Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman
“What place in the world could sate four hundred years of longing for a home? Was it foolish to long for a territory in which you could risk imagining a future that didn’t replicate the defeats of the present?” (33)
Again and again in Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman names and claims her ancestry: she is “the progeny of slaves...the [child] of commoners” (204). I am the progeny of settler colonists, the child not of commoners or recent immigrants but of centuries of accumulated power and property stolen and held by White people. As I’ve dug and sifted through my own family’s past, I’ve found that this accumulated power and property doesn’t always or even usually manifest in mansions or gold or grand inheritances: it manifests in a traceable family tree, an untruncated (if obfuscating) narrative of kinship and origin—a version of what Hartman is searching for in her memoir of a year spent living in Ghana, researching and retracing the transatlantic slave route.
I say memoir, but this is the best kind of book. It is more expansive than genre, weaving a web between memoir, travelogue, theory, and history. Details of arriving and living in Accra—the way Black Americans are seen by Ghanaians, the intermittent nature of electricity and weather, how the history and relics of the slave trade are held uncomfortably in a space between erasure and tourist trap—are intermingled with threads of Afropessimist theory, reflections on Hartman’s genealogical research, and carefully documented history of the way the slave trade functioned in and beyond Ghana: what slave dungeons were like, how cowries were used as currency, the traumas of the Middle Passage. Hartman investigates the fractures and scars between herself, a Black American descended from slaves, and the Africans she meets while in Ghana, finding that, more often than not, they don’t name or understand slavery and the slave trade in the same way that she does.
As someone who has just begun the process of excavating and understanding the people and history I come from, I was struck deeply by Hartman’s look at what happens when we shy away from naming, from specificity, from attempting to understand wounds and their composition: the sameness and differences that compose them, the knitted together, scabbed over, infected, and pulled apart. Reading her words, I felt the piercing power and importance of looking clearly and deeply at our ancestors and the manner in which they moved through the world. Were they fugitives or conquerors? Were they despots or rebels? Were they slaves, slavers, or those somewhere in the middle ground—able to claim technical innocence even while indirectly profiting from the dehumanization of people into commodities? To speak clearly of these—our— inheritances, to reject romanticization and generalization, is to combat “the hundreds of years of forgetting” (157) and to acknowledge that “...these identities were tethered to conflicting narratives of our past, and, as well, these names conjured different futures” (231).