The Age of Stolen Salt — by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

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The Age of Stolen Salt — by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Post by Welles »

Salt is an ancestor. Older than ocean, old as stars. Salt flows through your saltwater body even now like blood, as blood. Salt is nonnegotiable, necessary for the working of every single cell.

Salt is time. Evidence of how long since evaporation. Resident time of water in basins. Measured future for the preserved dead. Salt is first and lasting.

We live in the age of stolen salt, bottled sweat, preserved expendable flesh.

Some historians say salt grew up with capitalism. Or the preconditions of capitalism. Agricultural societies with domesticated animals disconnected by the wild symbiosis of salt had to actively seek out salt: thus trade, thus war, thus tax, thus all forms of distance and extraction. Going back to “the salt mines” has become a euphemism for extractive labor in general. But the violence is not only metaphorical.

Once upon a time, salt itself was money. Precious rock salt good as gold. They say the first salt war was about 6000 BCE at Yuncheng Lake in China. All the wood it takes to evaporate brine is partially blamed for significant deforestation in Europe. The European colonizers of the Caribbean stacked salt in their basements. Traded salt for human beings in chains.
This excerpt is slightly more than a third of the little essay (it's short). I found it fascinating.

The Age of Stolen Salt — by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

https://thecreatorwritings.wordpress.co ... s-release/


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