À perte de mère: Sur les routes atlantiques de l'esclavage

by Saidiya Hartman, Maboula Soumahoro (preface)

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Memoir, Race, Africa, Feminism, African American

428 pages, Paperback

First published January 9, 2007

About the author

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. She a Guggenheim Fellow and has been a Cullman Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. She is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.

Reviews

[Zanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think it would be correct to say that Saidiya Hartman is an academic and went to Ghana to do academic research. That she decided to communicate that research as this highly accessible and moving personal story, I am deeply grateful for. But the quality of insight in this book (and perhaps the integrity as well, the commitment to refuse easy answers and excuses, to seek the true truth without sparing oneself in any way, is not only a personal quality of the author but something of the spirit of the field) to me seems pretty strongly validating to the whole institution of academia and studying stuff deeply. Hartman presents her findings and realisations with humility, making them seem obvious, but they were hard won for important reasons, and the stories of the journeys to them are what convey them so clearly.

I have felt lacunae in various awesome museum and gallery events relating to Black and West African histories and cultures. Much of this book concerns absence and emptiness. In Ghana, the people bought as slaves by Europeans and shipped elsewhere are, of course, not to be found. Their traces are faint. The local attitudes to their fate are at odds with the emotions of the African American tourists who come seeking consolation or connection or whatever else might be found... Hartman speaks of her struggles to articulate the purpose of her visit, to herself and to others. This is only one of so many struggles with the legacy of the slave trade. Investigating and writing about such matters should not have the intention of settling them or making them comfortable, but of course Hartman seeks solace, seeks a future for Black Americans in which this past has ended. She calls out the way Ghana transforms its traces of the slave trade into a lucrative tourist industry without owning responsibility for the powerful kingdoms and raiders who traded slaves. In The Continent of Black Consciousness: On the History of the African Diaspora from Slavery to the Present Day, Erna Brodber explains how the African people traded out of the country by Europeans suffered by far the worst form of slavery ever perpetrated, but Hartman writes with full compassion and outrage for all enslaved people.

If the story has a trajectory, for the most part it's going deeper, descending. At each layer I wonder, how will we get out of this? Maybe that's the right question.

[Kenyon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review was published originally in Left Turn Magazine. www.leftturn.org

THE NAKED TRUTH

LOSE YOUR MOTHER: A JOURNEY ALONG THE ATLANTIC SLAVE ROUTE
BY SAIDIYA HARTMAN
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

One of the most painful political battles I've ever had was with a white activist. When co-authoring a political document, I was asked to declare myself as "an American." They couldn't understand how and why I refused to accept that label, nor had any sense that there is a school of Black political thought (dating back to the first generation of people of African descent "born" as chattel in the U.S.), that defies the notion that we were then, or are now, anything resembling real citizens. Their insistence on choosing my definition was, in and of itself, emblematic of being a non-citizen: the complete absence of autonomy for self-definition or determination.

Even African-Americans who are more politically conservative and invested in making America "our home", understand that Blacks have to constantly fight to be seen as citizens; voter "purging" in Florida in 2000 and Gulf Coast residents having to assert that they are in fact citizens and not "refugees" are two recent examples of the fluctuating "citizenship" in which African-Americans find ourselves.

Hartman's (a professor of English at Columbia University) outstanding book Lose Your Mother, is a first-person exploration of what it means to be the descendants of the dispossessed—the cast-offs of African society during the period of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to this very day. She chronicles the ambivalence of current African-American ex-patriates in Ghana, the cynicism of the new "slavery tourism" industry, and the sometimes disturbing relationship to slavery and its direct descendants that exists in Ghana today. The book provides valuable insight into hearts and minds of blacks in the Diaspora, who are more than ever trying to bridge the gaps in time that the trans-Atlantic slave trade severed—mostly through tourism and DNA technologies to trace one's "roots".

Hartman impeccably weaves together the history of the African Slave Trade with the precision of an academic, and the personal narrative of her journey with the lyricism of a novelist. The historical research and personal narrative conspire together to paint a portrait of how the varying historical incidences are still bound up in the bodies of black people in the 21st Century.

NEW COMMONERS

Lose Your Mother is not an Alex Haley's Roots 2.0. It is not Hartman's attempt to locate her ancestral home or to find that fictional place in time—that many Afrocentrists desperately attempt to recall—"when we were Kings and Queens." To the contrary, Hartman explains that she "traveled to Ghana in search of the expendable and the defeated. I had not come to marvel at the wonders of African civilization or to be made proud by the royal court of the Asante, or to admire the great states that harvested captives and sold them as slaves. I was not wistful for aristocratic origins. Instead I would seek the new commoners, the unwilling and coerced migrants who created a new culture in the hostile world of the Americans and who fashioned themselves again, making possibility out of dispossession."

She's not looking for herself in the faces of Ghanaian aristocracy. Instead, she is in search of the stateless, the marginalized bodies that would most likely be the descendants of the people who's communities were destroyed by the selling of bodies for material goods.

Hartman's pursuit of the naked truth is at times hard to take, even as someone who detests political optimism and cheap cultural-nationalist sentiment. I felt as though, when reading this book, all of the romantic narratives of Africa or a Pan-Africanist politic that I as an African-American cling to, were pillars that she destroyed one by one. I ran from one toppled narrative to the next and she was there, waiting to plunder it. At the end, I was left with nowhere to go.

