Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
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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.
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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 Motheris a powerful meditation on history, memory, and the Atlantic slave trade.
Liked Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
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The Slave Ship: A Human History Shares history, nonfiction, slavery -
Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora Shares nonfiction, history, Africa -
Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga Shares nonfiction, history, race -
The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry Shares nonfiction, history, slavery
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Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History
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The Making of a Racist: A Southerner Reflects on Family, History, and the Slave Trade
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Bury the Chains
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The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
