Blog

As fewer and fewer people speak Jèrriais in Jersey, what other languages might the soil understand? What might we be missing knowing about the land in not speaking Jérriais? And how might we expand this land vocabulary to include the plants, seaweeds, animals and seeds who have come here more recently?

These Jèrriais language recipe cards were produced by artist-researcher Kaajal Modi as an outcome from Native Tongues, a project that explored land, language and biodiversity on the Island of Jersey, in collaboration with students from Springfield and Le Quennevais Schools. Each of the cards shows one of eight land and sea plants that have come to Jersey within the last few decades via factors including: changing bird migration patterns and the changing of tidal flows caused by climate change; changing infrastructures of food supply, including monoculture land and sea farming and their unintentional run-offs; and changing human migration patterns due to economic precarity caused by capital flows, geopolitical events and colonial legacies of extraction.

Since they are recent migrants, none of the plants previously had names in the native language of Jèrriais. The students came up with these names as part of a language education programme with L’Office du Jèrriais, through which they engaged in seasonal plant and seaweed foraging around the island from March to October 2024, educational activities at Jersey Museum during the programming for Bouan Appétit!, conversations with native Jèrriais speakers at the regular meetups around the island, a foraged dinner and a live performance by Jèrriais language band Meli-Melo.The children are themselves all from multilingual families, most of whom migrated to the Island less than two generations ago to work in the food and finance industries. The plants and seaweeds we have named, like the children, could be considered ‘non-native’, and some have even been determined ‘invasive’. Yet they are as much a part of the island and its culture as any other organism that lives there. One important strategy for managing (or stewarding) non-native species is to encourage locals to forage it for food.

The cards contain guidance for foraging plants and seaweeds around the island, and suggestions for recipes of how to prepare them which are hybridised from local and migratory cuisines. We expect you will adapt your existing household recipes to include these flavours and textures, and hope you will share them with us to create further hybrids. It is the hope of the artist and curator that this project will continue to grow in this manner. We encourage you to engage in all foraging activities responsibly and generously, leaving enough for the birds and land animals, and consulting with the experts (Kaz, Trudie and many others both native and not) when you are in doubt about the wisdom of putting something in your mouth.

Which tongues get to be native? My tongue is native to my mouth, and my mouth is native to my tongue. Feel your tongue in your mouth; make a sound, shape a word, lick the air of your environment. What shapes this muscle, this appendage, this technology that you use to taste the world, and to let it taste you? Which tongues speak through you, and how do these shape you, the person, the being, the multispecies assemblage of human, bacteria and yeasts fed by fungi, plants, and animals (human and otherwise)? The ecology of your mouth expressed through the breath in your lungs, feeding the plants and the trees around you, and being fed in turn. The ingestion and digestion, the painfully intimate metabolism of it all, that makes us part of the environments we occupy, and that makes all who occupy them part of us.

 Touch a leaf with your fingertips, smear it across your palm. Does it sting or soothe? Pick up a fleshy globule of seaweed, a dead mans finger, a devils tongue, a sea snot. Come home to a little taste of deliciousness from the sea. Put it in your mouth, where does it taste of? What textures does it evoke? Which flavours does it remind you of? Is it home? Are you home? Where are you from? Where are you really from, because it can’t be from here. We look smell taste too different. We washed up on our shores from another place and you are creating shade where there used to be sun, creating structure where there used to be erosion. You hold back the sea, supporting the soil of the island, your roots deep under the ground where we cannot and do not have to see you. Where are you really from, and what do you eat there? Not the hybrids, we want the authentic recipe, the exotic one, the pure one, the ones we can ingest, digest, and appropriate, inappropriately offer it back to you without the spice, the sting, the tingling sensation that warns you of danger, that reminds you to rest, and to digest. This indigestion, that burns our hearts, caused by the flavours that fed their tongues, of sugar and spice that were brought to this island, the wealth on which it stands proud on the roots of trade. Yet the people, our people, were left behind.

 These fleshy beings rendered invisible by distance and a silence so vast it sinks ships.  A vast half-broken ocean that rises, that recedes shores, that displaces people who travel through the fissures only to arrive here and meet nothing that wants them . My shores are receding, my fields are full of invasive species, on which I have learned to rely. These hidden nightshades that grow deep underground, surviving an extinction event to adapt to live in tundras, rainforests, plains, highlands and islands, in forms including trees, vines, shrubs, and symbiotic species. Who have become my natives, to be dug, harvested, cooked and sold by those from farther shores, whose ears and teeth and tongues have naturalised to this place, learning to understand my tongue, and to speak back.

Native Tongues is part of Abundant Futures, commissioned by ArtHouse Jersey and curated by Dana Olărescu. The work was supported by L’Office du Jèrriais, Jersey Museum and Heritage for Global Challenges at University of York. With special thanks to Ari, Arya, Aiden, Kevin, Raphael, and Thomas, Ben Spink (and Meli-Melo), Geraint Jennings, Karen Le Roy Harris, Scott Evans, Kaz Padidar, Trudie Trox and the St. Martin & St. Helier Jèrriais meet-ups.