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Also by Saidiya Hartman:

Lose Your Mother, January 2007
Hardcover

LOSE YOUR MOTHER
By: Saidiya Hartman

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.

Media Buzz

Tavis Smiley - January 26, 2007
News and Notes - January 23, 2007