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

Hartman, Saidiya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374531153 ISBN 13: 9780374531157

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

Synopsis

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. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.

The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger―torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way and with figures from the past whose lives were shattered and transformed by the slave trade. Written in prose that is fresh, insightful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a "landmark text" (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams).

About this title

About the Author:

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection. She has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and is now a professor at Columbia University. She lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Prologue 
The Path of Strangers
 
As I disembarked from the bus in Elmina, I heard it. It was sharp and clear, as it rang in the air, and clattered in my ear making me recoil. Obruni. A stranger. A foreigner from across the sea. Three children gathered at the bus station shouted it, giggling as it erupted from their mouths, tickled to have spotted some extraterrestrial fallen to earth in Ghana. They summoned me, "obruni, obruni," as if it were a form of akwaaba (welcome), reserved just for me. As the words weaved their way through the crowd and landed on me, I imagined myself in their eyes: an alien tightly wrapped in the skin of a blue rain slicker, the big head bursting from its navy pod.
 
            My appearance confirmed it: I was the proverbial outsider. Who else sported vinyl in the tropics? My customs belonged to another country: my too-fast gait best suited to navigating the streets of Manhattan, my unfashionable German walking shoes, my unruly tufts twisted into two French braids, fuzzy and unfurling in the humid air. Old and new worlds stamped my face, a blend of peoples and nations and masters and slaves long forgotten. In the jumble of my features, no certain line of origin could be traced. Clearly, I was not Fanti, or Ashanti, or Ewe, or Ga.
 
            Then I started to hear it everywhere. It was the buzz in the market. It was the shorthand my new Ghanaian friends used to describe me to their old friends. Obruni lurked like an undertone in the hustle of street peddlers. People said it casually in my face, until I sucked my teeth and said "ehh!" informing the speaker that first, I knew what the word meant, and second, I didn't relish the label.
 
            But then I learned to accept it. After all, I was a stranger from across the sea. A black face didn't make me kin. Even when otherwise undetected, I was betrayed when I opened my mouth and heard my father's Brooklyn brogue rippling across the surface of my studied speech, wreaking havoc with the regimented syntax enforced by my mother the grammarian, whose scrupulous speech was a way of masking her southern origins and blending into New York. My direct way of speaking sounded sharp-edged and angular when compared to the tactful evasion and obliging indirection of the local English idiom. The brisk clip of my speech, flattened vowels, and sounds trapped in the dome of my mouth, expiring from lack of air, branded me the foreigner.
 
            I was the stranger in the village, a wandering seed bereft of the possibility of taking root. Behind my back people whispered, dua ho mmire: a mushroom that grows on the tree has no deep soil. Everyone avoided the word "slave," but we all knew who was who. As a "slave baby," I represented what most chose to avoid: the catastrophe that was our past, and the lives exchanged for India cloth, Venetian beads, cowrie shells, guns, and rum. And what was forbidden to discuss: the matter of someone's origins.
 
            Obruni forced me to acknowledge that I didn't belong anyplace. The domain of the stranger is always an elusive elsewhere. I was born in another country, where I also felt like an alien and which in part determined why I had come to Ghana. I had grown weary of being stateless. Secretly I wanted to belong somewhere or, at least, I wanted a convenient explanation of why I felt like a stranger.
 
            As a child, when I was angry with my mother and father, I'd conjure up glorious imaginary parents who'd rescue me from the awful people forcing me to call them Mom and Dad. I often imagined that the singer Johnny Hartman was my father since we shared the same last name. Whenever my dad played his Coltrane albums, I listened for Johnny Hartman's lovely wistful voice. If I didn't think too hard about why he had abandoned me, I could find succor in this fiction of origins. The sting of obruni allowed for no such fiction.
 
            I complained to an expatriate friend living in Accra that I had never felt as much a stranger as I did in Ghana. He muttered, "uh-huh," and then he asked, "When you go to Chicago, do you expect black folks there to welcome you because you're from New York? Well, why should it be any different here?"
 
 
The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger. Torn from kin and community, exiled from one's country, dishonored and violated, the slave defines the position of the outsider. She is the perpetual outcast, the coerced migrant, the foreigner, the shamefaced child in the lineage. Contrary to popular belief, Africans did not sell their brothers and sisters into slavery. They sold strangers: those outside the web of kin and clan relationships, nonmembers of the polity, foreigners and barbarians at the outskirts of their country, and lawbreakers expelled from society. In order to betray your race, you had first to imagine yourself as one. The language of race developed in the modern period and in the context of the slave trade.
 
            The very term "slavery" derived from the word "Slav," because Eastern Europeans were the slaves of the medieval world. At the beginning of modernity, slavery declined in Europe as it expanded in Africa, although as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was still possible to purchase "white" slaves--English, Spanish, and Portuguese captives in the Mediterranean ports of North Africa. The Iberians can be credited, according to one historian, "for restricting bondage, for the first time in history to peoples of African descent." 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.
 
            For Europeans, race established a hierarchy of human life, determined which persons were expendable, and selected the bodies that could be transformed into commodities. For those chained in the lower decks of a slave ship, race was both a death sentence and the language of solidarity. 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. Racial solidarity was expressed in the language of kinship because it both evidenced the wound and attempted to heal it. The slave and the ex-slave wanted what had been severed: kin. Those in the diaspora translated the story of race into one of love and betrayal.
 
 
I had come to Ghana in search of strangers. The first time for a few weeks in the summer of 1996 as a tourist interested in the slave forts hunkered along the coast and the second time for a year beginning in the fall of 1997 as a Fulbright Scholar affiliated with the National Museum of Ghana. Ghana was as likely a place as any to begin my journey, because I wasn't seeking the ancestral village but the barracoon. As both a professor conducting research on slavery and a descendant of the enslaved, I was desperate to reclaim the dead, that is, to reckon with the lives undone and obliterated in the making of human commodities.
 
            I wanted to engage the past, knowing that its perils and dangers still threatened and that even now lives hung in the balance. Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.
 
            Nine slave routes traversed Ghana. In following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, I intended to retrace the process by which lives were destroyed and slaves born. I stepped into the path of more than seven hundred thousand captives, passing through the coastal merchant societies that acted as middlemen and brokers in the slave trade, the inland warrior aristocracies that captured people and supplied slaves to the coast, and the northern societies that were raided and plundered. I visited the European forts and storehouses on the three-hundred-mile stretch of the littoral from Beyin to Keta, the slave markets established by strong inland states that raided their enemies and subordinates and profited from the trade, and the fortified towns and pillaged communities of the hinterland that provided the steady flow of captives.
 
            I chose Ghana because it possessed more dungeons, prisons, and slave pens than any other country in West Africa--tight dark cells buried underground, barred cavernous cells, narrow cylindrical cells, dank cells, makeshift cells. In the rush for gold and slaves that began at the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, Danes, Swedes, and Brandenburgers (Germans) built fifty permanent outposts, forts, and castles designed to ensure their place in the Africa trade. In these dungeons, storerooms, and holding cells, slaves were imprisoned until transported across the Atlantic.
 
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About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0374531153
• ISBN 13: 9780374531157
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288