But nowhere is precisely the place to be. When there are no more mysteries, when the romance is gone, you are forced to then forge something new, something more authentic. Revolutions may be built on dreams, but a dream founded on myth can never sustain them. For Hartman, the dream she finds in Ghana is "an elsewhere, with all its promises and dangers, where the stateless might, at last, thrive."

Lose Your Mother, after smashing the temple of Afrocentric idealism, leaves a clearing in its place (for the stateless Blacks cast into and across the oceans) to re-create ourselves. The question remains—are we brave enough to tread new ground?

—Kenyon Farrow

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost a 5-star read, but it took me some time to warm up to it. Saidiya Hartman spends a year in Ghana researching the slave trade and seeking an elusive something that she never quite finds. The result is an exquisite exploration of historical memory and deliberate forgetting. Particularly fascinating was the section on rituals and herbal remedies used in precolonial Ghana to make captives forget their homes and ancestry (and become more tractable), which I had never read about anywhere.

Hartman delineates a clear divide between how African-Americans view their ties to slavery and the African continent, and the perspective of the Ghanaians she meets, who largely see visiting African-Americans as a source of tourism revenue and do not readily discuss slavery, which they see as a source of shame - to those of slave ancestry in particular. It is worth noting that slavery in Ghana continued even after the abolition of the transatlantic trade. While Europe and North America built modern nations from the blood of slaves, the African interior experienced widespread depopulation, and the riches gained by merchants and royals - often in the form of cowrie shells, now worthless - did not perdure. That is a very truncated version of what was an eye-opening exploration of the history of slave trading within and beyond Ghana. A personalized approach to history that pushes me to read more and will have me pondering for some time.

[Bea · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book centers around the interesting relationship between African Americans and Africa, particularly the relationship between African Americans and Ghanaians. The disillusion of the opening chapters is heartbreaking, but soon the narrator's sadness turns into a kind of bitterness that refuses to see from the perspectives of others, and this becomes a constant bother throughout the rest of the book. Hartman at times comes across as a person unwilling to consider her own privilege and that the Ghanaians (and other Africans) that she meets might have their own painful pasts and current problems. While she occasionally acknowledges the poverty she encounters, this is usually only treated in a couple of sentences and bears little or no significance to her continued complaints about how Ghanaians handle the memory of slavery or treat her as an African American. While she has many valid criticisms, she doesn't make a conscientious attempt at understanding the Ghanaian population, which leaves the text lacking in nuance. This blind bitterness became repetitive and made the book tedious at parts.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are things that I can take for granted. I may not be able to recite my family tree by rote, and there is the question that my paternal grandmother may have been Jewish, but I know that my family hails from England, France, Canada, Lithuania, and Italy. It is something that I have taken for granted. Saidiya Hartman’s book is about, in part, having a lack of that, a lack of sense, and a lack of belonging.

It’s too glib to say that we all feel that sense of loneness. In part this is true, but many of us at least have a sense. Many of us can even break down to country and region, perhaps even a city.
Hartman has a continent. That’s it.

But to call this a book about a quest for self or identity is wrong. Hartman’s journey to Ghana, to uncover the story of the common slave – a slave who is not from a family of kings. The idea of a return to Africa is a return to homeland, but as Hartman points out -it isn’t quite that simple. Hartman feels out of place because the history of the slave trade depends upon the lenses – African-American versus African. IF Hartman isn’t American, then she isn’t African either. She is stateless. Her past is a commodity in both ways – as her ancestors were slaves and as their descendent returning.

So, in part, the book is about the different use of language and the different history. About the effects of slavery that we do not fully think about. The question of otherness.

There is much packed into this slim volume and it is the type of book that you mull over for days.

[penny shima glanz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This passage stuck me as no other in the book has. In Chapter 4, "Come, Go Back, Child", p100: "Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on 'what happened then' than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again?"

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meditative, self-reflective, painful enlightenment written with searing intelligence. Not what I was expecting at all.

[Jaime · Rating 1 out of 5]

Biased and blind to her own privilege

The author is absurdly critical of how Ghanaians access and interpret their own history. Her perscriptivism for nearly three hundred pages in which she complains that Ghanaians:
- Don't know anything about their history
- Memorialise their history in the slavery museum incorrectly
- Don't talk about slaves enough
- Talk about the wrong slaves when chiefs agree to grant her an audience to talk about slavery
- Don't cry/grieve when passing slave forts (Even though I'd bet good money that she doesn't spend all her time in America weeping at monuments to slavers. Sometimes people have places to go and things to do. Perhaps when she's stood in a country on a Fullbright scholarship paying for everything she doesn't realise that people on poverty level of wages actually need to work to survive?

Her sneering attitude to Ghanaians, speaking gleefully about happening across people in slums using a sand dune as a toilet in one breath and then bewailing the lack of knowledge people have about their history, as if poverty and lack of education aren't directly linked in countries where school costs money, was absolutely breathtakingly ignorant of her and reminded me of the worst kind of white girl on a gap year blogs, not a book by a historian.

[Breena · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had high expectations and felt they were not met. There was information on the Atlantic slave trade that was new to me. I discovered some different avenues of inquiry. I thought much of the book had the tone of aggrievement -- a tone of whining -- a bit of sulkiness. I'd assume the author might know that not all African Americans approach the continent and its poeple with as much naivete, misinformation and sense of entitlement.

