Herbs and Poetry for Reclaiming What Was Lost
November 6, 2025Reading time: 3 minutes
For years poets have mentioned Kamau Brathwaite's essay, History of the Voice, but I have never managed to track it down until someone on Bluesky kindly gave me a link and honestly it is one of the most interesting things I have ever read, creating links between my thinking on herbs as well as poetry, via colonialism and healing, and tying up with geopoetics and some work Mairi McFadyen was doing about culture and the body, and the discussion the young folk-singer Quinie had on her blog about 'singing like a bagpipe'.
Brathwaite discusses the way 'nation language' Brathwaite's useful term for the common language developed by the mixed populations of colonised people, which I will use henceforth, and culture was erased in Jamaica, and Western culture imposed. Scottish people who were told for generations to 'speak properly', that Scottish was 'slang' and not to speak Gaelic at all will understand this process, but it was taken much further in Jamaica. We are used to being marginalised and under-represented in literature syllabuses, and we know that pub quizzes will expect 'everyone' to know about the Tudors and Plantagenets, not the early Stuarts or the Lords of the Isles, but colonised communities were told they had no history or culture at all and were graciously introduced to the glories of Wordsworth or Shakespeare as gifts of the Empire. The result was children writing essays about snow falling on meadows rather than rain on canefields, poets writing in pentameters rather than the rhythms of nation language.
It goes further than this - Brathwaite says that pentameter
carries with it a certain kind of experience, which is not the experience of a hurricane. The hurricane does not roar in pentameter. And that's the problem: how do you get a meter that approximates the natural experience, that is the environmental experience?
I have come across two examples that demonstrate this in music. One is the Mongolian band Anda Union, who play the music of nomadic people following thier horses across the steppes. It is full of the sounds of wide open grasslands and the drumbeat of horses' hooves. The other is the psalm singing of the Scottish islands, which embodies the wind and high seas crashing on the shores of Lewis. I think this process is what Lorca means when he talks about duende in flamenco - it summons the spirit of place, which gives poetry its vital depth and truth, and I think it is what Quinie means when she talks about connecting her singing with place and its people. Building such a poetics is powerful and necessary work.
In a similar way, to recover and reclaim knowledge of plants, growing skills, cooking and crafting traditions can connect a people to a place and a community. Learning the herbs of a place connects me to the soil and the rainfall, the tastes and preferences of my neighbours. But I can also connect to the history and heritage I bring with me, my mother's cooking, what friends have shared with me. The herbs and the poems
mend a link
in the chain that leads us back to our dead,
and makes us whole, wherever we live now.
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