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A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
January 2007
On Sale: January 9, 2007
288 pages
ISBN: 0374270821
EAN: 9780374270827
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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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