Hello everybody how are you doing? I can see none of you and you all can see me
which is great. Hello everybody my name is Jackson Hall I'm a master's and
folklore student here at the University of North Carolina which is
redundant to say because we're here. I'm also a graduate of the University of
North Carolina's America Studies program and the Creative Writing program so
thank you Gabby for being here and also let's please just take a time to thank
everyone who has graced the stage and blessed it with their presence that
allowed me to be here. So I was born in Montgomery, Alabama which is not a place
where you find a lot of Germans and I say that because my grandmother emigrated
chose to emigrate from Germany in the 1950s after living through World War II
and when you come to Alabama there's not really a community of like Germans
there right and all throughout my life even though like my grandmother or my
Umi shared these wonderful foods and this love of food that she nurtured
through her love of cooking to me I can barely count on my hand a number of
times actually heard her speak German and when I think of culture when I think
of food I think of the words that informed the culture then formed the
hands that touched this food and transferred traditions as it passes
down to children and grandchildren beyond and one of the most difficult things
I've had to reckon with my life is knowing that I can never speak German to
my grandmother before she passed away and that many of the ways she's
experienced her life and her home and her food is lost to me and you know
whenever I dream of desserts the first vision of bliss that arrives comes in
the form of a black forest cake a dark castle of sin an architectural marvel
of Gothic chocolate each cherry a tower its crimson the fire that burns
throughout the night each cremation of cream frosting its whiteness the snow
that coats every battlements once winter has taken over everything and my Umi
slices a cake with a big knife and reduces this thick slice of cake that
slides onto my plates and as I'm about to dig the fork into each layer I ask my
grandmother Umi what do you call this in German she replies and this is where the
dream ends a world melts away a palace of memory slides into slush and my
lips tremble at the attempt to translate um Swartz forest no Swartz
black voled forest kersh cherry torta cake um Swartz velder gestorta the
syllables sharp awkward in my mouth smolder into ash the word its flavor
made acrid was learned was not inherited was not passed down a recipe
recorded not on a piece of paper but in the ease with which my Umi's hands could
command flour powder yolk fire into something so so I'm sorry I don't have
the words to describe it the trees the mountains the castles crowned with frost
the landscapes my Umi's childhood for lack of a better word are lost and in
their place is every broken sentence every loss for words every single moment
my grandmother dreamed of home in German but had to speak it to me in
English not Swartz but black not voled but forest not kersh but cherry not
torta the cake not Bavaria but Alabama not home but here when I try the listen
from my Umi's voice reciting every single ingredients I hear nothing when I
try to compel my hands to shift through the bowls of flour through the cups of
sugar through the cans of cocoa to recreate one of the few things that
nourish my Umi's soul enough so that all the miles of ocean collapse and all the
years of translation collapse that fluster away from her home I yield
nothing and remember that I've forgotten my grandmother that I have a word to name
her but no words to feed the memory of her the absence of her feeds the absence
of her language and I become a stomach emptied I become a tongue cut and I
know somewhere there is a magnificent castle and a forest dressed like a
blizzard that has been raised to ash and I do not have the words to describe when
it burns away
