MALJO, BUSH TEAS AND SECRET PRAYERS: Trinidad Cocoa Panyols’ Beliefs Hardcover – December 12, 2021

This book provides an insight into the Hispanic folk medicinal culture of the Caribbean island of Trinidad. Trinidad is the southernmost of the chain of islands stretching from Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic) and Puerto Rico to the coast of Venezuela in South America. The island has been a repository of Hispanic culture since 1496 when Spain first encountered its native Peoples. Trinidad’s Spanish medicinal legacy, rooted in Amerindian epistemology and pharmacological practices, was guardedly held by the local rural Spanish speaking people, also known as Panyols and Cocoa Panyols.This book contains ten concise essays detailing the Panyols’ legacy of beliefs and knowledge. This legacy is manifested in their prayers, and in the spirits: the presence of good and evil, the real and imaginary power of maljo (evil eye) and despair of soucouyant (evil female spirit), and in the knowledge of healing plants. The essays are followed by a detailed and scholarly sixty-page catalogue of plant names, their uses in medicine and their Spanish, English and French Creole names. The book evokes a definition of medicine and a medicinal culture that once thrived in the pre-Columbian Americas, elements of which now exist only as dim-remembered or distorted fragments. Read more