Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

By Saidiya Hartman

The slave, Saidiya 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. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana.

There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives 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, vividly dramatising the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and American history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Release date: Jul 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781782838562

Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, and Lose Your Mother. She was a professor in the Department of English and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, prior to joining the faculty of Columbia University, where she is currently a professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She received a MacArthur fellowship in 2019. She lives in New York City.

Reviews for Lose Your Mother

[lilysea · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I would call this book an historical memoir. Hartman, an African American historian, goes to Ghana to research the African slave trade, hoping to find some kind of sense of origin or family, but instead finds complexity upon complexity within tangles of human cruelty, pain and betrayal.I found the title compelling and the cover art on the paperback haunting. I think the title speaks to the true displacement not just of those descended from the survivors of the Middle Passage, but of those left behind in a continent ravaged by outsiders for centuries. The book serves as a fine backdrop to understanding the continuing war on families and communities of African descent in the United States, not to mention the continuing abandonment of Africa by the rest of the world.