[Wamuyu Thoithi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nuanced. Poignant. Thought-provoking. Beautiful. Brutal.
-
This book really challenged what I know about the Afrcican diaspora in the post-slavery era. I seldom read/ hear perspectives on “the return” and this book was an eye-opening one.
-
Saidiya beautifully weaves historical accounts with her personal experience in Ghana. She is critical and maybe even resentful of Africans. Understandably so. She can’t understand how Africans have forgotten the atrocities of TransAtlantic slavery and is disillusioned by her “return”

I yo-yo-d between:

a) thinking that she had misplaced expectations and
b) empathy.

She states herself, that 1) humans forget, and 2) there has never been African-wide/ Black-wide kinship in Africa.

On 1) Americans, even Black ones, rarely remember racist events of even 5 years ago. How can one expect the collective African conscience to remember or care for slavery? Especially when a shared African identity does not exist.

On 2) I personally think any Black American hoping for a warm and fuzzy return is being delusional... Anyone coming in with expectations and/ or hopes is setting themselves up for disappointment. I think that Pan-Africanism, while a beautiful ideal, is unrealistic and will likely never be achieved.

—-
However, as an African I can never pretend to know what’s it’s like to be ADOS. This book gave me deep empathy for the longing of an origin. And it opened my eyes to the many ways that certain classes of Africans were complicit in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, even though many Africans deny it.

Excerpts that moved me:

“It is only when you are stranded In a hostel country that you need a romance of your origins; it is only when you lose your mother that she becomes a myth; it is only when you fear the dislocation of the new that the old ways has become precious, imperilled, and watch a great great grandchildren will one day wistfully describe as African”

—-
Khalid: They didn’t lose everything. We did

Saidiya: And all for so little. The worse thing is that it doesn’t hurt any less now. It should but it doesn’t.

💔

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"These words made me think hard about the Africa in "African American." Was it the Africa of royals and great states or the Africa of disposable commoners? Which Africa was it that we claimed? There was not one Africa. There never had been. Was Africa merely a cipher for a lost country no one could any longer name? Was it the remedy for our homelessness or an opportunity to turn our backs to the hostile country we called home? Or was there a future in Africa too?"

Hartman mentions early on that she wanted to "engage the past, knowing its perils and dangers still threatened and that even now lives hung in the balance." The aftermath of slavery is deadlier for it is multi-faceted and the tentacles are hidden. She was also wearing of feeling like a stranger, homeless within the home, the continued statelessness. So in Africa perhaps, lost mother, belonging will finally come. This book engages with the missing and the absented, the small gaps with the narrative that signal bigger portents, the strangers cruelly relegated to the blurred pages of history.

A memoiristic narrative of the dispossessed and their now scattered descendants, this is appropriately dense yet it is always arresting. It is a studied, nuanced take on Black lives in the diaspora and on the continent, their current and past concerns, their divergent attitudes to slavery, and its myriad repercussions. It is not a simplistic story about searching for one's roots. Hartman complicates the questions, moves past easy answers, and provides us a vivid, thoughtful, and compelling tapestry of lived experience & profound insight.



(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

[H.L.H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

My brain sputtered and chugged reading this, because the depth of thought and observation, as well as the research and transparency, are nothing short of divine.

[Andrea Samorini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mi è piaciuta anche la presentazione dell’edizione italiana, scritta da Barbara Ofosu-Somuah, da cui questo incipit (e da dove per la prima volta leggo un testo che fa uso della schwa [ə] per indicare il genere neutro; ho dovuto incontrare la terza\quarta parola per rendermi conto che non si trattava di un errore di stampa ma era voluto: l’effetto è stato interessante):
Fin dalle prime pagine di Perdi la madre, Saidiya Hartman chiarisce che «se la schiavitù rimane una questione aperta nella vita politica dell'America nera, non è a causa di un'ossessione antiquaria per i giorni andati o per il peso di una memoria troppo duratura, ma perché le vite nere vengono ancora svalutate e messe a repentaglio da un calcolo razziale e da un'aritmetica politica consolidatisi secoli fa». La schiavitù e i suoi lasciti, ovvero il mondo creato da schiavitù e colonialismo, fanno ancora oggi parte del vissuto delle persone nella diaspora nera. Le conseguenze di ciò sono evidenti nelle storie di violenza quotidiana che le persone nere subiscono ovunque nel mondo, e contro tale violenza è altrettanto evidente che i movimenti antirazzisti internazionali abbiano un ruolo necessario. In Italia, così come negli Stati Uniti e altrove, il movimento globale per le vite nere è riemerso per discutere pubblicamente la realtà della nerezza/ dell'essere nerə, al di là dei confini nazionali, e per amplificare le lotte di resistenza contro il razzismo. Attivistə afroitalianə, che da tempo lavorano per affermarsi all'interno del dibattito italiano sull'identità, hanno guadagnato il centro della scena per promuovere un discorso di giustizia razziale.
Lunedì 25 maggio 2020 due avvenimenti si sono fatti strada, attraverso i social media, nella coscienza globale. Al Central Park di New York, le vite di Amy Cooper e Christian Cooper, una donna bianca e un uomo nero senza legami di parentela, si intrecciavano in un incontro. Facendo eco al duraturo mito della minaccia insita nella mascolinità nera, Amy Cooper chiamò la polizia per denunciare Christian Cooper, accusandolo falsamente di aver attentato alla sua vita per averle chiesto di mettere il guinzaglio al suo cane, come d'altronde richiedeva il regolamento del parco. Questa vicenda ricorda l'episodio che aveva portato alla morte di Emmett Till, un quattordicenne afroamericano linciato in Mississippi nel 1955 dopo essere stato accusato di aver importunato una donna bianca. Le accuse contro Emmett Till furono poi ritirate, decenni più tardi, dall'accusatrice.
Nello stesso giorno, a Minneapolis, un uomo nero di nome George Floyd giaceva steso per terra senza vita dopo che un poliziotto bianco…

Nel saggio storico Perdi la Madre Saidiya Hartman ripercorre le tappe a ritroso degli schiavi, dall’America al Ghana, approfondendone molti aspetti e raccontando anche riflessioni e\o dilemmi dell’autrice stessa durante le sue ricerche di testimonianze, memorie e di significati.

