Black salt poem by Édouard Glissant and a magickal recipe

*Sea salt

*Incense ashes/ashes from a chimney/ashes from any protective plant

*A pinch of black pepper

*Charcoal or charcoal powder

*A mortar and pestle

There is an old saying which goes: "Salt does what you tell it to". So, just speak to it.

Black salt is traditionally used for banishing and protections spells. It is useful for driving away from depression, bad spirits and unwanted guests. 

You can sprinkle it along the threshold of your doorway. 

All you need to do is grind the ingredients in a mortar, stir them and always feel and visualize the intention. 

BLACK SALT

by Édouard Glissant

 For the salt it signifies. 

Again the brilliance and the bitterness 

Distress of lights on its expanse. Profusion. The theme, as pure idea, 

knots itself with foam, with salting. Monotony: untiring sound the cry 

splits open. 

There is—on the delta—a river where the word builds up, the poem—

 and where the salt is purified. 

“Black Salt,” 1960, was originally published in French in Sel noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). The English translation is published with permission from Gallimard.

Édouard Glissant is a poet, playwright, novelist and essayist, born in Martinique in 1928. He is one of the most important contemporary writers in French. His poetry is aesthetically distinguished and historically significant, with potent metaphors of local identity. He uses rules of orality and ties the poems to a Martiniquan experience, history and geography/geology. Glissant expresses an ongoing search for identity and a struggle between memory and forgetting. He is globally recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought.