“Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route” by Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman is an American writer and academic focusing on African and African American studies. Her book “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route” offers a rich reflection on today’s impact of the trans-Atlantic slave route that operated from the 16th century through the 19th century.

Hartman writes of the most universal definition of slave being “stranger” and the repercussions of one’s ancestors being torn from their family and exiled from their home of origin. As a descendant of people enslaved and as a researcher, she journeys to Ghana to interrogate the afterlife of slavery – ”skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature deaths, incarceration, and impoverishment.”

It's about the loss that produced the people on the Diaspora. To lose your mother is about losing your identity, your language, your country, and that's the way they speak of it in West Africa. So, it's about those losses that haunt us, those ancestors who we know but can't name. We feel their presence but they're without names for us.”

Saidiya Hartman in NPR

“When I first arrived, I was shocked that people perceived me as a stranger. I didn't have any naïve notion that, oh, I would just fit in and people would welcome me back. But to constantly have people call you an American, or a foreigner, or a white person, was you know, was shocking. What's interesting about, I think this for many West African cities that in the sounds of the cities, there's so much African-American music. So, often I would be out in a restaurant at night, and I would just be listening to Marvin Gaye or Aretha Franklin, you know, wafting through the air. So there was this strange sense of being at home, and kind of like in my parent's home, almost, because it was usually older music that was playing” (NPR).

The book highlights the dispossession of Black life – from the terrors of slavery to its impact in the modern-day. But through it, and most of her work, Hartman gives voice to those often minimized to line-items in ledgers about “cargo,” captain manifestos, and bills of sale. She refers to her work “history of the present”—writing that examines the past to show how it haunts our time (New Yorker).

About the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

About Saidiya Hartman

Reflection Questions

• What have you learned about the trans-Atlantic slave trade growing up? How much of that discourse included texts written by Black people? Centering the voices of those directly impacted?
• As Hartman's work emphasizes, the impact of slavery still affects society and culture today. What are you doing to support the work of reparations in your community?

Learn More

• READ: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman (Bookshop)
• Emory University has a comprehensive digital installation on the dispersal of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic world.
• READ: How Saidiya Hartman Retells The History Of Black Life by Alexis Okeowo (New Yorker)
• WATCH: Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a show on PBS where Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores the ancestry of dozens of influential people from diverse backgrounds (PBS)