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 senses a distance from them because they have little sympathy for the descendants of slavery victims. She begins the project with hope of finding and connecting with her origins and of celebrating the stories of slave descendants. She ends disappointed. She discovers that the truth of slavery is so complex as to have buried and transformed the stories in ways she had not imagined. Specifically, 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 and that Africa is not, in fact, “home.” Nevertheless, the project leaves her still dreaming of a world of equality and freedom for black people everywhere.

The American married couple came to Ghana in the 1960s and 1970s with a dream of finding a world of greater equality. They were disappointed by what they found, and John Ray cautions Hartman not to be too hopeful. He plays the part of hard-truth-teller in Hartman’s