Ci sono alcune pagine in cui il testo diventa febbrile, pressante, e di grande effetto (su di me travolgente):
San Giorgio era anche un martire tra i martiri, La maggior parte dei santi patì una specifica tortura come prova di fede. Ma lo sfortunato Giorgio soffri praticamente di tutte le torture conosciute. Il corpo di San Sebastiano trafitto da frecce, il petto squarciato di Sant'Agata e la crocifissione di San Pietro impallidivano a confronto.
In Palestina, San Giorgio fu fatto prigioniero. Fu torturato con punte di ferro, flagellato, il suo cranio frantumato. In Persia, fu avvelenato dal mago del re. In Nubia, un testimone riferì che San Giorgio fu torturato per sette anni e ucciso quattro volte. Venne dapprima bruciato vivo su un focolare, ma resuscitò. Poi il suo corpo fu diviso in due con una sega a doppia lama, ma egli sconfisse nuovamente la morte. Venne poi smembrato, ma gli angeli assemblarono le parti del suo corpo rimettendole insieme, e infine fu bollito in un calderone pieno d'olio. In Grecia venne legato a un palo e la sua carne fu lacerata da un rastrello e bruciata con una torcia infuocata.
La tribolazione dei santi e l'angoscia dei martiri sarebbero state messe a dura prova nelle celle di detenzione del castello, e non solo lì. San Giorgio aveva rappresentato un simbolo anche per la sofferenza degli schiavi? Aveva offerto loro la visione di una vita ultraterrena? Nella Costa d'Oro le orecchie gli furono recise, e poi fu messo a morte. A São Tomé fu annegato in mare. Nel Dahomey fu decapitato. In Congo fu asfissiato in un barracoon. A Santo Domingo gli versarono in testa dello zucchero di canna bollente che
gli fece appassire la carne. Nelle Barbados fu fustigato con una frusta a sette code. A Cuba fu riempito di polvere da sparo e fatto saltare in aria con un fiammifero. A Saint John fu messo al rogo, segato in due e impalato. In Maryland fu impiccato e decapitato. In Georgia fu ricoperto di zucchero e sepolto in un formicaio. A Curaçao il suo volto fu bruciato e la sua testa tagliata e piazzata su un palo per il divertimento degli avvoltoi, In Suriname gli tagliarono le mani e gli frantumarono la testa con un martello. A Trinidad fu smembrato e le parti del suo corpo furono gettate nell'Atlantico. In Brasile le sue orecchie vennero tranciate, un pugnale gli fu conficcato nella schiena e la sua testa putrefatta fu esposta nella piazza centrale. A Panama una spada lo sventrò. A Lima fu fatto sfilare per le strade, colpito con la frusta, e le sue ferite lavate con urina e rum. In Giamaica fu obbligato a mangiare escrementi e arso su una pira. A Grenada fu spinto in una fornace e arrostito. A Paramaribo gli tagliarono il tendine d'Achille e gli amputarono la gamba destra. In Virginia fu scuoiato. In Texas gli legarono i piedi e fu trascinato per le strade da un cavallo. A New York fu preso a bastonate e
impiccato a un lampione. In Carolina del Nord lo bruciarono con delle torce e gettarono il suo corpo nella calce viva. In Mississippi fu fatto a pezzi su una ruota di lame. A Washington fu montato come una bestia da soma e condotto alla morte. In Alabama fu legato a una croce, flagellato con torce infuocate e picchiato con delle catene. In Louisiana il suo ventre fu squarciato e le sue viscere traboccarono dal suo corpo.

Vorrei conoscere di più anche sulle vicende storiche e conseguenze delle bolle papali nei secoli, spunto nato da queste note:
una terra nullius
La bolla Romanus Pontifex (1454) sancì l'autorità politica e teologica degli europei di impadronirsi delle terre dei popoli non cristiani, ai quali era richiesto di giurare fedeltà al re del Portogallo e di convertirsi al cristianesimo. La sottomissione o assoggettamento era il risultato di questa filosofia militare della conversione. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, pp. 30-57

ad propagandam fidem
Vost, Portuguese Rule, p. 52.
Il Romanus Pontifex fu una di una serie di bolle papali emesse da Nicola V che garantivano e assicuravano ai portoghesi il monopolio sul commercio di schiavi, oltre a garantire loro il dominio sulla Guinea e i suoi abitanti. I primi schiavi furono rapiti nel 1441. Si veda Mudimbe,
L'invenzione dell'Africa, pp. 41-50; Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, p. 107;
Thornton, L'Africa e gli africani; Anselm Guezo, The Other Side of the Story: Essays on
the Atlantic Slave Trade (manoscritto), p. 26

Spunti interessanti di riflessione anche dalle parti autobiografiche:
Esisteva tutta una serie di divieti riguardo a ciò che dovevo o non dovevo fare, basata sull'infanzia di mia madre a Montgomery, in Alabama. Quando arrivò a New York dopo la laurea, la sua percezione della linea del colore cambiò poco o per nulla. Per come la vedeva lei, New York era ancora più pericolosa dell'Alabama perché la gente del nord diceva una cosa ma ne credeva un'altra; per lo meno con la gente del sud sapevi da che parte stavi. Insegnò a me e a mio fratello che una serie di pericoli, attesi e imprevisti, erano li ad attenderci perché eravamo neri. Per mio fratello le cose erano davvero tragiche. La più piccola disavventura poteva portare alla sua morte immediata. Credo che Peter avesse nove anni quando ricevette la sua prima lezione sui poliziotti bianchi. Che nostro padre fosse un agente di polizia all'epoca non rendeva le prospettive di mio fratello meno terrificanti, ma solo più vividi i pericoli. La regola era semplice: i poliziotti dovevano essere evitati il più possibile. Era esattamente l'opposto di ciò che veniva insegnato ai bambini bianchi.

