41 pages • 1 hour read
Saidiya V. HartmanLose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Famished Road”
Hartman visits Salaga, a town in Ghana’s northern section that was “the heartland of slavery” (178). Seven roads lead into Salaga, and merchants and traders, many of whom once brought batches of enslaved people sometimes numbering as many as 1,000 to 2,000, are on the roads. Hartman writes:
Had you been traveling along this road in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, no doubt you would have seen a band of strangers, whose chains were the clear sign that they would never pass this way again, heading toward the market (179).
Today, those living in Salaga prefer to forget the town’s history, although some encourage tourism for those who do want to remember, especially descendants of enslaved people such as Hartman. She speaks to a teacher who is defensive about the town’s history. He tells history this way: The more powerful Asantes forced the Gonja tribe, who lived in the region, to pay tribute to them each year with items such as 1,000 enslaved people. “The famed Gonja warriors began raiding for slaves from the moment the state was founded in the seventeenth century” (181). People were so frightened of the raids that might enslave them that they raided others to survive. The teacher insists that there were reasons for the enslavement of one’s own. “We suffered, too,” he says, sounding to Hartman like an ancient Greek tragedian: “It was a house divided against itself, and eventually it fell” (189).
However, Hartman points out, the slave trade created a new class of wealthy aristocrats. By celebrating these royal ancestors, rather than the enslaved laborers on whose backs the wealth was built, contemporary Gonjans perpetuate the victimization of the oppressed. Plundering kings and warrior states had not ceased to be victorious, at least not in memory.
There is, Hartman notes, a “battle royal” (192) going on over the meaning of history. Different narratives compete with one another, and she tries to tell the story of the losers, those without the ability to tell their stories themselves. She visits the current chief of Salaga and learns that there is a taboo against naming those who are descendants of enslaved people. This rule originated with good intentions: Nkrumah instituted it to prevent people from being branded as less than others; he wanted to eliminate status and caste privilege in Ghanaian society. Now, the rule will keep Hartman from locating those descendants who might help her tell the story of slavery. “Robbed of their kin and denied their lineage, slaves were a tabula rasa” (193), she writes.
Hartman is also told that some descendants of enslaved people are noticeable based on appearance—that is, they viewed as are more attractive because beautiful women were especially sought for use as “wives.”
Hartman begins to realize that she is an orphan who has no home in Africa.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Blood Cowries”
Hartman travels into the countryside seeking signs of slave history. She finds remnants of villages that existed before their inhabitants were seized and enslaved. The most telling indicator of such a village is a collection of baobab trees. She quotes an anthropologist who explains how the natural landscape can indicate human tragedy. Hartman also encounters marks of human life on the landscape: eroded shrines and fallen houses. Hartman ponders, “Who would have guessed that the symptoms of erosion were the text of a catastrophic history or that the money yielded by centuries of slave trading lay hidden beneath the earth […]?” (205).
In many of these villages, one can find hordes of cowrie shells, the currency used by traders to buy enslaved people, buried in the ground. The shells had value for Africans but not for Europeans. “The English and Dutch acquired the shells very cheaply and considered them worthless” (207). It required thousands of shells to buy an enslaved person, but the shells could not be traded back to the Europeans for goods. “The aristocrats and nobles believed that cowrie shells were God’s gift to the fortunate” (209). As a result, the slave trade was extremely unequal. The Europeans gained valuable commodities, but Africans gained nothing of commensurate value.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Fugitive Dreams”
Near the end of her stay in Africa, Hartman participates in a research seminar on slavery funded by the Ford Foundation, where she works with both African and American researchers. Hartman feels isolated, as she disagrees with the African scholars who are reluctant to own up to the role of Africans in the slave trade. “They made it clear: Africa ended at the borders of the continent” (215). She feels they fail to acknowledge responsibility; they feel she complains too much. Hartman is especially offended when one seminar attendee puts on shackles and makes jokes about being enslaved. For them, slavery is a game, but, for Hartman, it is a wound, a private sense of grief she harbors for all the souls lost to the slave trade.
