Personal Narrative: My Gumpkin Soup

The more we tried to change up the conversation, the more interesting it got. He asked me what were my plans for the day and off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I am gonna have some soup he said, some traditional haitian pumpkin soup. He was worried about me, he knew I might be alone for the rest of the day so asked if I was gonna have some soup at a friends’ house.
I’ve been sitting in that position for the last hour but it’s only felt like 5 minutes. He hold my hand so tight that it warmed my sweating palm and sent the heat back into my body like a water flow. I stared into the blur behind him trying not to look at his perfectly shaped face. With no glasses and and tired eyes, his sparkling smile was the only image

clear to me.
I had been wrestling with the idea of whether or not I needed to make my own soup.

Many reasons behind my hesitation: 1- I didn’t really like soup that much | 2-It takes a while to cook and that would only take away in the time I would rather spend napping. | 3-I had no plans whatsoever of sharing it with anyone, so whether or not I drink that pumpkin soup was totally up to me. |4- I had way tastier food in my dorm
My sister visited a few days earlier and she had bought me every single ingredient that I needed for the recipe. She said: “A real haitian woman never let her house be without the soup on the first day of a brand new year” I rolled my eyes at her and hided my

smile.
Two hundred and twelve years ago before all of this even mattered, my ancestors couldn’t afford drinking soup as slaves of the island. Not financially, not socially. So on January 1st 1804, Jean Jacques Dessaline drafted the Haitian Declaration of Independence and drank the first batch of “soup joumou” as a citizen in the haitian republic.
Ever since I was a little girl, soup joumou has been my breakfast, my lunch, my dinner and my supper on January 1st of every single year.

My mom would wake up at 4am and a huge pot of soup would be ready by 6am. There was always surplus and we have to bring a bowl for our neighbors. I got so tired of it overtime; I remember begging my mom for a plate of rice and chicken and she said no every time. The fridge would be empty though except for soup. I would try paying my sisters in secret to get me some cookie or whatever treats they could find but I almost always got caught.
When I refused to eat the soup and whine about it, my mom would make up these cool stories about how if I lived in the 1700s, I would be a wealthy beautiful woman with hundreds of dollars in my pockets. She said that that I would go to big fancy restaurants for that same soup and it would cost me a lot of my money. I used to love to hear her making me the star of the story everytime and that was all I needed to hear to start eating that pumpkin soup

again.
I looked at him and grind for an answer not knowing what else to say. I shook my head repeatedly to show that yeah, I will be cooking my soup. It started with a smile that turned into a big laugh when we realized that it was 6 minutes away from the new year. He stood up and pulled me up to my feet as we both impatiently stared at this mural projecting the countdown. He stood right in front of me and held both of my hands this time, so tight that I could feel the touch in my phalanges’ bones. All thoughts of soup slipped out of my head and in that instant I became an average american girl in front of a boy under fireworks at a new year celebration.
I arrived home so early in the day that still felt like night. I put all my ingredients out of the cabinet, started washing and peeling off the potato, the yam, the pumpkin and the plantains. I felt a conflicted type of nostalgia as I started to cook. I had never tried to cook this recipe, not even once in 18 years and the one time I do, my family is not even here to enjoy it. My mother used to say that the reason why it is so important it’s because “soup joumou” is quite hard to cook and its special recipe is the one thing that make us stand out from other nations.
20 minutes into the preparations, I find myself sleepy enough to pull out my sheets and comforter in the middle of my living room and falling asleep right then and there. It was the most peaceful nap I’ve ever taken in a long time and when I woke up, I caught myself smiling like a fool for no specific reason.
All my roommates were out of town and the freedom I felt was none that I can compare to any other. I was full of responsibilities yet not obligated to do any of them.
I work up the courage to keep my eyes open long enough not to burn pot. Running on just three hours of sleep and tired arms, I somehow managed to cook a small pot of super spicy pumpkin soup with way too much plantains and too little water. At first, it felt like the most hot and warming food I’ve ever tasted then a couple hours on the stove had it turn into a thick soup paste.
Later that same evening, my friends from the neighborhood visited. I had to separate and serve the soup into more plates than I even thought I could. As it was my first time, everyone was supportive. They said it was good and delicious. Though I knew better, it wasn’t about the taste at all, it was the fact that I went out of my way to cook the one meal all haitians crave on New Year's day. In that moment I felt some weird haitian pride rushing through my body. And even though I did not cook the best soup, I realized that I had transformed the walls, furnitures, and doors of my dorm into a Haitian home.