On KJZZ's SOAPBOX, The Show turns over the the mic to listeners. For winter 2022, writers tackled the theme EATING CHRISTMAS.
Melissa Dunmore is a spoken word artist, author and activist originally from Brooklyn, New York, with roots in rural Puerto Rico. She transplanted to the Arizona desert more than 15 years ago.
Puerto Rico boasts the longest holiday season in the world. Boricua Christmas, or la época navideña, is the crowning jewel of my nostalgia for Noche Buena in New York City and la isla del encanto. And abuela is the star on our family tree.
A diminutive doña from the west side of the island, she was born during the Great Depression, the youngest daughter of 14. Before she became everybody’s grandmother, she learned to cook by standing next to a pot that was bigger than she was and her recipes have long been legendary.
The seasonal staple of Puerto Rican festivities are pasteles. Similar to tamales in the Southwest, they are made with green bananas and yucca masa instead of corn. Even though pastel can also mean cake, to us they are better than cake. They are gifts, wrapped in a tight hug of banana leaf, wax paper and string you can use to trace your roots back to the Taínos and Africanos who ferried the recipe across the sea.
Oral histories and muscle memory have long been our cookbooks. But lately, Francisca keeps forgetting. Pancha gives us pause as her Alzheimer’s accelerates.
We booked our tickets for a journey in January. So in the new year we will find ourselves in the old country, and what awaits us is a house, dilapidated, and a young mother, determined to do right by her inheritance. I want to fix it up the way I can’t fix what ails her. Pen my love letter to legacy by patching peeling paint. Scaffold synapses and caulk cognition. Remediate the mold of the mind.
If we repair her palacio, will it prepare us for what comes next? Will this project’s payback be patience? This erosion of her feels like punishment and it’s unbearable to imagine life without her comfort and her cooking. In trying to contextualize a cruel disease, I postulate: Is it possible blanking is a kind of benediction for someone who’s endured so much loss? Is it a salve to her psyche to forget the five children she buried out of seven, her widowhood, or how she can count her remaining siblings on one hand? I want to ask her how she’s done it. But I don’t think she knows the answer, like a secret ingredient in a recipe we can’t quite figure out.
It is said smell is strongly tied to memory and music lights up parts of the brain unaffected by dementia. Maybe, the melody of the mangoes… Quizás the quenepas could…
Perhaps the plantain…
Suppose the starfruit…
Or certainly the ceiba knows what to whisper to the wind to make coquís in the trees trill their tiny voices to right her recollection. If even for a moment. And for safekeeping, I can preserve her in a ponche for posterity. Wrap her in a banana leaf blanket, on sugarcane sheets, and hibiscus pillows.
