A Practice to Hold the Salt Wind is a work of literary oral history, attending to how people remember themselves free inside conditions that refuse their freedom: across the diaspora, across the Global South, across the present-tense foreclosures of migration and return. Built from fifteen years of oral history interviews, quotidian encounters, and the author's own inquiry in the wake of displacement, the book is structured as a chorus of encounters: returns to specific moments held with specific people, rendered through ethnopoetic transcription, essayistic prose, image, and assemblage. The book asks what archives a life whose agency has been foreclosed. It proposes that our horizons, our dreams, our acts of reaching are themselves a form of being. The practices we improvise to keep those horizons alive, in ritual, song, in a suitcase under a grandmother's bed, in the body that carries ancestry across generations, are the counter-ontology of the global majority. Grounded in Caribbean memory traditions, decolonial thought, and embodied listening, the writer accompanies others, and her younger self, into rooms where what could not be spoken becomes possible to say. It is a critique of the dream that scattered a generation, and a reach for an otherwise dream.
2026