Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman journeys along a slave route in Ghana, following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast. She retraces the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy.

There were no survivors of Hartman's lineage, nor far-flung relatives in Ghana of whom she had come in search. She traveled to Ghana in search of strangers. The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger — torn from kin and country. To lose your mother is to suffer the loss of kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as a stranger. As both the offspring of slaves and an American in Africa, Hartman, too, was a stranger. Her reflections on history and memory unfold as an intimate encounter with places — a holding cell, a slave market, a walled town built to repel slave raiders — and with people: an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to build the first permanent trading fort in West Africa; an adolescent boy who was kidnapped while playing; a fourteen-year-old girl who was murdered aboard a slave ship.

Eloquent, thoughtful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a powerful meditation on history, memory, and the Atlantic slave trade.

"In this rousing narrative, Berkeley professor Hartman traces first-hand the progress of her ancestors-forced migrants from the Gold Coast-in order to illuminate the history of the Atlantic slave trade. Chronicling her time in Ghana following the overland slave route from the hinterland to the Atlantic, Hartman admits early on to a naïve search for her identity: 'Secretly I wanted to belong somewhere or, at least, I wanted a convenient explanation of why I felt like a stranger.' Fortunately, Hartman eschews the simplification of such a quest, finding that Africa's American expatriates often find themselves more lost than when they started. Instead, Hartman channels her longing into facing tough questions, nagging self-doubt and the horrors of the Middle Passage in a fascinating, beautifully told history of those millions whose own histories were revoked in 'the process by which lives were destroyed and slaves born.' Shifting between past and present, Hartman also considers the 'afterlife of slavery,' revealing Africa-and, through her transitive experience, America-as yet unhealed by de-colonization and abolition, but showing signs of hope. Hartman's mix of history and memoir has the feel of a good novel, told with charm and passion, and should reach out to anyone contemplating the meaning of identity, belonging and homeland." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Hartman's surrender and suffering in the face of the memory of slavery and the slave trade — the horror of which can never be tallied — is noble and dignified." San Francisco Chronicle

"Hartman is hardly the first black American to go 'back' to Africa seeking a measure of personal and historical salvation. But she charts her heartbreak at not finding it with a meticulous honesty and mix of emotions...that feel distinctly 21st century." Los Angeles Times

"A provocative work, tinged with sadness and anger." Kirkus Reviews

"Hartman's strength is how she interweaves vivid scenes of the terror of the slave trade with her own internal struggle to confront the pain of slavery in her family's past." Library Journal

"This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember. Lose Your Mother is a magnificent achievement." Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

Hartman journeys along a slave route in Ghana, retracing the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the 15th to the 20th century, and reckoning with the blank slate of her own genealogy.

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman journeys along a slave route in Ghana, following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast. She retraces the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy.

There were no survivors of Hartman's lineage, nor far-flung relatives in Ghana of whom she had come in search. She traveled to Ghana in search of strangers. The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger--torn from kin and country. To lose your mother is to suffer the loss of kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as a stranger. As both the offspring of slaves and an American in Africa, Hartman, too, was a stranger. Her reflections on history and memory unfold as an intimate encounter with places--a holding cell, a slave market, a walled town built

to repel slave raiders--and with people: an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to build the first permanent trading fort in West Africa; an adolescent boy who was kidnapped while playing; a fourteen-year-old girl who was murdered aboard a slave ship.

Eloquent, thoughtful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a powerful meditation on history, memory, and the Atlantic slave trade.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in the Nineteenth-Century America. She has taught at the University of California in Berkeley, and is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University. She lives in New York City. In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, Hartman reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history. The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger, one torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider, an alien. There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way and draws her deeper into the heartland of slavery. She passes through the holding cells of military forts and castles, the ruins of towns and villages devastated by the trade, and the fortified settlements built to repel predatory armies and kidnappers. In passages of historical portraiture, she shows us an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to build the first permanent trading fort in West Africa, a girl murdered aboard a slave ship, and a community of fugitives seeking a haven from slave raiders. The persons shattered and transformed by the slave trade come alive as Hartman weaves together history, biography, and memoir. An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery from the 16th century to the present and a welcome illustration of the powers of innovative scholarship to help us better understand how history shapes identity. But the book is also--this must be stressed--splendidly written, driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts. She combines a novelist's eye for telling detail with the blunt, self-aware voice of those young writers who have revived the American coming-of-age story into something more engaging and empathetic than the tales of redemption or of the exemplary life well lived, patterned on Henry Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass.--Elizabeth Schmidt, The New York Times Book Review An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery from the 16th century to the present and a welcome illustration of the powers of innovative scholarship to help us better understand how history shapes identity. But the book is also--this must be stressed--splendidly written, driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts. She combines a novelist's eye for telling detail with the blunt, self-aware voice of those young writers who have revived the American coming-of-age story into something more engaging and empathetic than the tales of redemption or of the exemplary life well lived, patterned on Henry Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass. Hartman's main focus in Lose Your Mother is shaking up our abstract, and therefore forgettable, appreciation for a tragedy wrought on countless nameless, faceless Africans. She makes us feel the horror of the African slave trade, by playing with our sense of scale, by measuring the immense destruction and displacement through its impact on vivid, imperfect, flesh-and-blood individuals--Hartman herself, the members of her immediate family she pushes away but mulls over, the Ghanaians she meets while doing her field work and the slaves whose lives she imaginatively reconstructs from the detritus of slavery's records.--Elizabeth Schmidt, The New York Times Book Review

An excellent account of the many misunderstandings between the children of the slaves who went to the New World and the descendants of those they left behind . . . Hartman draws on a wide range of published and archival sources to examine slavery's legacy . . . Above all, she reports movingly on her struggle with her own connection to Africa.--Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books

As Hartman] explores these and other places steeped in the history and memory of the African American experience, she expertly interweaves her own personal history . . . Her beautiful and insightful narrative reminds readers of previous calls for freedom in the work of Anna J. Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois and Richard Wright, among others. Saidiya Hartman stands in good company, and propels their work mas

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection. She teaches at the University of California in Berkeley. She lives in northern California.