Thursday, December 1, 2011

Saidiya Hartman: Lose Your Mother: A Journey Across the Atlantic Slave Route

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Across the Atlantic Slave Route, by Saidiya Hartman

From the New York Times, on 11 February 2007, "Erasing Slavery," by Elizabeth Schmidt: Saidiya Hartman’s story of retracing the routes of the Atlantic slave trade in Ghana is an original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery from the 16th century to the present and a welcome illustration of the powers of innovative scholarship to help us better understand how history shapes identity. But the book is also — this must be stressed — splendidly written, driven by this writer’s prodigious narrative gifts. She combines a novelist’s eye for telling detail (“My appearance confirmed it: I was the proverbial outsider. Who else sported vinyl in the tropics?”) with the blunt, self-aware voice (“On the really bad days, I felt like a monster in a cage with a sign warning: ‘Danger, snarling Negro. Keep away’ ”) of those young writers who have revived the American coming-of-age story into something more engaging and empathetic than the tales of redemption or of the exemplary life well lived, patterned on Henry Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass.


Hartman’s main focus in “Lose Your Mother” is shaking up our abstract, and therefore forgettable, appreciation for a tragedy wrought on countless nameless, faceless Africans. She makes us feel the horror of the African slave trade, by playing with our sense of scale, by measuring the immense destruction and displacement through its impact on vivid, imperfect, flesh-and-blood individuals — Hartman herself, the members of her immediate family she pushes away but mulls over, the Ghanaians she meets while doing her field work and the slaves whose lives she imaginatively reconstructs from the detritus of slavery’s records.


Her own journey begins in the stacks of the Yale library, where as a graduate student she came across a reference to her maternal great-great-grandmother in a volume of slave testimony from Alabama. Her excitement at finding a sign of her family’s past was undercut by her great-great- grandmother’s brief reply when asked what she remembered of being a slave: “Not a thing.” Hartman, while “crushed” to hear so little of her ancestor’s voice, turns negation into possibility, into all that can be communicated by such reticence: “I recognized that a host of good reasons explained my great-great-grandmother’s reluctance to talk about slavery with a white interviewer in Dixie in the age of Jim Crow.” Years later, after Hartman had begun work on this book, she returned to those interviews and could find no trace of the reference. She scoured the library for misshelved volumes, reread five surrounding volumes, reviewed her early notes but never found that paragraph imprinted in her memory, “the words filling less than half a page, the address on Clark Street, the remarks about her appearance, all of which where typed up by a machine in need of new ribbon.”


Hartman’s desire to know about slavery is thwarted at every turn: by grandparents who refuse to talk about the subject, by parents and a brother who urge her to stop brooding about the past and get on with her life, by the Ghanaians she encounters who either avoid the topic of slavery entirely or make it into a generic tourist attraction, and above all, by the huge gaps she encounters in her archival work, as the vanishing act of her great-great-grandmother’s testimony illustrates. Hartman’s response to what she calls the “non-history” of the slave fuels her drive “to fill in the blank spaces of the historical record and to represent the lives of those deemed unworthy of remembering.”


Hartman, the author of “Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America,” selects Ghana because it provides a vivid backdrop against which to understand how people with families, towns, religions and rich cultural lives lost all traces of identity. Ghana had “more dungeons, prisons and slave pens than any other country in West Africa,” she notes. “Nine slave routes traversed Ghana. In following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, I intend to retrace the process by which lives were destroyed and slaves born.” But Hartman, who “dreamed of living in Ghana” since college, is also interested in the country’s more recent centrality in the Pan-African movement since its independence in 1957, when the first president, Kwame Nkrumah, opened up the country to members of the African diaspora, creating a Ghana whose slogan was “Africa for Africans at home and abroad.”

In contemporary post-Nkrumah Ghana, Hartman confronts her own sense of pure Generation X despondency: “I had come to Ghana too late and with too few talents. I couldn’t electrify the country or construct a dam or build houses or clear a road or run a television station or design an urban water system or tend to the sick or improve the sanitation system or revitalize the economy or cancel the debt. No one had invited me. I was just ... about as indispensable as a heater in the tropics.”


No one will talk to her directly about slavery. It’s old news for those progress-minded people focusing on Ghana’s many current social and economic woes, and it’s too painful for others who want to avoid the collective guilt of remembering the ways Africans in the former Gold Coast facilitated the slave trade. As the Ghanaian poet Kofi Anyidoho says, “We knew we were giving away our people, we were giving them away for things.”