The African professors also argue that African slavery—as opposed to the Atlantic slave trade—was a “benign institution,” and they refer to it as “involuntary servitude” (217). They characterize it as distinct from the Atlantic trade, which in their view was entirely the Europeans’ fault. They accuse Hartman of feeling that she and other African Americans are the only ones who suffer because of slavery. Africans suffered too: They received only “trinkets” (218) in return for humans and accumulated no meaningful wealth, while the Europeans built globe-spanning empires on the backs of people stolen from Africa.
As she travels with the scholars, Hartman finds more and more signs of slavery’s legacy. In the town of Gwollu, she sees the walls and ramparts that were built to protect the population from enslavers—from “a constant stream of raiders, and breakaway princes seeking to establish dominion in new lands” (227). If they participated in the slave trade, building the wealth necessary to protect themselves from other Africans, villagers would have become enslaved themselves. Hartman concludes that the rules of this game were established in Europe and imposed on Africans. They had no choice but to comply. They could not resist because they had no coherent identity as Africans. Instead, they were fractured and fragmented into tribes and regions that had traditions of fighting with one another. They could develop no coherent narrative or story to inspire and guide resistance.
This fragmentation accounts for the lack of stories and songs about the people who were enslaved. Instead, all Hartman hears are songs about heroic ruling elites, and the conquerors’ language is as different from that of the vanquished as those of the living and the dead. Nevertheless, her experience leaves Hartman with what she calls a “fugitive dream” of a “world house” (233), one that would include the defeated in a common cause of redemption and freedom from having one’s life or death be decided by others.
Toward the end, Hartman tells a story of listening to girls playing a skipping game in Gwollu. A friend translates: It is a tale of slaves being taken. Finally, Hartman realizes, she has found what she has sought—the voice of the victims.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
The reality Hartman encounters in Ghana is much more complicated than what she expects to find. She seeks traces of slavery, accounts of enslaved peoples’ lives, historical tales from an African perspective, celebrations of the victims’ legacies—and anger. Instead, she finds forgetfulness and The Harmfulness of Denial—a rejection of the idea that slavery is a significant piece of Ghana’s history. Many of the contemporary Ghanaians she meets prefer to forget that slavery ever occurred. If they do remember, they do so either defensively, in a way that absolves Africans of all responsibility for a colonialist system of exploitation, or proudly, in a way that glorifies the power of their warrior ancestors who conquered and enslaved other African peoples: “The history that lived on in Salaga mostly recounted the glories of the slave trading past and, in so doing, defeated the enslaved yet again. […] Slaves have no place in the myths of empires” (190). This statement encapsulates the relationship between History and Dehumanization. This is a core part of Hartman’s central thesis: World history has too often been composed of myths of empires. As powerful groups seek to glorify themselves, the less powerful people on whose backs that glory is built are made to disappear.
Seeing how commonplace it is in Africa—and among many African Americans who dream of restoring an idealized precolonial Africa—to celebrate the aristocratic warrior class responsible for slavery, Hartman becomes more determined than ever to tell the story of the victims, those she calls the “commoners,” who were not wealthy or powerful enough to resist enslavement.
In the end, Hartman’s failure affirms her project’s importance. In history, there are few tangible signs or accounts of what happened to the “commoners,” the voiceless. Many events are so horrific that the only way of knowing about them is through their absence from the story.
Those who deny “the afterlife of slavery” (6) perpetuate the violence of those historical actors who engaged in slavery and the erasure of lives. They continue the act of turning the enslaved into non-humans by refusing to acknowledge their suffering and their wounds—and the legacy that is then passed from generation to generation. In the end, Hartman comes across as a lonely warrior, someone fighting for the voiceless by trying to voice at least an echo of their suffering.