L’esperienza vissuta da Hartman in Ghana non risolve le sue iniziali aspettative di trovare tracce efficaci che raccontino la schiavitú passata e risposte nette.

Non avevo incontrato nessuno che parlasse delle persone calpestate dai cavalli mentre fuggivano dagli eserciti conquistatori, delle città che scomparivano da un giorno all'altro, dei soldati dell'esercito sconfitto venduti all'indomani di una guerra civile, del nipote venduto dallo zio per non avergli consegnato una schiava e tre vacche alla morte del padre, del fratello minore venduto dal più grande a causa di una disputa sull'eredità del padre, della giovane venduta dal suo tutore dopo la morte dei suoi genitori, della nipote catturata mentre lo zio era fuori in viaggio, del ragazzino quindicenne condannato alla schiavitù perché colpevole di adulterio con la moglie di un uomo importante, delle ragazze offerte in dono a soldati mercenari, del ragazzo rapito su incitamento del cognato, delle due ragazze che, mentre scappavano dai banditi, si persero e si ritrovarono in un paese ostile dove vennero catturate e fatte schiave, del mercante abbiente catturato mentre cercava del sorgo da acquistare in una città lontana, del gruppetto di bambini rapito mentre giocava nei boschi, degli affamati e indigenti che si offri come schiavi, dei migranti che scappavano verso un paese straniero per sfuggire ai predoni ma che vennero venduti anziché protetti, delle sorelle accusate di stregoneria dal capo, del ragazzino ceduto in pegno dallo zio e venduto ai portoghesi prima che la madre potesse riscattarlo, dei neonati abbandonati lungo il cammino, del padre che si offriva come schiavo piuttosto che permettere che suo figlio perdesse la libertà, degli schiavi sacrificati sulle tombe dei re, degli infedeli che resistettero alla conversione all'islam, e dei milioni e milioni spinti verso il mare e portati via.

Segnalo la bella recensione del libro in questo articolo di Matilde Flamigni, Chi vuole evitare il passato?.

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WANT TO READ BOOK: Diario del ritorno al paese natale (Aimé Césaire)

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Alex Haley’s (largely fictionalised) family history Roots, especially its late 1970s TV miniseries, prompted a back-to-Africa-to search-for-ancestors surge amongst African Americans, this was an acceleration of longer running ‘back to Africa’ movement. This is a movement we can see in the creation of the colony in Liberia, in Marcus Garvey’s ’Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League’, and in the wake of the 1960’s liberation struggles. Although in one key way, it was different: it became personal. Previous movements had been about a return to the motherland; in the wake of Haley this was a movement in search of the mother. A combination of the conversion of humans into commodities for trade and the social and cultural depredations of enslavement meant that many descendants of the enslaved could (can) barely trace their families back to a generation or two before emancipation, if that.

This mythification of descent, the fading of the family line into obscurity, can be seen as exacerbated by the tendency for histories of the slave trade to start at the coast, and to focus on the Middle Passage and what came next – enslavement in the Americas. Yet it is the coastline that continues to attract visitors – although when noted historian of Southern slavery Saidiya Hartman got there, to the famed Elmina Fort on the coast of Ghana, she found herself called obruni – stranger – as were all American visitors. Not only that, but they were easily identifiable as not Ghanaian. Hartman had gone to Ghana looking for the slave roads inland, the routes by which those to be traded with the Europeans – the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English – were brought from the ‘heathen’ uplands in the north to the coast. As is the case so often, the process of othering, the classification of those who are ‘not us’, saw them cast as heathen non-believers and therefore of lower status.

What she finds instead is a place with a profoundly ambiguous, uncertain engagement with the slave trade. In part this is because Ghana has bigger, more pressing issues of the day – surviving the depredations of global neo-liberal impositions…. But it turns out there is an awful lot more going on. Along the way she uncovers and unpacks several other stands that problematize the African-Americans-coming-home narrative, not the least of which is that the middle class tourists, descendants of the enslaved, seem a lot better off than most Ghanaians. In parts this seems like an unpacking of a depressingly conventional conservative narrative – but that’s not Hartman’s way; her work often digs below the obvious in the manner of the quality cultural historian she is.

The narrative arc of the book takes on a very different form – from the opening family history of a maternal heritage in Alabama, and a paternal background in the Caribbean, through an uncertain negotiation of a relationship, or not, with the ‘tribe of the Middle Passage’, it is only when she ventures out from Accra and the coast that the more subtle and discomforting aspects emerge. The turning point, for me at least in the narrative, is her unpacking of the many meanings and forms of dungeon in the trade – those in the forts, the holds of ships, the contemporary perils of driving while black, and more, all maintaining the enslaved, the about to be enslaved, and the descendants of the enslaved in a form of non-humanity. It’s a compelling discussion because it is the place where Hartman realises that she cannot simply connect Ghana with Brooklyn or Oakland.