By the end of her stay in Africa, Hartman faces the fact that she hasn’t found “the signpost that pointed the way to those on the opposite shore of the Atlantic.” She has had to rely primarily on her imagination in reconstructing the lives of particular slaves. But just as she gleaned something in her great-great-grandmother’s refusal to engage, she hears something beyond “the story I had been trying to find” in a small, walled town in the interior, one of the few places where the slave raids had been resisted: “In Gwolu, it finally dawned on me that those who stayed behind,” the survivors of the slave trade, “told different stories than the children of the captives dragged across the sea.” (source: The New York Times, Elizabeth Schmidt)


Journeying along a slave route in Ghana, following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, Saidiya Hartman 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.


Across the Atlantic Slave Route from Cody's Books on FORA.tv

61 comments:

  1. It’s good to come across a web log every
    every now and then that isn’t the same old rehashed material.
    Fantastic read! I’ve saved your site and I’m adding your RSS feeds to my
    Google account.

    my weblog - Family Homes (Linkiamo.Com)

    ReplyDelete
  2. May I simply say what a relief to uncover somebody that really knows what they are talking about over the internet.

    You certainly understand how to bring a problem to light and make it important.

    More and more people have to read this and understand this
    side of the story. It's surprising you are not more popular given that you most certainly possess the gift.

    My webpage; College University

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hello there, just became alert to your blog through
    Google, and found that it's truly informative. I'm going to watch out for brussels.
    I will appreciate if you continue this in future. Numerous people will be benefited from your
    writing. Cheers!

    Also visit my web site ... education blog

    ReplyDelete
  4. Greetings! This really is my first visit to your website!

    We're a team of volunteers and starting a fresh initiative in a residential area in the same niche. Your blog provided us of good use information to focus on. You did a extraordinary job!

    my web-site; Latest Entertainment News

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi! Would you use Twitter? I’d prefer to follow you if that could be
    o.k.. I’m positively enjoying your site and look forward to new updates.



    my web-site; uk travel news

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hmm it seems like your website ate my first comment (it
    was super long) therefore i guess I’ll just sum it up what
    I submitted and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog.


    Take a look at my blog post: Business financing (friendmend.com)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thanks for the good writeup. It in truth was a entertainment account it.
    Glance complex to more added agreeable from you!
    However, how could we communicate?

    my website; dadsnet.org

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hi! Quick question that's totally off topic. Do you know how to make your site mobile friendly? My website looks weird when viewing from my apple iphone. I'm trying
    to find a template or plugin that might be able to correct
    this issue. If you have any suggestions, please share.
    Cheers!

    Take a look at my site: student government

    ReplyDelete
  9. This design is incredible! You definitely know how to keep a reader amused.
    Between your wit and your videos, I was almost moved to
    start my own blog (well, almost...HaHa!) Fantastic job.
    I really loved what you had to say, and more than that,
    how you presented it. Too cool!

    Feel free to visit my website; simply click the next web page

    ReplyDelete
  10. Definitely consider that that you said. Your favourite
    justification seemed to be on the net the easiest factor to be aware of.

    I say to you, I definitely get irked whilst people consider worries that they just do not recognize about.
    You managed to hit the nail upon the top and also defined out the whole thing without having side-effects , other folks
    could take a signal. Will probably be again to get more.
    Thank you

    Stop by my weblog: facenetz.com (bismaker.net)

    ReplyDelete
  11. Good day! I know that is kinda off topic however I’d figured I’d ask.

    Could you be thinking about trading links or even guest authoring
    a blog post or vice-versa? My site goes over most of the same topics as yours and I really
    believe we could greatly reap the benefits of each other.

    If you be interested feel liberated to shoot me a contact.

    I look forward to hearing from you! Fantastic blog by the way!


    Feel free to surf to my site: Public Relations Courses (Dichtiengtrung.Org)

    ReplyDelete
  12. I’m not that a lot of a internet reader to tell the truth however
    your web sites really nice, keep it up! I’ll go on and bookmark
    your site to return later on. Best wishes

    Feel free to visit my web site ... College University

    ReplyDelete
  13. Hi colleagues, how is the whole thing, and what you wish for to say on the
    topic of this article, in my view its genuinely awesome in favor of me.


    Here is my web-site :: public relations courses

    ReplyDelete
  14. Link exchange is nothing else but it is simply
    placing the other person's blog link on your page at appropriate place and other person will also do same in support of you.

