Introduction: BEGIN HERE

The Caribbean has long been pronounced as the unstable, discordant, syncretic string of islands that we mark as ideal vacations but no more than that. In this course, we learned over time that the Caribbean is not just the simplified Western vacation getaway but rather the history, the culture, have made it to a fully functional and modern society that the Western world does not acknowledge unless there is to be some negative remark to be made about it. Alejo Carpentier’s novel, Kingdom of This World is a magical realist work that blends fact and fiction and takes the reader on a blurring journey of Haiti’s political revolution: before, during, and after. However, this blog will not be about Haitian history rather it will be about the powerful and secretive relationship between the Caribbean people and the land specifically plant medicine.

We are introduced to Macandal, who is the master’s go to slave as he has an eye for the best horseflesh and soon after he has accident resulting in the amputation of his arm, he is kept on light duty of pasturing cattle, but little does the white master know he has given Macandal the weapon that will lead to his coup and defeat. Macandal’s sudden time in the pasture leads him to notice and analyze the plants, which becomes his duty he starts to research, experiment, and record the results of his plants. Macandal is no longer an ordinary slave rather he now is the medicine man, the knowledge holder of his people, he has the power to start the revolution. Even after the white people ‘kill’ Macandal, the Caribbean people scoff as Macandal is not truly dead he has transcended his position from slave to knowledge holder to symbolic leader of the revolution. All this begins just from the indigenous knowledge he gains from the plants.

Now applying this method to modern day Haiti comes up with the same results. Haitians depend more on plant remedies than drugs even today it could be due to the lack of medical services available or could it like Macandal the Caribbean people contain an inner, indigenous knowledge that is more valuable and successful than their modern day counterparts? To find the answer one has to look past the Caribbean artifice that the Western world has built as stated in Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s article “The Repeating Island,” and acknowledge the Caribbean for it is and for what it is not. This blog will attempt to connect the links between ancient plant knowledge and the ignorance the Western world associates with the Caribbean due to its past, which is the very thing responsible for the plant knowledge in the first place.

This blog will be dedicated to a number of plant medicines that are commonly used in Haiti and featured on the Caribbean Medical Database: Tramil, and modern day encyclopedias of herbal medicine (listed in the bibliography). The purpose of this blog is to give an option to people who have tried drugs for common ailments but to no avail. As per my own personal experience, some doctors who prescribe medicine nowadays are more interested in keeping the capitalistic drug industry running than actually healing the patient. This blog will feature 15 plants some indigenous to the Caribbean others introduced through colonizers but each plant has a purpose for a common ailment, the chemical breakdown of the plant including its nutrients, and the connection between the plant and person in reference to The Kingdom of This World.

*******The Blog postings should go in order from A (the Onion) to J(Poisonous End). This introduction is only here due to it not fitting in the about section.