Leaving the coast, travelling north, takes her to two places – Salaga, in north central Ghana, a centre of the slave trade that was at its height of power and wealth throughout the 19th century, after the trans-Atlantic trade had been outlawed (although there are reports of slave ships into the later decades of that century). Much of Salaga’s wealth and power, up until the 1890s, in its final century of standing came from a network of enslavement throughout west Africa, only partly connected to the Atlantic trade. This was also an enslavement that took multiple forms only one of which was akin to chattel slavery and the commodification of humans. The second place is the small town of Gwolu – a 19th century fortified town set up and run by those who had successfully avoided enslavement.

Here were two complex engagements with slavery – one that saw a continuing engagement after the Atlantic trade had ended, but whose successors denied as being by and of them, and one that centred of successfully avoiding being captured. Hartman’s search for the slave roads turns out to have opened up a profoundly different understanding of the era, of the trade, of the people involved.

It’s a reminder of the vital need to get beyond the margins (or in this case, the coast), of the need for empathy and nuanced engagement with historical actors whose diversity undermines the all-too-common single narrative, and the dangers of imposing a single story on events that span a hemisphere and transcend several centuries. This is also a book the defies genre – the blurb calls it “historical travel writing”, which might work for marketing but it is life writing and historiographical commentary, with more than a little hint of the (auto)ethnographic; most of all, for me, it is piece of decolonial history.

It is also beautifully written, evoking a sense of place and time, where Hartman’s historical imagination allows her to craft moments of great empathy, balancing the horror with the resistance, those who fought back with those who hoped to survive. It is a book of elegance and eloquence, without losing the brutality, while reminding us that those who the slave trade left behind, untraded, are likely to see it in very different terms, even as they grapple with the global after effects of the changes the trade was a vital foundation for.

Smart and powerful, this is an essential perspective on memory, movements, mythification, and the quest for origins.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've started this review so many ways, to try to explain what this book means to me. I will not do it justice. Obviously, Hartman has incorporated detailed research. But it's presented as a a moving memoir that I think echoes the experience of many American descendants of slavery. I felt like I was wading through my own history, my own wounds, and like Hartman, often coming up empty. And yet, this adds to the few instances I can count on one hand, where I have felt so incredibly seen by the words of another person. New core memory unlocked.

[Clara · Rating 5 out of 5]

a must read !!!!

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few books surprise you on every page. By synthesizing millions of pages of slave trade history and anchoring the naked facts in her own turbulent emotions as an American descendant of slaves living in 1990s Ghana, Saidiya Hartman invites us to witness a complicated and brutal story.

In this book and her other combination of memoir and narrative history, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman digs deep into into the archive, catching glimpses of marginalized peoples, and reads it at a slant. By telling the stories that enslavers and jailers suppressed, she plays with the gaps between the scant facts to arrive at a more honest Truth than what the existing words – written from the winners' perspective – can tell us from a traditional reading.

In one memorable passage, Hartman describes the brutal murder of a young woman during the Middle Passage. William Wilberforce, a leader of the movement to end the slave trade in the British Empire, uses the story to convince his fellow lawmakers of the merits of abolition. That's a story Hartman could read in Wilberforce's letters and speeches, a familiar tale that puts a powerful, crusading British man at the center, and a place where most (popular) historians would stop. But Hartman takes the story down to the level of its actors. She imagines why the enslaved woman starved herself to avoid a life of servitude, why her murderer, the ship's captain, tortured her to strike fear into the ship's enslaved passengers, and why the ship's surgeon refused to save her life – and was upset mostly because he didn't receive his promised two slaves in compensation for his work as the voyage's doctor.

By reminding us that constructing history is more about connecting the gaps, filling in the blanks, and comparing perspectives than about listing dates and names, Hartman highlights that every writer and every generation have the chance to retell, reorient, and repurpose a story. She implicates herself in the narrative, too, both as a historian and a descendant of people like the murdered, unnamed woman. She cries, argues, and refuses to speak as she traces the path of enslaved people, reminding us that our moods, emotions, and personal histories also shape the stories that we tell. "Straight facts," in fact, aren't straight as they appear.

This is a book for those who aren't afraid to both think and feel. It's for those who can stomach the pain of contemporary life and generational trauma and who can stare clearly into the eyes of the maelstrom. Hartman invites us all to consider our own histories, unearth them, boldly reconstruct them to better understand our worlds – and change them.

[nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was somewhat surprised at this book. Having read Hartman's first published book, Scenes of Subjection, I was expecting a similar analytic angle. I didn't get what I expected, but I got something rather amazing, nevertheless. The analytic value of this book goes on at both at the descriptive level and at the movement between personal narrative and historical scene-setting.

Lose Your Mother appears to be intended to be sold as a more "mainstream" book, an idea I like--it's an attempt to popularize discussions about diasporic identity formation and the disconnect between the "Africa" of African Americans and Africa itself. The book always threatens--as most diasporic writings do--to freeze "Africa" as a relic of the past. Yet that discontinuity is also what makes it interesting, and what provides its narrative motor.