    Here is my blog post :: Going in dolphin.webappsnet.Com

    ReplyDelete
  15. Hey are using Wordpress for your blog platform?
    I'm new to the blog world but I'm trying to get started and set
    up my own. Do you require any html coding expertise to make your own
    blog? Any help would be really appreciated!

    Look into my web site - free dating website

    ReplyDelete
  16. At this time it looks like Movable Type is the top blogging platform out there right now.
    (from what I've read) Is that what you're using on your
    blog?

    Feel free to visit my web page ... energy engineering []

    ReplyDelete
  17. Hi there are using Wordpress for your site platform? I'm new to the blog world but I'm trying to get started and set up
    my own. Do you need any coding expertise to make your
    own blog? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

    My web-site real estate latest News (www.zoom400.com)

    ReplyDelete
  18. This is a topic that's close to my heart... Cheers! Where are your contact details though?

    Feel free to visit my web blog - pagesfriends.com

    ReplyDelete
  19. I am sure this paragraph has touched all the internet users, its really really pleasant
    article on building up new web site.

    Feel free to visit my blog ... advertising communication

    ReplyDelete
  20. I blog often and I genuinely thank you for your information.
    Your article has truly peaked my interest.
    I will book mark your website and keep checking for new information about once per week.
    I opted in for your Feed as well.

    Feel free to surf to my website ... College University

    ReplyDelete
  21. Fastidious response in return of this difficulty with solid arguments and describing the whole thing concerning that.



    My weblog; travel article

    ReplyDelete
  22. If some one wants to be updated with latest technologies afterward he must be pay a visit this web page and be
    up to date all the time.

    My webpage; Freda Nix

    ReplyDelete
  23. Hey! Someone in my Facebook group shared
    this website with us so I stumbled on check
    it out. I’m absolutely loving the info. I’m book-marking and will
    be tweeting this to my followers! Superb web log and great
    style and design.

    My web-site :: entertainment24.eu

    ReplyDelete
  24. Hello, I think your site might be having browser compatibility issues.
    When I look at your blog in Opera, it looks fine but when opening
    in Internet Explorer, it has some overlapping. I just wanted to give you a quick
    heads up! Other then that, very good blog!

    Feel free to visit my homepage Restaurants News :: :
    :

    ReplyDelete
  25. Normally I don't read article on blogs, however I would like to say that this write-up very forced me to check out and do so! Your writing style has been amazed me. Thank you, quite nice article.

    my website - Bernd

    ReplyDelete
  26. Hi, I do think this is an excellent website. I stumbledupon it ;) I'm going to return once again since I saved as a favorite it. Money and freedom is the best way to change, may you be rich and continue to help other people.

    my webpage mouse click the next article

    ReplyDelete
  27. Pretty! This has been an incredibly wonderful post. Thanks for providing
    this info.

    Feel free to surf to my site :: the home news ()

    ReplyDelete
  28. Wow that was odd. I just wrote an really long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn't show up. Grrrr... well I'm
    not writing all that over again. Anyway, just wanted
    to say wonderful blog!

    my web page; datingnews.eu

    ReplyDelete
  29. Ridiculous quest there. What happened after?
    Thanks!

    Also visit my website :: Visit this hyperlink

    ReplyDelete
  30. An interesting discussion is definitely worth comment.
    I do think that you ought to publish more on this subject
    matter, it might not be a taboo matter but typically folks don't discuss such topics. To the next! Many thanks!!

    Here is my webpage ... http://www.pengchat.com/blogs/entry/-Calm-Communities **

    ReplyDelete
  31. It's actually a nice and useful piece of info. I am happy that you shared this useful information with us. Please keep us informed like this. Thank you for sharing.

    Stop by my web-site - Relevant Web Page

    ReplyDelete
  32. Greetings from Florida! I'm bored at work so I decided to browse your blog on my iphone during lunch break. I really like the knowledge you present here and can't wait to take a look when I get home.
    I'm surprised at how quick your blog loaded on my mobile .. I'm not even using WIFI, just
    3G .. Anyways, fantastic site!

