Saidiya Hartman

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 sl

A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Lose Your Mother

Marion

Unlike we come together or we who fled or we who were liberated, African people crossed the lines of raider and captive, broker and commodity, master and slave, kin and stranger. The capaciousness of these words African people was as dangerous as it was promising. No doubt, for the priest, the longing that resided within them concerned what we might become together or the possibility of solidarity, which would enable us to defeat the enemy again, except that they described the enemy too.

The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it was not the kind of thing that could ever be given to you. The kind of freedom that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back. Freedom is the kind of thing that required you to leave your bones on the hills at Brimsbay, or to burn the cane fields, or to live in a garret for seven years, or to stage a general strike, or to create a new republic. It is won and lost, again and again. It is a glimpse of possibility, an opening, a solicitation without any guarantee of duration before it flickers and then is extinguished.

The story of slavery fabricated for African Americans had nothing to do with the present struggles of most Ghanaians. What each community made of slavery and how they understood it provided little ground for solidarity. African Americans wanted to regain their African patrimony and to escape racism in the United States. Ghanaians wanted an escape from the impoverishment of the present, and the road to freedom, which they most often imagined, was migration to the United States. African Americans entertained fantasies of return and Ghanaians of departure.

From where we each were standing, we did not see the same past, nor did we share a common vision of the Promised Land. The ghost of slavery was being conjured to very different ends.

It is only when you are stranded in a hostile country that you need a romance of origins; it is only when you lose your mother that she becomes a myth; it is only when you fear the dislocation of the new that the old ways become precious, imperiled, and what your great-great-grandchildren will one day wistfully describe as African.

Laurence Favre

 after my harrowing experience at Ilhe De Goree (Goree Island) in Senegal, where the “Door of No Return” is housed, I couldn’t believe the similarities of experience to Hartman’s in Ghana. Hartman’s travels while grouchy, are raw and honest, an exploration of how lives were stolen & in my reflections, how lives were stolen differently. In moments, difficult to read of the brutal violence of slavery that the mind cannot comprehend but necessary reading in understanding the scale at which this violence was meted & of which is yet to end. 

A book I will be thinking of for eternity. 

Aisha Mugo

Recommended by @mariorugu after my harrowing experience at Ilhe De Goree (Goree Island) in Senegal, where the “Door of No Return” is housed, I couldn’t believe the similarities of experience to Hartman’s in Ghana. Hartman’s travels while grouchy, are raw and honest, an exploration of how lives were stolen & in my reflections, how lives were stolen differently. In moments, difficult to read of the brutal violence of slavery that the mind cannot comprehend but necessary reading in understanding the scale at which this violence was meted & of which is yet to end. 

A book I will be thinking of for eternity. 

Similar to Maya Angelou gods children need traveling shoes but more history and academic.

Saidiya Hartman traces a slave route back to Ghana and follows the history of the Atlantic slave trade. Historical travel writing 

Similar to Maya Angelou gods children need traveling shoes but more history and academic.

Saidiya Hartman traces a slave route back to Ghana and follows the history of the Atlantic slave trade. Historical travel writing 

Traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey the author took along a slave route in Ghana, vividly dramatizing the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African-American history.

A thought provoking and soul stirring discussion of the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy written with the elegance of a novel.

Lose Your Mother A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

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