Weaving words, weaving culture: representing Grebo cultural heritage in Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s poetry

Imaginative writings remain a viable dais for the advancement of the cultural identities of postcolonial African writers. The Liberian high-ranking U.S.-based poet, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, has, through her art, continued to promote Liberian Literature by immortalizing the traditional Grebo values and orientations. This study identifies, explores, and explicates the presence of Grebo cultural markers in Wesley’s Before the Palm Could Bloom. Through the theoretical outlook of cultural anthropology, which explores human behavior as vestiges of beliefs, traditions, and dispositions evident in one’s cognitive and socio-cultural interactions, five poems that portray the Grebo oral traditions and linguistic habits were selected and subjected to qualitative analysis. The study submits that Before the Palm Could Bloom is Wesley’s choice of immortalizing Grebo aesthetics in the written literature of English expression. It also recognizes that the deployment of culture-specific allusions and other poetic devices and recourse to Grebo stylistic resources and cultural conventions in the selected poems help eternize Grebo cultural heritage.