Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route | 
 enlarge | Author: Saidiya Hartman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 21002
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0374531153
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.36209667
EAN: 9780374531157
ASIN: 0374531153
Publication Date: January 22, 2008
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Product Description
In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.The slave, 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. There are no known survivors of Hartman’s lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping 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 whose lives were shattered and transformed by the slave trade. Written in prose that is fresh, insightful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a “landmark text” (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams).
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 You may want to feel, yes, but there's more than feeling in travel and history October 26, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
One lesson of this book is that the pain of history doesn't go away easily. It isn't erased through generations of being American rather than African, and it certainly isn't resolved by just going back to Africa. I read this book before my own trip to Ghana, to get a travelogue sense of what to experience, and came away disappointed. The author spends much time standing around the old slave forts feeling lost and sad, searching for a sense of their evil, while all around her life goes on as normal, as life tends to do. She wants to see some signs of what happened there, something like markers, memorials, grave-like images of loss. She wants acknowledgment. She wants people to be weeping there, wailing, to have heads bowed over the horrible crime. Of course they don't, and of course the locals are used to Western people coming there for the sole purpose of feeling their own self-produced overwhelming emotion. There are thousands of crimes committed against humanity in the last several hundred years, and not all sites, despite the overwhelming scale, are treated as hallowed ground.
Her subject matter is hardly dismissible, but her approach is one-pronged. You can't just go back to the scene of the crime when it was hundreds of years ago and half a world away and find answers. It's a worthy trip, just to see the place if nothing else, but it won't solve everything, and it's a bit painful to follow her musings as you can see things won't be resolved. She is aware of, but absolutely cannot come to grips with, the ideas that Africans are different from her now, that there isn't so much of a connection as she wants, and that Africans are aware and accepting of this. For the Africans, an old slave fort is ancient history; they have other problems now and want to deal with regular life.
As for the journey itself, you don't get much of it in this book. There's much valuable background and history present, but the actual travel details and description of life there now is all but lost. The author's approach moves this book firmly out of the category of travelogue and more into a personal examination.
Forced to read it..... boring. August 18, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I had to read it for college, and honestly, it was quite redundant. I can summarize it in one sentence:
"They did not accept me when I went to Africa to find my family."
Chapter after chapter go on and on about how lonely she feels in Africa, which seems obvious to me because she has nothing in common with Africans besides her skin color. If I go out and buy a tub of paint and change my skin color, will I have anything in common with her? No. They grew up on different sides of the planet, with totally different governments, economic situations, weather conditions, and culture. What she was searching for was family, and she didn't find it in Africa. Skin color doesn't equate familiarity or a connection.
As Whoopi Goldberg said, I am not African-American. I did not live in Africa, I wasn't born there, I visited there, once, but I am as American as anyone else.
That being said, I'm sure she is a nice lady.
 THE PAIN OF REJECTION April 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a story of rejection of those of us forced into slavery by force and not by choice, by those who ancestors were in colluson with the eurpeans. This is also a realization that what is the most important is the acceptance of being a stanger in a strange stilen land as european america, but also to know that one cannot go back home as what we were, but how we are now. Knowing that wherever we (Africans) are i n the world, one thing is for sure, we are and will always be part on Mother Africa, and the spirit of our Mother will always accept her lost childrens.,
Extraordinarily Insightful and Eloquent July 22, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
A deeply moving combination of history, personal memoir and deep reflection,particularly on the heroic and aspirational legacy of slavery as seen by this wonderful writer.
Spectacular March 25, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Saidiya Hartman takes us on a journey that is intense, tough and thoroughly rewarding. Impressively, she learned as much about herself as she did about the past she sought, even more.
The beauty of going with her on this journey is that the reader has the same magnificent opportunity, hypnotically led by the author, to ponder and to gain personal insight perhaps too long submerged.
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