In the kitchen at work, as I was preparing some coffee, my ears sent me rumors of a conversation on a topic that greatly concerned me. Were they really talking about the difference between sweet potatoes and yams in the reception area just outside? It became clearer and clearer to me that they were. Eventually, as I hovered closer and closer, their eyes turned to me, and to me they directed the wobbling queries that had been looping around in ever-wilder orbits of indecision.
There are many cases of children being raised in exotic locations and coming back to the dreary colonial homeland with airs of Kubla Khan. These insufferable children, described with sympathy in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s books, for example, alienate their playmates with the false grandeur they feel for having seen untamed landscapes and eaten indescribable tropical fruits. I am afraid I might have been such a child for a while after a short, barely remembered Caribbean sojourn in my near-infancy, and I now take pains to avoid projecting such privileged superiority. Still, when yams are misidentified I feel it deeply.
Sweet potatoes are clearly understood. When asked to indicate a sweet potato, no one will hesitate to point out the lovely orange potatolike root with its delicious properties and important vitamins.
However, a horrifying number of people, especially in the South, will call this same tuber a “yam.” My mother used to cook yams. If you have ever tasted their dense, buttery texture, their sweet, hard, grainy flesh, you will know that this is an unforgivable confusion. It is hopeless to explain it to anyone, for the reasons mentioned above and because yams are not commonly available here.
Does this explain the immense good fortune of being asked to discuss the difference between the two vegetables, twenty-three years after my transplantation to this country, at 9:30 in the morning in an office building in Dallas? And after a heartfelt exposition on the subject, allowing all the respect in the world for those who retained their own (mistaken) opinions, to receive this vindicating link from a coworker who had researched the matter after our conversation?
My soul longs for your salvation;
I hope in your word.
My eyes long for your promise;
I ask, “When will you comfort me?”
For I have become like a wineskin in the smoke,
yet I have not forgotten your statutes.
How long must your servant endure?
When will you judge those who persecute me?
The insolent have dug pitfalls for me;
they do not live according to your law.
All your commandments are sure;
they persecute me with falsehood; help me!
They have almost made an end of me on earth,
but I have not forsaken your precepts.
In your steadfast love give me life,
that I may keep the testimonies of your mouth.
2 comments:
I am enjoying your day-by-day stanzas of Psalm 119 - it is truly much better not to read it all at once, but to enjoy it slowly, like warm soup spoonful by spoonful. I think the talk of yams influenced my metaphor.
And on the subject of yams, I was glad to see your comments - I have been disquieted because the local Albertson's has signs identifying light-colored sweet potatoes as "sweet potatoes" while the reddish ones are called "yams" though I know they really are not! Like you, I hesitate to be a know-it-all and ask whoever's in charge to change the signs. But it's good to know I'm not alone in feeling that not only are yams being misrepresented, but people are somehow missing out on the real thing.
Nothing but life’s perversity can explain the thing that occurred yesterday. The very day of my post about finding—if not in the world at large, at least in the reception area at work—an unexpected balancing of the disorder regarding yams and sweet potatoes, not twelve hours after describing how I had found a state of yamly rightness, we had sweet potatoes at the staff Christmas lunch. This in itself was unremarkable; they were very good and I enjoyed them; but I was seized with new bafflement upon hearing the dish spoken of as “potatoes.” Yes, “potatoes.” And not by one person at my table, but by two, both of them perfectly understanding each other and apparently expecting them to be called by nothing more than the generic name of that banal, colorless garden root, that basic archetypal starchy vegetable. It was as if the shocking orange of the delicious mélange did not even register on the retinas of its beholders. And what’s more, one of the people at my table had never eaten them before! I realize that on my blog I am supposed to be synthesizing experiences and shaping them into meaningful stories, but I am unable to stitch this bizarre scene into the fabric of my life story. It just does not fit. I am helpless.
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