In any case, while I thought the book was beautifully, beautifully written, and really impressive in its weaving of interpersonal stories with historical and discursive interpretations, in the final analysis, it appeared, perhaps a little bit more individualistic--especially in the ways in which the author regards herself--than I really would have liked. This may have to do with the psychoanalytic hermeneutics that it appears to subtly usher in. Not that psychoanalysis is necessarily individualistic; rather, it seems to me that the level at which this hermeneutics is mobilized doesn't account for the translation of individual symbolics to a cultural (in the sense of collective) Symbolic. Hartman's brilliance is that she can describe the individual symbolic in a mainstream text--the "mental theater" as some call it. Yet I was waiting and waiting for that collectivizing move.

In the end, it wasn't there. And that, perhaps, is why the theme of loss is so able to dominate this text.

[Sara-Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

In both Bayo Hasley’s book, ‘Routes of Remembrance’ and Saidiya Hartman’s ‘Lose Your Mother’, the authors--female African-American scholars--explore shared ground: the political economy of diasporic celebrations, the complex politics of memory for inhabitants in the shadow of Cape Coast and Elmina slave fortresses, the class dynamics of slavery in the Northern regions, the psychology of pan-african longing. But the difference in form is crucial, and with the outcome, one can’t help but think it is indeed the later book’s autobiographical approach that is suited for the unraveling of these themes. A better comparison might be Ghosh’s In An Antique Land; Hartman’s ‘Lose Your Mother’ is a travelogue with such a combination of scholarly rigour, literary flourish and exposed internal dissonance that it does not do ghosh an injustice to draw a comparison between the two.


'For me’ saidiya says, ‘the rupture was the story’ (43).



“Had we possessed the words, we might have said that it was not as if we expected to find something that could make history hurt less or fill the hole inside of us, because it was not the kind of hole that could be filled and then would go away. Coming here was simply a way to acknowledge it. There was no turning back the clock. But it didn’t feel like it was moving forward either” (199).

A question from my life: The divide engendered from a history of the forcible passage across an ocean, and the divide from the hand wielding the whip to the flesh, bloodied-- the travel of the slave and the slavemaster, both, produce a testimony of a wound encircled. i could have written this passage--is there a difference within even this expression of negative space? and how ever to speak of a shared wound without appropriation, without repeating the processes of violence?

An honest, moving book.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a gorgeous, lyrical book on a profoundly difficult subject. Hartman goes to Ghana for a year to trace the stories of the enslaved men, women, and children who were sold in North American. She's looking for home, for connection, to find the part of her own story that has been missing, and yet finds alienation, loneliness, and stories she almost doesn't hear.

The book deals with issues of nation, state, community, identity, colonialism, enslavement, and loss, as well as shame, disappointment, and a back-and-forth relationship with something like understanding. It's a tremendous work, which added so much to my own inadequate understanding of diaspora, history, and race.

[Johannes Lindelöw · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Ghana, they took the work of mourning seriously. Professional mourners were employed at funerals. These expert grievers ensured that the deceased received the proper amount of crying and keening to guide them into the spirit world. The failure to properly mourn the dead was considered a transgression. (p. 56).

“Africa was a land of graves without bodies.” It was a line I recalled from a poem by the Ghanaian poet Kwadwo Opoku-Agyeman. The poem was about the millions of people who disappeared from Africa during the slave trade and the empty homes, deserted villages, and open graves left behind in their wake. But it made no mention of mourners. Were there no mourners because the graves were empty? (p. 57).

“Black people have always been in crisis,” he remarked. “We’ve never been wanted in America, at least not since the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s still no excuse for not doing better.” No matter how vehemently he and I disagreed, what we both accepted was that the experience of slavery had made us an us, that is, it had created the conditions under which we had fashioned an identity. Dispossession was our history. That we could agree on. (p. 59).

“It is only when you are stranded in a hostile country that you need a romance of origins; it is only when you lose your mother that she becomes a myth; it is only when you fear the dislocation of the new that the old ways become precious, imperilled, and what your great-great-grandchildren will one day wistfully describe as African” (p. 76).

Slavery made your mother into a myth, banished your father’s name, and exiled your siblings to the far corners of the earth. The slave was as an orphan, according to Frederick Douglass, even when he knew his kin. “We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters we were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.”

IF INGESTION EXEMPLIFIED the merchant’s accumulation of capital and the slave’s dispossession, then waste was the proof that the powerful had eaten. Excrement was the material residue of this politics of the belly. As Canetti writes of the voracious and bestial character of power:

Anyone who wants to rule men first tries to humiliate them, to trick them out of their rights and their capacity for resistance, until they are as powerless before him as animals…[The] ultimate aim is to incorporate them into himself and to suck the substance out of them. What remains of them afterwards does not matter to him. The worse he has treated them, the more he despises them. When they are no more use at all, he disposes of them as he does of his excrement…The excrement, which is what remains of all this, is loaded with our whole blood guilt. By it we know what we have murdered. It is the compressed sum of all the evidence against us.

Racism, according to Michel Foucault, is the social distribution of death; like an actuarial chart, it predicts who would thrive and who would not. Blacks are twice more likely to die than whites at every stage of life and have shorter life spans. In my city, black men have life spans twenty years shorter than white men’s, and the infant mortality rate among black women rivals that of a third-world country (p. 98).

I am reminded of the letter that James Baldwin wrote his nephew on the centennial anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. “The crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen,” he wrote, “and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” (124 – 125).

Had we possessed the words, we might have said that it was not as if we expected to find something that could make history hurt less or fill the hole inside of us, because it was not the kind of hole that could be filled and then would go away. Coming here was simply a way to acknowledge it. There was no turning back the clock. But it didn’t feel like it was moving forward, either (p. 144).

