There Was Never Enough Salt in the Kitchen by Juleus Ghunta
By Wasafiri Editor on February 4, 2023 in Poetry
Wasafiri is pleased to publish the pieces shortlisted for the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The poems, essays, and short stories in this series showcase the best new writing from the best new writers across the globe – in all their diversity and complexity. In this moving poem about memory and ‘saltnesness’, Juleus Ghunta remembers his grandmother through the image of salt granules.
War
Grandma poured handfuls of salt along the hibiscus fence, sprinkled salt across the
lawn as though she was seasoning an acre of meat. Some nights, she tied salt-laced
thorns on doorknobs to paralyse the hands of our neighbour’s ghosts. Both families
fought a long war for the land, a few times in court, mostly with herbs and oils and
ashes strewn along the fence.
Madness
What Grandma feared most was madness in her children. She would call frantic
meetings to explain the neighbour’s schemes: roasted breadfruit and dried herring to
stop our garden from producing; dead lizard in a matchbox to spur sudden sickness
and grief; old textbooks covered with grave dirt to prevent young ones from learning,
dreams dead before we could name them.
Protest
Once, interrupting her reading, I reminded Grandma there was never enough salt in the
kitchen, how unsalted food was a greater threat to my wellbeing, how only this
saltlessness was real. Later that evening, I strutted up and down Palmer’s Hill, slowed
each time I reached our neighbour’s gate to speak in tongues, stomp and twirl, to
scatter ashes from a calabash bowl I found at the fence.
Cleansing
The taxi sped through potholes on our way to the balmyard in St Elizabeth. Grandma
clutched her blue bible, a soft prayer on her breath. The bush doctor threw a handful
of beads and bones on a table, pointed at the John Crow Bead near the edge, said it
was a sign of distances I would travel, far from Palmer’s Hill, a flame no calabash can
contain, uncontainable like the bird after whom the bead is named.
Wings
The floor creaked under the sudden weight of grandma’s knees. At fourteen, the age I
started living on my own, I would summon this memory, not of beads or bones, the
memory of grandma’s arms stretched wide, her guttural praise of the bush doctor’s
prophecy of wings. In 2019, a year before she died, I asked why she still sprinkles salt.
She sent me for an atlas, told me to touch all the places I have been.
Juleus Ghunta is a Chevening Scholar, poet and children’s writer. His poems have appeared in 30 journals. He is the co-editor of two issues of Interviewing the Caribbean journal (The UWI Press), focused on children’s literature and childhood trauma. His picture book Rohan Bullkin and the Shadows was published by CaribbeanReads in 2021.
Photo by Jason Tuinstra on Unsplash