    Here is my site education online :: ::

    ReplyDelete
  33. Definitely believe that which you stated. Your favorite justification seemed to be on the net the easiest thing
    to be aware of. I say to you, I definitely get annoyed while people consider worries that they plainly do not
    know about. You managed to hit the nail upon the top and defined out the whole thing without having
    side effect , people could take a signal. Will probably be back to
    get more. Thanks

    Also visit my blog post: click through the following document *fashloop.Com*

    ReplyDelete
  34. What's up friends, its impressive piece of writing about educationand fully explained, keep it up all the time.

    Feel free to visit my web page - http://familylinkmobile.com/index.php?option=com_blog&view=comments&pid=223778&Itemid=0 (adoptioneducationclasses.com)

    ReplyDelete
  35. Asking questions are truly nice thing if you are not understanding something
    entirely, but this piece of writing presents pleasant understanding
    yet.

    My web site ... please click the following webpage ()

    ReplyDelete
  36. Hey are employing WordPress for your weblog platform?
    I’m a new comer to your blog world but I’m looking
    to get started and create my very own. Would you require any html
    coding expertise to produce your own weblog? Any help could be greatly appreciated!


    my web blog; trendy fashion

    ReplyDelete
  37. I am regular visitor, how are you everybody? This post posted at this site is really
    nice.

    My webpage :: energy engineering

    ReplyDelete
  38. Hello, I enjoy reading through your article. I wanted to write a little comment
    to support you.

    Stop by my webpage :: nutrition society

    ReplyDelete
  39. Hello to every body, it's my first go to see of this web site; this web site consists of awesome and genuinely fine stuff for readers.

    Look into my blog please click the up coming document

    ReplyDelete
  40. Hello, the whole thing is going sound here and ofcourse
    every one is sharing information, that's really fine, keep up writing.

    Feel free to surf to my web-site racing

    ReplyDelete
  41. I really like what you guys are usually up too. This type of clever work and exposure!
    Keep up the fantastic works guys I've you guys to my own blogroll.

    Also visit my webpage; lifestyle coach **

    ReplyDelete
  42. Every weekend i used to go to see this website,
    as i want enjoyment, for the reason that this this website conations
    genuinely fastidious funny data too.

    Here is my weblog :: video game industry :: http://aboutarticles.com.au/Famous-People-Bratz-Game-Titles.htm ::

    ReplyDelete
  43. of course like your web site however you have to check the spelling on quite a few of your
    posts. Several of them are rife with spelling issues and I in finding it very bothersome to inform the
    truth then again I'll definitely come again again.

    Also visit my blog post :: Men Gifts :: ::

    ReplyDelete
  44. Nice post. I was checking continuously this blog and I am impressed!
    Very useful information particularly the last part :) I
    care for such info a lot. I was looking for this particular information
    for a long time. Thank you and good luck.

    Look into my webpage: Building Maintenance

    ReplyDelete
  45. Nice post. I learn something totally new and challenging on blogs I stumbleupon on a daily basis.
    It will always be helpful to read articles from other authors and practice a little
    something from their web sites.

    My web blog; video game industry :: www.gojini.com ::

    ReplyDelete
  46. I visited multiple web pages however the audio quality
    for audio songs present at this web page is in fact marvelous.


    Also visit my homepage; Click Here (http://arbok.tk/)

    ReplyDelete
  47. Oh my goodness! Impressive article dude! Thank you, However
    I am encountering issues with your RSS. I don't understand the reason why I am unable to join it. Is there anyone else having the same RSS issues? Anybody who knows the answer will you kindly respond? Thanks!!

    Feel free to surf to my site :: press release newswire ()

    ReplyDelete
  48. Great article. Couldn’t be write much better! Keep it up!

    ReplyDelete
  49. Either way keep up the excellent quality writing.

    ReplyDelete
  50. Your blogs are truly awesome. Keep it up.

    ReplyDelete
  51. This is an informative blog by which I have got that info which I really wanted to get.

    ReplyDelete

  52. There are also articles on these topics on my blog and I hope you visit once and have a deep discussion!

    ReplyDelete

  53. I'm looking for a lot of data on this topic.

    ReplyDelete
  54. That is a great tip particularly to those new to the blogosphere.

    ReplyDelete
  55. A must read post! Appreciating the hard work you put into your site and detailed information you present.
    Wonderful read!

    ReplyDelete
  56. I like the helpful info you provide in your articles. I’ll bookmark your blog and check again here frequently

    ReplyDelete
  57. I’m very pleased to discover this site. I want to to thank you for ones time for this particularly wonderful read!!

    ReplyDelete

HOME

HOME
Click here to return to the US Slave Home Page