Jatropha curcas: The Poisonous END

Jatropha curcas is the Barbados nut, a small poisonous plant that originated from Central America but has been spread to the Caribbean as well.

The medical uses of the Barbados nut is the sap, which closes broken skin, skin rash but it is very dangerous. Only a trained medicine man can apply the poultice as this plant is toxic and can lead to harmful effects.

The chemical breakdown of this plant is as follows: alkaloids, saponsides, quinines, flavonoids, and steroids.

In a study described on Tramil, 30 patients that already had a type of plantar wort were treated with the poultice instead of liquid nitrogen and the wort improved within 11-12 days.
Now this poison is very harmful but useful as every aspect of the plant contains some type of toxicity from the leaves to the roots and the Haitian people have figured out how to use and incorporate it safely in their daily lives. This use of poison which grows or perhaps was brought by the white man to the island exhibits the power the colonized (the Caribbean people) had over the colonizer (Europeans) as is shown in the novel with the poison seeping from the ships into the plantations, “Nobody knew how it found its way into the grass and alfalfa, got mixed in with the bales of hay, climbed into the mangers” (27). Now to the reader the answer is obvious: it was the slaves who were on the ships, in the fields, working with the plants who had this knowledge and manipulated it to suit their needs. But to the colonizer the slaves are the last suspects in their minds as it seems unthinkable that they could even imagine or let alone have a master plan to set themselves free. Benetiz Rojo’s article also cements this fact that even the modern day world continues to set the island back, not looking past its ‘instability’ to see the knowledge or power within the Caribbean thus he states, “The time has come for postindustrial society to start rereading the Caribbean” (2). It is past due time that the modern world recognizes that indigenous knowledge is the uncanny, some facet of it will always come back in the present, and in this case of plant medicine it is time to put aside the selfish Western greedy, capitalistic system and welcome a change that has the potential to cure not string along a person leeching their money indefinitely.