Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route - Hardcover

Hartman, Saidiya

4.27

2,161 ratings by Goodreads

9780374270827: Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374270821 ISBN 13: 9780374270827

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2007

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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.
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 Mother is a powerful meditation on history, memory, and the Atlantic slave trade.

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Review:

"LOSE YOUR MOTHER is wider and deeper than Alex Haley's landmark ROOTS, much less sentimental and incredibly smart. It reads like a cross between Bruce Chatwin and Toni Morrison, top-notch travel-writing and scintillating prose and soul. Hartman makes the Middle Passage more personal than heretofore imaginable both for Africans and African Americans. In so doing Hartman goes a long way toward healing an unhealable hurt. Absolutely searing. This book is destined to be a landmark all its own. Probably the most meaningful book I've read this year." --Randall Kenan, author of "A Visitation of Spirits
""Combining the depth and breadth of a scholar of slavery with the imagination and linguistic facility of a novelist, Saidiya Hartman has written a most poignant meditation on the ironies of black identity in a postmodern, multicultural world. Hartman has found a most compelling narrative voice that enables the dreaded Middle Passage and the tomb of slavery to speak to a new generation of readers. This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember. "Lose Your Mother" is a magnificent achievement." --Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
""Lose Your Mother "is a profound utterance of humanity, an innovative and compelling re-narrativization of terror by a scholar of extraordinary subtlety of vision, insight and empathy." - Hazel V. Carby, Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, Yale University
"Hartman moves beyond archives and attempts to hear the voices of ghosts. "Lose Your Mother" is one of those landmark texts thatsucceeds at remembering the horrors of the Middle Passage and the historical legacy that experience left on both sides of the Atlantic." - Robin D.G. Kelley, author of "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"""Lose Your Mother" is a radiant book that takes readers through much which feels beyond imaginative confrontation. Saidiya Hartman' s words and thinking are unflinching, true, and beautiful, and only she could have written this extraordinary book." --Elizabeth Alexander, Professor of African-American Studies, Yale University

" An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery, [ Lose Your Mother is] splendidly written, driven by this writer ' s prodigious narrative gifts. " -- Elizabeth Schmidt, The New York Times Book Review
"This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember. Lose Your Mother is a magnificent achievement." --Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
"An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery, ["Lose Your Mother "is] splendidly written, driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts."--Elizabeth Schmidt, "The New York Times Book Review"
"This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember. "Lose Your Mother" is a magnificent achievement." --Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery, ["Lose Your Mother "is] splendidly written, driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts. "Elizabeth Schmidt, The New York Times Book Review"

This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember. "Lose Your Mother" is a magnificent achievement. "Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University""

An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery, [Lose Your Mother is] splendidly written, driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts. Elizabeth Schmidt, The New York Times Book Review

This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember. Lose Your Mother is a magnificent achievement. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

"An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery, [Lose Your Mother is] splendidly written, driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts." --Elizabeth Schmidt, The New York Times Book Review

"This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember. Lose Your Mother is a magnificent achievement." --Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

About the Author:

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection. She teaches at the University of California in Berkeley. She lives in northern California.

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