The search for an ‘Island in the Sun’ in East Harlem callaloo greens

At Sisters Caribbean Cuisine, you need a memory. The restaurant overlooks Marcus Garvey Park’s bare magnolias, gossips with the Deli Candy Store next door, and does a good takeout business with podiatry students from the Foot Clinic of New York.

Since 1995, Marlyn Lawrie-Rogers and Elsie Darrell—the sisters in question—have served island and Southern food from the same East Harlem location. You need a memory to contain all relevant details. The space is thick, and you will want to stroke its weft and remember its knots.

Jerk chicken is an Ad Reinhardt, black, an abstraction of flavor but intensely material, a dish that requires concentration, that absorbs and concentrates heat. As I finish: “The world had stopped just as it was; no longer was there any desire and I, too, was utterly satisfied.”

Candied yams are a shivery vapor of earth, like sweet fresh loam run through the fingers. Fecund dragon teeth allowed to sprout in dark cupboards. Their frothy juice foams over.

Callaloo, coconut-creamed greens, born from a great iron cauldron, stores a measure of concentrated light. Even a tiny bite frees the tongue to collect photons from thin air.

This summer, I met Sisters’ Nelson, who first introduced me to callaloo. He comes from Jamaica and works the steam table at the restaurant. In July, he told me that he missed the islands where “the sun always shines”—but on a January Wednesday he wore a 2010 ING New York Marathon T-shirt. He likes to watch the runners and seems to bear the winter months with a half-hearted grin.

Rice freckled with peas, varnished with grease, slips off Nelson’s spoon. Examined from the proper angle, Sisters recedes back from the street. Minutes progress slowly—watches are set for island time. Sunlight, however impoverished, flows in curly rivulets. Yet, it is neither easy nor desirable to abandon all memory and leap into fantasy. Sisters denies cruisers a port of call: no simple holidays here. Beneath the quiet of melting ice—the almost silent “sound of countless people’s joints all cracking at once”—a wonderful tension, a dramatic complication, holds Sisters suspended between East Harlem reality and island holiday. As Weezer defines it in “Island in the Sun,” a holiday is a dream of never feeling bad anymore. But the aesthetic power of Sisters depends on your ability to feel bad, and good, and conflicted. Complete feeling—the ability to taste across the color spectrum—is a prerequisite to ethical, compassionate pleasure. At least over a plate of brown stewed chicken, in wavering afternoon light, on the island of Manhattan.

It’s an amnesiac escape. Placeless and timeless, the island is a space of forgetting. If embraced with no regrets, a commitment to ignorance offers an elaborately disguised diversion from ugly, ordinary life.

Sisters Caribbean Cuisine is not on an island in the sun—because it is firmly planted in this neighborhood and rooted in these people. It is not hip because it is not anesthetized. If it is sleepy, it does not slumber. It feels the profound pain of distance stretched through time. In fact, the island, which refuses family and history, is antithetical to Sisters. Whereas the island defeats genealogy, Sisters subsists on it. So lord help the mister who comes between sisters: Family recipes regularly prove stronger than brute force.

Jason Bell is a Columbia College junior majoring in English. In Defense of Deliciousness runs alternate Fridays.