Always Carry Salt
A Memoir of Preserving Language and Culture
Samantha Ellis’s powerful memoir Always Carry Salt exemplifies diaspora yearning and determination.
Ellis grew up in the United Kingdom, hearing snippets of the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic of her parents and ancestors. By adulthood, though, she was unsure of how to pass her fading milk language on to her son. She joined groups dedicated to learning the language, a remnant of a once-bustling community that had dwindled to a handful of people following vicious displacements, but their members struggled, too: “everything I learned about my language was … contradictions and confusion, shreds and patches.”
Though the prose is steeped in perpetual longing, there is also ferocious joy in Ellis’s accounts of gathering memories from her disperse community. Things carried stories, though people had not been allowed to carry much with them; food, which was “literally easier to swallow than the trauma and political complexity,” nourished her need, too.
The book is flush with edifying historical and cultural context, though Ellis’s love of her community is what lingers most. Barred from visiting the homeland of her parents and ancestors, she writes about longing for tastes that cannot be replicated and about wanting to travel streets she never will. There’s power and poignancy in her essays about rewriting the magic of bowls inscribed with Lilith’s name and of tasting nabug far from where it fruits. And while some aches are impossible to resolve, there’s also hope in Ellis’s presentation of translation being about “working hard to make spaces where we can talk to each other,” and of sharing memories being akin to “caring and repairing from past to future.”
Written with the belief that “sleeping languages can be kissed back to life,” Always Carry Salt is a remarkable memoir about what we pass down and why.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
