Sylvia Wynter's Dream

Consider the long-term ripple effects of amnesia on future generations.

I think about the way I don’t eat roast dumplings. I’ve seen my mother make it a dozen times at country by the coal fire but I was never interested in learning to make something I wouldn’t eat myself.

I don’t how to make hot chocolate from the cocoa trees in the backyard there. None of my cousins do. My aunt has explained to us how to make it every time the tree is bearing.

All I remember is that you beat it, then dry it, then beat it and dry it.

I wonder when the house is just us, what will we cook inside it?

Are we still Jamaican if the only hot chocolate we know is from a sachet? If our children never make moonshine babies because we never teach them? If none of us can make roast dumpling?

old pictures of my mother making roast dumplings

With each generation there is a little less of what it meant to grow up in that house.

I think about my little cousin who doesn’t eat yam or banana, who only knows hot chocolate from a Styrofoam cup. Last week he asked me if I like Papa John’s pizza. If I told him about roast dumpling he would laugh and say you can’t roast dumplings.

There’s no “Jamaican roast dumpling” recipes on the internet. Maybe in a few generations there’ll be no roast dumplings in my family either.

Here is the way my mother makes it:

On the coal stove beneath somebody else’s pot (the best roast dumplings are a spur of the moment decision when somebody else is cooking) .

Like boiled dumplings, knead and shape your dough (flour, salt and water). Then lay your dumplings on the coal to roast.

The result should be a cracker-like.

The result should gather your family to look and taste it.