Produced by Taz Rahman
My Banana thinks on Louise Bennett’s ‘Colonisation in Reverse’
Maggie Harris is a British Guyanese poet who won the Poetry Wales prize in 2020 and her most recent collection I Sing to the Greenhearts was published by Seren Books in 2025. She lived in Wales for a decade publishing three books during that period as well as winning the Guyana Prize. In her own words, ‘Wales really sustained me’.
Maggie Harris’ poem ‘My Banana thinks on Louise Bennett’s “Colonisation in Reverse”’ references the Caribbean poet Louise Bennett who pioneered writing in the Jamaican patois, a language richly influenced by English and West African tongues as well as carrying the burden of British enslavement of the African people. Harris herself came from the tropics and when she first arrived in the in the UK in the 70s, she couldn’t buy the wide variety of Caribbean food as is available now. There is irony and factual observations in the poem in a way that the plant world becomes a metaphor for migrants. At the end of the poem the personified banana plant is hearing the voices of history and drumming rhythms that hark back to days of enslavement and visions of freedom.
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