The Editor, Sir

It is said that the most enduring part of a transplanted culture is the food. There are many examples that are almost clichés to the Jamaican alien, but I would just like to salute the humble water cracker, the tough cracker. Anybody who is tempted to laugh, just recall the pride of place, the almost religious fervour that leavened and unleavened bread have inspired in several cultures over the ages.

Fast-forward to the 20th century when a great Jamaican was born. I know the people who are not laughing - the thousands of Jamaicans who use it as the best 'gas' medicine. This includes a good friend of mine, who happens to be a medical doctor, who gave customs officers no ends of amusement when she would fill her suitcases with water crackers to take back to the Bahamas where she was working.

For me, its medicinal powers were further established after a bout of food poisoning left me with a conviction that it was, either, eat water crackers or die of starvation. In semi-rural Pennsylvania surrounded by woodlands and farmlands, I was rescued by a rushed shipment of the red plastic, bagged tough crackers by my friend in New York from a Jamaican store in Brooklyn.

Ultimate proof

As the ultimate proof that the water cracker is worthy of this homage I give you its use in a cool reggae song to evoke the mellowness of Jamaican rural happiness. After a few water crackers and some warm Milo tea, rub massage home-made coco butter skin cream; (Third World and Junior Gong; Paradise Child). Its closest food rival, as a pleasurable treatment for illness - the admirable but mundane chicken soup - cannot boast this feat.

Sir, as part of possibly the last generation who ate it with condensed milk, salt fish and dunked in Milo, I just had to try to capture a minuscule but real part of both recent and contemporary history and culture. All hail the water cracker! (Big up de tough crackers!)

I am, etc.,

KARIS CHIN-QUEE

kpc11@psu.edu

P.O. Box 1051

Mandeville

Manchester

Via Go-Jamaica