BBC Arts

Salt, by Selina Thompson (2021x6)

Air date: Oct 24, 2021

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