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Performance artist Selina Thompson recreates her award-winning dramatic monologue about a journey she made by cargo ship to retrace the triangular route of the transatlantic slave trade. Poetic and deeply personal, Salt is part testimony, part performance and part excavation of collective memory through archive and music.

Throughout the film, Thompson explores her painfully difficult but ultimately redemptive exploration of the Atlantic triangle, and in doing so, takes us on a cathartic pilgrimage through grief, race and identity. Darkly comic in places but also intensely sad, Salt is Thompson’s deeply human response to being both British and a descendant of a people enslaved by the British.

Central to Salt is Thompson’s physical performance of her monologue. She plays a character, known simply as The Woman, who pounds great rocks of salt, tells profound stories and makes wry observations. The Woman allows Thompson’s particular journey and personal experience to hold a greater resonance, representing the afterlife of slavery and colonialism.

The salt the Woman breaks down into manageable pieces embodies that shared experience – the labour of negotiating racism, the tears, the sweat, the healing. The salt is also of the sea, itself a character in the piece that plays witness to the atrocities of the Middle Passage.

Complementing Thompson’s performance is a revealing, unflinchingly honest and at times humorous interview conducted by Afua Hirsch.

Thompson describes her journey, reflecting on the feelings and thoughts that defined her experience at the time, as well as her meditations now, five years after the original journey. She is an exceptional storyteller and her candidness, vivid powers of description and facility with language give Salt a raw and powerful intimacy.

Recalled in distinct chapters, Thompson’s journey takes her by sea from Belgium to Ghana, on to Jamaica and finally back across the Atlantic to Europe. She set out on this extraordinary journey not to try to experience the horror of the Middle Passage, but to ‘sit with it’, to commemorate the dead. Part way through her journey, that grieving process takes on an additional significance with the death of her beloved grandmother.

In exploring the past and its lasting legacy, Thompson is also looking for new definitions of home on the three continents she visits, having been told variously her whole life that all of them and none of them were home.

Footage of James Baldwin and Stuart Hall, who themselves grappled with this history and its afterlife, speaks to the inspiration and comfort Thompson drew from the black cultural archive and its distinct and rigorous legacy.

In Europe, Selina’s place of birth, she examines what it means to be black in a country that must grapple with its leading role in, and lasting benefits from, both slavery and colonialism. Her first sea voyage, where she encounters toxic racism and the abuse of power, becomes a contemporary replica of empire.

In Ghana, she explores the complexities of grief and remembrance, and what it means to commemorate a history and a people defined by absence. On her journey between Africa and the Caribbean, she confronts her own privilege and power, granted to her by her British passport.

In Jamaica, the country of her grandparents’ birth, she reflects on the nature of diasporic identity, on an island where most people’s ancestors came from somewhere else. On the final leg of her journey, overwhelmed by the weight of history and its ongoing legacy, she reaches a point of crisis, but ultimately, she does find home. Her long journey back into the past allows her, at last, to go forwards, as she closes with the quiet demand that we reckon with the past so that we can all do the same.

Salt is a deeply moving account of a young woman grappling with the afterlife of slavery and colonialism. The artist in Thompson creates a performance that somehow makes the overwhelming and unsurmountable bearable for her. Steeped in anger but delivered with the lightest of touches, Salt in its essence is about love and family, whether those bonds are biological, chosen through adoption or simply the bonds inherent within the black community. In exposing her pain, and her path towards healing, Thompson lays bare a rare yet vital truth.