Read e-book online Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route PDF

By Saidiya Hartman

ISBN-10: 0374270821

ISBN-13: 9780374270827

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman trips alongside a slave path in Ghana, following the path of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast. She retraces the background of the Atlantic slave exchange from the 15th to the 20th century and reckons with the clean slate of her personal genealogy.

There have been no survivors of Hartman's lineage, nor far-flung relations in Ghana of whom she had are available in seek. She traveled to Ghana looking for strangers. the main common definition of the slave is a stranger--torn from family and kingdom. To lose your mom is to endure the lack of relatives, to put out of your mind your prior, and to inhabit the realm as a stranger. As either the offspring of slaves and an American in Africa, Hartman, too, used to be a stranger. Her reflections on heritage and reminiscence spread as an intimate stumble upon with places--a protecting mobilephone, a slave marketplace, a walled city built
to repel slave raiders--and with humans: an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to construct the 1st everlasting buying and selling citadel in West Africa; a young person boy who was once abducted whereas enjoying; a fourteen-year-old woman who was once murdered aboard a slave ship.

Eloquent, considerate, and deeply affecting, Lose Your mom is a strong meditation on background, reminiscence, and the Atlantic slave trade.

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Extra info for Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Sample text

It would be tempting to say that in 1482 the handwriting was already on the wall. It would be easy to trace a straight line from then to now, as if the twelve million who arrived in the Americas, or the millions who were slaughtered in war; left for dead on the trail; killed by dysentery, cholera, and dehydration; or dumped in the Atlantic were sentenced to their fate when the ground was broken for the castle. In hindsight it would appear as if the demise of centuries could be foreseen in the exchange of gifts and promises between a Portuguese captain and an Akan viceroy.

What do you know, Professor? Soon the Europeans will own all of it again. ” John demanded, trying to control his slurred speech. ” John’s eyes were on me and he was assessing all my shortcomings with his stern gaze. He was contemptuous of most of the African Americans in Ghana. Would I turn out to be no better than the rest of them? John often spoke as if the expatriates who had returned to the States had betrayed him personally. They had abandoned the dream and been rewarded with university chairs, fat salaries, and celebrity, while he labored in the trenches and pieced together an existence.

Or was there a future in Africa too? There was still the chance that all the poverty, death, and suffering would come to an end. There was still the chance that the manufacturers of misery would be toppled and the empires derailed. There was still the chance that Sankara’s dream of a White House in Harlem might be realized. As long as I believed this, I could still call myself an African American. ON THE DAY BEFORE I left for Elmina, which is about one hundred miles west of Accra on the curved shoreline that forms the Gulf of Guinea, I suffered my first migraine.

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


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