I was grateful to Greg for approaching me to write this article. Herbalism and the much needed and inspiring work of projects such as Solidarity Apothecary was something I had been wanting to highlight for some time. We’re just going to get straight into it today and I will include some additional links at the end of Greg’s piece that might be useful.
What’s so radical about radical herbalism? by Greg Frey
It sounds mythic - and it is - but everyone I speak to in this corner of North London knows of Rasheeqa’s talents as a herbalist. My being able to write this is proof of them.
For half a year I was getting nowhere with my recovery from Long Covid. No amount of rest, antihistamines or meditation (the treatment options aren’t many) was helping. I was in a hole.
The only thing that has helped has been Rasheeqa’s herbal prescriptions. Really I have the plants - bilberry, nettle, reishi, rosemary, calendula and many others - to thank, but Rasheeqa conducted the introductions.
I had assumed this kind of thing was beyond my reach financially. Herbal medicine is not an integrated part of our National Health Service, and many herbalists charge between £50 and £100 for a consultation. Which is why Rasheeqa and some friends started the Community Apothecary.
The apothecary grows herbs in gardens across the borough of Waltham Forest in London, and volunteers help transmute them into medicine. This shared labour enables them to offer herbal medicine on a sliding scale price system. All of that collective care is part of what’s healing me as well.
If you live online (as a lot of us do with chronic illnesses), it’s exciting to see the rise in interest in plants and herbal medicine. Unfortunately it often struggles to break from the individualism of the new online wellness culture, where social media influencers capitalise on branding systemic health issues as personal problems.
As feminist scholar Carol-Ann Farkas puts it, the new wellness culture promotes “a radical turning inward of agency toward the goal of transformation of one’s own body, in contrast to a turning outward to mobilize for collective action.”
This is where radical herbalism distinguishes itself from herbalism in general. Radical herbalists refuse to look away from how ill health is produced by social, not personal issues. It is not a statistical anomaly that illness correlates with class, race, gender and many other social constructions of difference. As Rupa Marya and Raj Patel document in their systemic study of the connections between inflammation and capitalism, “your body is inflamed”, because it is “part of a society inflamed”, and, “as a consequence, the planet is inflamed”.
Because there is no ‘One Root Cause’ of all our problems - capitalism isn’t one thing, but an ecosystem of forces - radical herbalists across the UK take many approaches to addressing it.
Herbalists Without Borders, for instance, is a network of herbalists joining the dots between racist borders, unequal access to healthcare and the empowering qualities of herbal medicine. They support refugees and asylum seekers in the UK and have provided emergency medical care to folks travelling through Calais.
The Solidarity Apothecary is also focussing on supporting the people most screwed over by this system but focuses on people incarcerated. Founded by Nicole Rose, who had spent 3 years in prison for animal rights activism, she describes the mission of the Solidarity Apothecary as “to materially support revolutionary struggles and communities with plant medicines to strengthen collective autonomy, self-defence and resilience to climate change, capitalism and state violence.”
If these projects are focused on supporting the most vulnerable and in need, the Community Apothecary’s focus is on collectivising the work. Rasheeqa had no interest in the further commodification of plants or the individualism of a solo shopkeeper. And while holding workshops, she found that a genuine community apothecary would abandon any idea of the herbalist as the sole expert.
The breadth of histories, relationships with plants and intimate, embodied knowledge that people bring to the apothecary astonished and continues to astonish her. People have just as much to teach one another and themselves, as she does.
Just as the labour of growing, drying, infusing, blending, brewing, soaking, decocting and packing is shared, so is the labour of knowledge production and dispersal. Meanwhile, in a way that is always impossible to really capture, the herb gardens facilitate all sorts of other empowering exchanges: ideas are shared, stories told, connections made and vulnerabilities held.
At one of the Community Apothecary’s sharing circles last month, made up almost entirely of women or nonbinary folks, two things were clear to me. Despite centuries of efforts to eradicate it, there is a deep connection with the healing powers of plants, and that this connection has a lot to do with gender.
In the 16th and 17th centuries the feudal class, desperate to end centuries of resistance to their power, began a concerted effort to defeat one of the central pillars of that resistance: women. This process, the witch-hunts, paved the way for capitalism. It involved the simultaneous subjugation of women and the natural world: women’s intimate knowledge of plants, ecosystems and healing was used as proof of their proximity to satan; the wildness of the natural world was coded as feminine, and the feminine was coded as subversive, immoral and dangerous. The terror of humiliation and death forced these forms of knowledge underground.
As Sylvia Federici argues in Caliban and the Witch, her groundbreaking study of this period, the witch-hunts aimed primarily to destroy women’s bodily autonomy. Severing their ability to care for themselves and their communities, and in particular their ability to control pregnancies with natural contraception, was an essential part of the development of capitalism. It wasn’t just the eviction from the commons that created a surplus population ripe for exploitation in industrial centres, but an explosion in the population in general.
Whether self-consciously or not, this is also the context in which radical herbalism operates. As well as everything else it is a reassertion of autonomy, collective care and our connection to the land. It is part of the work of repairing the trauma of the witch-hunts and patriarchal society in general. It’s a healing of both much more and no less than our bodies. With this in mind, you couldn’t put it more clearly than Nicole Rose if you tried: “The time for revolutionary medicine is now.”
Greg is mostly thinking/writing/talking with pals about resistance in the anthropocene, living near the Lea River a few miles up from where it meets the Thames, and navigating various chronic illnesses (including capitalism). Find more of his writing on his newsletter notes from the belly of the whale and on socials here.
Greg is being paid for this article.
Links/resources
A few of the things that Greg’s piece brought to mind that I thought might be relevant and worth sharing:
Herbalists Without Borders Bristol
I love the Herbal Year Book from Herbalists Without Borders Bristol (a Bristol volunteer organisation made up of medical herbalists, community herbalists, people who are passionate about herbal medicine, and herb growers). The group works with asylum seekers and refugees and provide free herbal healthcare “to people fleeing conflict, persecution, and intolerable living conditions”.
Their year book is a really beautiful and useful guide to the medicinal herbs available around us throughout the calendar year.
If you’d like to find out more about HWBB I really enjoyed listening to this podcast episode with Robin Harford of Eats Weeds speaking to Becs Griffiths and Annwen Jones, founders and members of the collective.
Witch (a BBC podcast)
A brilliant series by India Rakusen for BBC Radio 4. I really enjoyed the whole series. Episode 6 (Midwives and Healers) in particular looks at the extent to which the common belief that the witch hunts were a targeted attack on female healers and midwives is true.
“The upside-down privilege narrative in alternative health”
An interesting recent piece on Charles Eisenstein’s Substack newsletter addressing the argument that “alternative” medicine is elitist:
Who is Wellness For? : An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind by Fariha Róisín
I am part way through reading this book. It is a vulnerable, courageous and impassioned read. I haven’t finished reading it yet but I am already deeply appreciative to Róisín for writing this.
Photo credit: Sui Searle