Saltwater as Method, Art and Memory: Healing in Caribbean Research, Woman’s Tongue, Mangroves, and Truth-Telling
What this Episode Offers
A powerful reflection on saltwater as method, memory, and healing in Caribbean research.
An intimate conversation on Saltwater Healing, myth memoir, and the creative labour of making archive.
A meditation on Woman’s Tongue, mangroves, and ancestral presence as sources of knowledge.
A Black Caribbean feminist engagement with truth-telling, respectability, silence, and survival.
A discussion of art as method and the body as an archive that carries memory, spirit, and data.
A careful look at the pressures scholars face to fragment themselves for institutional legibility.
An invitation to think about public scholarship, Black queer joy, and decolonial justice as unfinished work.
In this episode of Saltwater Reasonings, I sit with Angelique V. Nixon for a deeply embodied conversation on saltwater as method, art as archive, ancestral memory, and Caribbean feminist truth-telling. Beginning with Nixon’s reflections on growing up in The Bahamas, the conversation moves through saltwater as mother, fear, healing, and foundation, while opening into the layered world of Saltwater Healing, her myth memoir rooted in collage, poetry, sand, plant matter, Woman’s Tongue branches, memory, and spirit.
The episode lingers with Nixon’s grandmother as an ancestral and methodological presence. Through stories of Woman’s Tongue, defiance, Obeah, domestic labour, sexual politics, and Black Caribbean women’s survival, Nixon reflects on the work of telling stories that may be partial, painful, messy, and difficult to verify through formal archives. The conversation insists that these forms of remembering remain rigorous, truthful, and necessary.
We think through art as method, the body as archive, the emotional labour of truth-telling, and the pressure to make scholarship legible to disciplinary expectations. We explore what it means to refuse fragmentation as scholars, artists, activists, and Caribbean women, especially within institutions that often ask us to separate spirit, creativity, politics, and knowledge.
The conversation also opens into Nixon’s current work on mangroves, decolonial justice, aesthetics, public education, Black queer joy, and the unfinished work of building more expansive spaces of freedom. This is an episode about saltwater as foundation, archive as living presence, and the courage required to tell the stories that have been mis-told, stolen, silenced, or left to disappear.
