Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

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Her own journey begins in the stacks of the Yale library, where as a graduate student she came across a reference to her maternal great-great-grandmother in a volume of slave testimony from Alabama. In Chapter 4, "Come, Go Back, Child", p100: "Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. It was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the line between the slave and the free separated Africans and Europeans and hardened into a color line.

In 1966, the police and the armed forces overthrew the government of Kwame Nkrumah and the goodwill evaporated. I was not bolstered by his words, which I had first read as a graduate student: "We must have the courage to invent the future. And the futures envisioned by Nkrumah and King and eclipsed by assassins, military coups, and the CIA never seemed more distant. Not only did black Americans identify with the anticolonial struggle, they believed that their future too depended upon its victory.

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. The question of before was no less vexed since there was no collective or Pan-African identity that preexisted the disaster of the slave trade. The vision of an African continental family or a sable race standing shoulder to shoulder was born by captives, exiles, and orphans and in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade. Of course I knew black people had been enslaved and that I was descended from slaves, but slavery was vague and faraway to me, like the embarrassing incidents adults loved to share with you about some incredulous thing you had done as a toddler but of which you had no memory.

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. When there are no more mysteries, when the romance is gone, you are forced to then forge something new, something more authentic.I needed to see the Atlantic, which was where I reckoned with the dead, the men and women and children who were all but invisible in most of the history written about the slave trade; academics had continued to quarrel about how many slaves packed per ton constituted "tight packing" and a deliberate policy of accepting high mortality, estimate rates of cargo productivity in the slave trade versus the other kinds of commodity trade, and quantify the gains and losses of the slave trade with algebraic formulas that obscured the disaster: Deck Area = Constant × (Tonnage) 2/3. I knew she lived with her children in a small building on the grounds of the DuBois Center complex, which included the guesthouse, but I didn't know exactly where.

You'll see the African elites and nobles fashioning themselves after Europe's kings and the captives trailing behind them in tow. The lucky ones enjoyed the privilege of serving the bourgeoning black republic; the ones waiting tried to be patient and reassured themselves that as the months stretched out they weren't being idle.Saidiya was also a fiction of someone I would never be—a girl unsullied by the stain of slavery and inherited disappointment. I turned on the radio, but all I could find was static, except for a prerecorded program on the Voice of America Radio about Jackie Robinson breaking the color bar in baseball. I identified the street on which I lived as Volta River Club Street, because the club was adjacent to the apartment building and no other street markers existed. She scoured the library for misshelved volumes, reread five surrounding volumes, reviewed her early notes but never found that paragraph imprinted in her memory, “the words filling less than half a page, the address on Clark Street, the remarks about her appearance, all of which where typed up by a machine in need of new ribbon. It reads like a cross between Bruce Chatwin and Toni Morrison, top-notch travel-writing and scintillating prose and soul.