Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route

Saidiya Hartman recounts her journey to Ghana to research a project on slavery. She has a strong affinity for Ghanaians because they are her ancestors. At the same time, she feels increasingly alienated from them as she finds that many people in Ghana have little sympathy for the descendants of enslaved people. She begins the project with the hope of finding and connecting with her origins and celebrating the stories of descendants of enslaved people. She ends disappointed. She discovers that slavery is predicated on erasing the lives and histories of those who are enslaved and that recovering those histories in the present is difficult in ways she had not imagined. Her experience of slavery and racism as an African American is starkly different from the experiences of today’s Ghanaians. She concludes that she is an orphan—that enslavement made orphans of her ancestors and that this severing from the past cannot be undone. The enslaved person and all that person’s descendants dream of returning home, but Africa is not, in fact, “home.” The project leaves her still dreaming of a world of equality and freedom for Black people everywhere, but she is more convinced than ever that building this world will require radical structural change.