Lose Your Mother

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. Eloquent thoughtful and deeply affecting Lose Your Mother is a powerful meditation on history memory and the Atlantic slave trade.‘This is a memoir about loss alienation and estrangement but also ultimately about the power of art to remember. Lose Your Mother is a magnificent achievement.’—Henry Louis Gates Jr. Harvard University‘Hartman’s mix of history and memoir has the feel of a good novel told with charm and passion and should reach out to anyone contemplating the meaning of identity belonging and homeland.’—Publishers Weekly‘Wider and deeper than Alex Haley’s landmark Roots much less sentimental and incredibly smart. It reads like a cross between Bruce Chatwin and Toni Morrison top-notch travel-writing and scintillating prose and soul.’—Randall Kenan author of A Visitation of Spirits