Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Dungeons and Diaspora

For decades, academic discussions about the Atlantic slave trade centered on the number of Africans taken from the continent in a violent, forced migration to lands in the Americas. In 1969, historian Philip Curtin attempted the first scientific study of the numbers question (The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census), producing a figure of approximately 9.5 million; scholars since have revised the number to 12 million, and still others estimate that as many as 20 million souls were uprooted from their homelands and made to suffer the brutality of the Middle Passage on their way to plantation slavery.

In recent years, however, scholars, authors and others have focused more on the question of memory than on statistics. What memories of the slave trade and its horrors and complexities still linger along the Atlantic shores of the African continent? What memories remain in the minds and hearts of Africa's diaspora? Alex Haley's groundbreaking Roots first awakened such interest in 1976, and since then it has been the journeys of other African Americans back to the continent that perhaps drives this renewed attention to roots and routes.

Saidiya Hartman's book epitomizes these journeys. An associate professor of English at UC Berkeley, Hartman is a distinguished academic whose work includes the scholarly Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997). But Lose Your Mother describes a more personal journey and is written for a wider audience. In it, she attempts to trace one of the several Atlantic slave routes, this one beginning in Ghana, where she visits such infamous locales as Elmina Castle, which was both slave dungeon and export station.

"I chose Ghana because it possessed more dungeons, prisons and slave pens than any other country in West Africa -- tight dark cells buried underground, barred cavernous cells, narrow cylindrical cells, dank cells, makeshift cells," Hartman writes. As she explores these and other places steeped in the history and memory of the African American experience, she expertly interweaves her own personal history. She reveals what she knows and what she wishes she knew -- this is the conundrum that many in the African diaspora face when looking back at a nonlinear history for which few, if any, records can be found.

"In my family too, the past was a mystery," Hartman laments. "No matter how we embellished and dressed things up, the truth couldn't be avoided: Slaves did not possess lineages. The 'rope of captivity' tethered you to an owner rather than a father and made you offspring rather than an heir."

She lyrically describes the feeling of not belonging anywhere, of being a stranger, of being a person displaced in the past and in the present. The only resolution to this loss of inheritance is a commitment to the ongoing struggle against slavery in all its forms. This is the legacy Hartman gleaned from her own passage along the slave route. 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 masterfully into the 21st century.

Anne C. Bailey is the author of African Voices of the Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame.

• Read more about this book

Don't Miss Out — Get Feminist News, Ideas, and Actions.