We use language to convey messages, concepts, and ideas. As researchers, we employ language in the scholarly pursuit of broadening our collective knowledge, usually in the form of scientific papers. However, this pathway of knowledge sharing is limited in its scope, outreach, and public accessibility. Consider the potential if we were to utilize language differently.
Recently, I was challenged to find ways to enhance the prominence of our research to foster greater engagement and connection to a more diverse audience. As a graduate student working in Peru’s Amazon Basin, I wrestled with how to communicate the rich and nuanced experiences of my study participants while providing a platform to elevate their voices. This experience deepened my interest and investment in learning about different forms of art-based research, specifically poetry, as both a methodological approach and an advocacy tool for social change and decolonization.1,2
The poet Rita Dove once said, “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”3 As researchers, how do we harness this power? This inquiry eventually led me to poetic inquiry, a form of research poetry that has been gaining traction over the past two decades and promoted by prominent researchers such as Prendergast, Bulter-Kisber, Van Rooyen, and Faulkner. It is a methodology that presents scientific findings in a more accessible and emotive format and helps to articulate the rich contextual realities of participants’ lives through poetry.4 It encourages greater introspection as researchers examine their research processes, their relationship to participants, and power dynamics.5 Not only can it be used to draw attention to injustices and inequalities by articulating the lived experiences of those often marginalized and underrepresented,6,7 but it is also an effective decolonization strategy within research that “delinks conformist methodologies of knowledge production and reconfigures the relations of power that shape conventional research by invigorating the (often suppressed) voice of the colonized.”2(p13) For example, poetic inquiry has been used to deconstruct Western ideas of illness and disability in Palestine,8 to explore transwomen identities in Namibia,6 and as a tool to understanding how mobile money systems are perceived by users in rural Kenya.9
Currently, several scientific journals publish poetry including the JAMA Poetry and Medicine and Health Promotion Practice. Poetry was also used to promote COVID-19 vaccination through the Dear Vaccine project (https://www.globalvaccinepoem.com). Recently, St Louis University jointly with Texas A&M University launched a biannual poetry journal in public health called Leaders Igniting Generational Healing and Transformation or LIGHT (https://light4ph.org). This highlights the growing public and academic interest in the intersection of poetry and public health. However, to the best of my knowledge, there is no centralized global health repository of poetry that is publicly available. Through a preliminary, and by no means rigorous, search, only a handful of articles and publications appeared across search engines and databases with the keywords of “global health” and “anthology” or “poetry” or “poems” or “poetic inquiry.”
Yet, poetic inquiry does not come without thoughtful reflection on the methodological boundaries and quality of this language form. Specifically, we must consider if we are creating good poetry and, correspondingly, if the data are still trustworthy, persuasive, and credible.10 This remains a highly debated topic among research poets and poet researchers alike. Despite being new to this field, I see inherent value in poetry. It is exactly what is needed right now in the field of global health, and more expansively in public health research. It positions us as researchers within the research, provides a space for reflexivity, and helps humanize the experience of our participants. In addition, it compels us to consider the oft-neglected local and cultural contexts of our research and to question dominant Eurocentric narratives.11 Using this form of compact and emotive language has the potential to make us better researchers.
To conclude, here is an original poem I wrote following a field visit to study sites in Loreto, Peru, along the Marañón River, a major tributary of the Amazon River. My research focused on the downstream impacts of COVID-19 mitigation efforts on adolescent pregnancy in one of the country’s impoverished regions marked by a high rate of adolescent pregnancy and poor maternal and child health indicators.12 It outlined pathways that connect the risk of adolescent pregnancy to several ecological system factors from the macro, micro, and individual levels such as poverty, lack of education and health care access, and social and gender norms that limited female autonomy and helped to conserve the practice of early unions. In addition, communities faced new challenges posed by the widespread adoption of technology among adolescents amplified during the pandemic. This poem weaves together different lived experiences of young girls in the Amazon synthesized from data collected from interviews and focus group discussions with adolescents, apus or community leaders, and educators, as well as secondary data sources and field observations. Marañón Heavy rain floods through open windows puddles across the wooden plank floor traffic worn from chickens and children impatient for the season’s end as they wait like islands on the Marañón. A pregnant girl rests her swollen body across the warped metal rocker careful to balance her weight while pushing her feet firmly onto the ground and her back to the chair’s spine. In the dry season, she had played voley in the open fields before her that now pool above her waist threatening to swallow the bodies of girls too young to carry to term. In the secret pleasures of the oscura, he had exposed her with his body’s weight and used his cell phone to examine her pubescent breasts before abandoning her for otro trabajo down the Marañón. Yet she still waits, days swollen by tears she does not cry but floods the haul of the peke peke used to carry her body upriver to Nauta’s eroded oil-slicked banks but not time enough to save her —and her unborn child.
See also The Languages of Public Health, pp.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research in the Peruvian Amazon was supported and funded by the Fulbright-Fogarty and Global Health Equity Scholar fellowships (grant D43TW010540).
I would like to thank the community health workers of Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia’s project Mamás del Río, apus or community leaders, local health staff, teachers, and adolescents in my study sites for their contributions to my research and, in turn, the inspiration for this poem. A special thanks to my research assistant, Adriana Garcia Saldivar; my Beyond Global Health co-collaborators, Shameka Poetry Thomas and Purnima Madhivanan; and mentors, Magaly Blas, Priscilla Magrath, and Heidi Brown.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The author declared no conflicts of interest.
