Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route

Hartman thematizes slavery; she does not just report its history. For her, slavery reduced people to non-human status. Uprooted from their native land, slaves become strangers, lose their connection to home and family, and are turned into a commodity, a tradable thing. Slaves must “lose their mother” and become nameless. Hartman also defines being a slave as harboring a persistent dream of elsewhere, of return to a lost place and a lost people.

Hartman herself, as a descendant of African slaves now residing in the US, yearns to return to her roots. She wants to know her personal history. Combined with this desire is a hope to find a land where people are like her and where she will feel equal to them. But she discovers that slavery is a different issue in Ghana than it is in the US and has different meanings for the society it has left behind, including the descendants of its perpetrators. Hartman is accustomed to defining slavery as an act of violence with dehumanizing consequences, and she expects Ghanaians to see slavery the same way—as a crime against humanity. She is shocked to realize that slavery might have a different meaning in its land of origin.