Synopses & Reviews
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, she 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 strangertorn 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. There are no known survivors of Hartmans 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 with figures from the past whose lives were shattered and transformed by the slave trade. Written in prose that is fresh, insightful, and deeply affecting,
Lose Your Mother is a “landmark text” (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of
Freedom Dreams).
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in 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 alsothis must be stressedsplendidly 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 alsothis must be stressedsplendidly 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 individualsHartman 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 slaverys 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. Du Bois and Richard Wright, among others. Saidiya Hartman stands in good company, and propels their work masterfully into the 21st century."Anne C. Bailey, Ms.
"An enigmatic memoir as much about exorcising demons borne of delusion as it is about a futile search for traces of ancestors nowhere to be found . . . Written in a very engaging fashion, this thought-provoking, post-sentimental, and ultimately heartbreaking neo-narrative is a clarion call for a serious attitude readjustment . . . It is likely to lead to an overhaul in Pan-Africanist thinking."Kam Williams, News Blaze
"In Lose Your Mother, which documents one womans attempt to reach back beyond slavery and make the Africa-America connection, Saidiya Hartman melds ugly reality with the lyricism of literature to come up with a new paradigm . . . 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 . . . The urgency of her mission is unmistakable."Erin Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
"'The country in which you disembark is never the country of which you have dreamed,' writes Saidiya Hartman in eloquent meditation on dislocation and memory . . . Weaving together history and myth, her own personal experiences and those of the other African Americans she meets along the way, Hartman carefully depicts the imbalance of power between the descendents of those who were sent away and of those who remained. Hartman's book provides a powerful exploration of naming and the language of exile, for 'what orphan had not yearned for a mother country or a free territory? What bastard had not desired the family name or, better yet, lo
Review
"An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery, [
Lose Your Mother is] splendidly written, driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts."--Elizabeth Schmidt,
The New York Times Book Review"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
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
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, she 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--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. 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 with figures from the past whose lives were shattered and transformed by the slave trade. Written in prose that is fresh, insightful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a "landmark text" (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams).
About the Author
Saidiya Hartman is the author of
Scenes of Subjection. She has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and is now a professor at Columbia University. She lives in New York City.