Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

The book by Saidiya Hartman narrates a journey to trace the unknown people ‘who left behind no traces’ (pg 15). She is on a quest to find out her ancestral connection and origin from Africa. It studies deep into the Atlantic Slave trade that took place in Ghana where her background is found. Hartman went to Ghana as a scholar and stayed there for a year researching into the save trade, intending on tracing the itinerary of destruction from the coast to savanna. The book is stimulating the thoughts on the scarring effect of slavery that still haunts the present-day. There is an identity that is lost and can only be found and shaped when the real truth and vivid explanation of what happened during the slave trade are given. This lost identity is what Hartman hides in the tittle Lose Your Mother.

Hartman, among many other Africans living in America, faced a lot of challenges because of their skin color. She explains her feeling about the situation that she felt like a monstrous being caged with a sign warning on it: Danger, snarling Negro. Do not approach. She is determined to make her fellows think the horror of African slavery, to bring back into the thoughts of people the tragedy did on many nameless and faceless Africans. She wants to revive the memories and the realities of what happened to the family members of the existing Black population.

The genesis of the journey takes place in a library at Yale, where, as a college student, she got a book that referred her to her maternal great-great-grandmother inform of slave witness as of Alabama. She was very excited to have found a sign of her family’s past. She hungered for explanations of what led to her state of life. She read an interview of her great-great-grandmother and a white interviewer where she was asked what recalled from the experience of a slave. She replied in a way that showed that the experience was not something to want to bring back the thoughts; Not a thing (12-15). She went back to look for the interviews later only to find no trace of the references she had earlier read. Hartman’s desire to unveiling history was downplayed in many instances. Her parents and her brother also urged her to cease digging into the past and focus on her being; the natives of Ghana she met were not willing to talk about slavery plus the missing references. She, however, grew in desire to fill in the missing links of historical records and to represent the lives of those deemed unworthy of remembering.

Hartman chose Ghana not because it is the only country victim to slavery, but because it provided a vivid image to comprehend how people with families, settlements, beliefs, and precious traditional lives lost all traces of individuality. It had most features that indicated severe slave activities than any other state in West Africa, including; slave prisons, dungeons, and slave pens. Nine slave routes also passed through Ghana. She visited many areas where slave activities happened like Elmina, where slaves were captured and sold to European slave traders, warehoused before shipment across the Atlantic Ocean. She visits many other sites of significant slave activities to gather information about slavery. She mentioned a few cases of brutality that happened to the Africans at that time; for instance, she gives an account of the torture and murder of a young woman by a British captain. The captain was later tried and acquitted for the crime.

Hartman was not only interested in the study of the slave trade in Ghana but also in the centrality that the Pan-African society had brought in 1957 after Kwame Nkrumah allowed access of the country to other Africans living out of Ghana. He created a state whose slogan was; Africa for Africans at home and in a foreign country. Hartman’s visit was full of challenges that the collection of the data she expected to get from firsthand people was not accessible. The Ghanaians were so focused on the future that no one wanted to tell her the slavery stories. Others did not want to talk about it because it was too painful for them to avoid the guilt of recalling the details of how some of the trades were taking place. One of the Ghanaian poets says that they knew they were giving away their people for things. This experience is too painful to remember, especially when you know that you sold out your son for material things, only to get reports of how their lives turned out to be a hell on earth.

They stay in Africa was not as productive as she had anticipated. She did not get direct leads to the answers she was looking for; nothing really filled the gaps that were all over. The fact that people shied from talking about what happened had changed everything in the minds of the people. She now came to understand the reason why her great-great-grandmother refrains from talking about her experience in slavery. Despite the lack of success in her quest, she heard something that is far beyond what she as looking for, in a small confined town in the inner side where the slave invasions were counterattacked. The city is Gold. She says that she realized that those who remained during the whole process of the slave trade told different narrations from the families of the victims of the slave trade. The two groups talked from the point of different experiences and feelings.

Work Cited

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. Macmillan, 2008.