Lose Your Mother
A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The slave, Saidiya 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. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana.
There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives 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, vividly dramatising the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and American history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this rousing narrative, Berkeley professor Hartman traces firsthand 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 na ve 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 decolonization 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.