In Gwolu, it finally dawned on me that those who stayed behind told different stories than the children of the captives dragged across the sea. Theirs wasn’t a memory of loss or of capitivity, but of survival and good fortune. After all, they had eluded the barracoon, unlike my ancestors. They had been able to reconstruct shattered communities. Despite their present destitution, they had fashioned a narrative of liberation in which the glory of the past was the entry to a redeemed future. My narrative was a history of defeat, which at best was the precondition for a victory, longawaited, but that hadn’t yet arrived. This was the story I had been trying to find. And in listening for my story I had almost missed theirs. (p. 168).

He moved a few inches closer to me and then shouted in my ear. The girls are singing about those taken from Gwolu and sold into slavery in the Americas. They are singing about the diaspora. Here it was—my song, the song of the lost tribe. I closed my eyes and I listened (p. 169).

[Agla]

No rating because I'm conflicted.
On the one hand this book asks very important question about the legacy of slavery and the slave trade. The author is African American and went to Ghana to look for the history of the people who were stolen from there and made slaves. She spent a year there (I think) and visited several places linked to the slave trade. She felt like a stranger in Ghana, met people who hated African-Americans there, met African Americans who had emigrated there and were disappointed but could return to the US. She says that Ghana uses the slave trade to develop tourism and people there mostly refuse to talk about their ancestors' role in the trade or the history of slavery in Ghana itself. The content is very interesting and the writing style very enjoyable.
On the other hand, the structure was way to meandering for me and I felt it was never ending even though the book is not that long. We jump between snippets of stories and the overarching thread remained elusive. I don't regret reading it because I learned a lot but it was difficult to follow at times. For example one chapter was dedicated to the fate of a woman who was kidnapped and killed onboard a slaver's ship by a white man who was then put on trial for it. In the chapter we get a summary of the different accounts available but we jump from one account to the next without transition so it took me a while to get that it was several POV of the same events (the testimonies are very different and we will never know what actually happened to this nameless woman). By the end of the chapter I did not get whether the murderer was convicted. This was the most confusing chapter (and very very graphically violent too).
All in all I think this book is important because those are questions that are seldom talked about I just wished it was structured differently.

[Sanchita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hartman is such an evocative writer and I love how much of herself is in her research. There is a lot of power in what she says. I highly recommend this book for both academics and non-academics. This kind of writing is what reaffirms my faith in humanity and academia.

[Claudia · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF ~ 60%, 10/02/22

Non l’ho finito (mollato a pagina 170), ma penso che tre stelle sia un giudizio adeguato per la mia esperienza di lettura.

È un memoir misto saggio storico molto denso e a volte mi ha persa passando dall’esperienza personale ai fatti storici. Lo avevo messo in pausa mesi fa, dopo aver letto circa 80-100 pagine e in questi giorni l’ho ripreso, ma niente da fare. Per me basta così.
Una grande pecca, a mio avviso, sono le note: non a piè di pagina (ma su questo direi che sono rassegnata), ma a fondo volume e senza essere numerate, identificate dal numero della pagina. Pare che anche l’edizione originale abbia la stessa impostazione. Per mio gusto, un libro non-fiction dovrebbe almeno avere le note numerate, anche se a fondo volume.

[Talia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so good

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply meditative about sources and identity and the impact place has on us

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If secretly I had been hoping that there was some cure to feeling extraneous in the world, then at that moment I knew there wasn't a remedy for my homelessness."

This book, a sort of travel memoir on Hartman's travels in Ghana tracing various experiences of the Atlantic slave trade, was thoughtful in a different way than if she had adopted a more professorial, academic approach. It was an eye-opening read for me, because heritage journeys (I don't even have good words for this phenomenon - and I'm sure others do) to West Africa don't feature prominently in my cultural milieu, and I think if I were exactly the same person I am now, demographically, except African-American, that would change substantially. The writing aches with the sense of homelessness she ponders in the quote above, and it is both enlightening - as a white reader - and familiar - as a traveler - to read the ways in which her journey fails to provide closure or belonging or whatever it is she's looking for, and which even she cannot always name precisely, at so many turns. It's an instructive read for anyone from the US (including black readers, I'd guess, though I assume in a much different way than for white readers), and a thoughtful read for anyone.

[Ai Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really great book--Hartman traces her research journey through various slave trade sites in Ghana alongside her emotional reaction to them and the constant deferral of what she emotionally wants/needs out of that trip. There's so much going on in here about space and geography, and the collapsing of time that is super interesting, and Hartman is a really excellent writer. The way she weaves some sentences leaves a lot of "oh eff" moments, and I really feel like I have to revisit this when I'm not under a time crunch to finish it for class and think a lot more about questions about ghosts and haunting for myself (I'm always thinking about ghosts and haunting.)

Anyway, I really strongly encourage folks to read this, it's a great book that provides a lot of information alongside an emotional journey that's interesting and insightful to follow.

[Naori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dissonant from her previous book, this historical memoir explores the realities of slavery in an African context, rather than solely a transatlantic sense. Hartman's conflicted response to the notion of an African homecoming illustrates the difference between black Americans who have suffered the legacy of slavery and African progeny of slaves, who consider themselves survivors. There are several poignant passages in the text where Hartman allows herself a raw unveiling of the chasm between what Americans of African descent seek to find in Africa, and what the reality of contemporary Ghanian/West African society consists of. The work overall was very compelling, but the shorter and more honest vignettes were, in my opinion, the best part...

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything I admire, aspire to, and want to read in a "theoretical" text –– something so firmly situated in the particular that it's this very situation that engenders astonishing historical critique.