Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (NY: Farrah, Straus and Giroux, 2007). 288 pp. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route is Saidiya V. Hartman's autobiography. As a descendant of enslaved Africans, she embarks on a journey to search for strangers "who left behind no traces" (15) and to find answers to her unknown ancestral connections in Africa. Hartman's book does more than unearth the experiences of an individual whose story and life intersect with others cemented in the archaeological remains along the coast of Elmina and Cape Coast in Ghana and other locations on the continent. Lose Your Mother reveals Hartman's imagination, curiosity and anguish about an aspect of her ancestral roots and identity that she grapples with as an African American living in America. In many thought-provoking ways, Hartman's book epitomizes the dream and experiences of Diaspora Blacks who congregate at sites of slave memories in Ghana to inquire, express and articulate personal and collective yearnings to unknown ancestral spirits in earthly and heavenly realms. Hartman "was not trying to dodge the ghosts of slavery but to confront them" (42). This well-written twelve-chapter book is engaging, poetic, historical and sometimes humorous. Chapter eight not only underscores Hartman's motivation for the journey, but draws striking comparisons between the humiliating treatments the enslaved endured in Africa and North America. Hartman blends her skills in poetry and prose with her limited knowledge about her heritage to make sense of the Middle Passage. Hartman's major argument underscores challenges that confront returnees as they refashion their identity in ways that allow them to embrace their dual identity as people of African descent born in the Americas. Chasing invisible voices, exhuming hidden spirits, uprooting concealed echoes, unearthing shadowy ancestral images entrenched in the dungeons for centuries can indeed be overwhelming. This daunting task not only requires an attempt to bring to light the spirits of one's forebears in unfamiliar territories along the coastline of Ghana. Indeed, this exploration demands a rigorous search as Hartman as walks in vicinities where the enslaved were paraded the last time before they entered through the "Doors of No Return" into waiting ships; and as she navigates through human remains at various sites of memory tracing a history without transparent evidence of enslavement and ancestral linkages. At the same time, Hartman describes the somber experiences of Diasporan Blacks and the apathy of Ghanaians at sites of slavery: "We were encouraged to mourn because it generated revenue, but our grief struck no common chord of memory, no bedrock of shared sentiment" (171). According to Hartman, her "grand-parents erected a wall of half-truths and silence between themselves and the past" (12-15). Hartman does not hide her frustrations, loneliness and disappointment as she provides detailed narratives about her encounters with people in Ghana. Hartman interrogates them about the presence or absence of her forebears as she faces the reality of rejection in negotiating her pathway. Through these historical spaces in Ghana Hartman firmly plants the lives of slaves-strangers and at the same time situates her own family history of slavery in southern plantations in the United States. …