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.
Themes
Enslavement as Enforced Forgetting
Hartman argues that slavery not only reduced people to the non-human status of commodities but also imposed on them a living death that cut them from their past and their kin. Uprooted from their native land, enslaved people become strangers, losing their connections to home and family as they are turned into a commodity, a tradable thing. Newly enslaved people were instructed to “lose their mother” and become nameless. Because of this enforced forgetting of the past, Hartman defines the condition of enslavement as that of harboring a persistent dream of elsewhere, of return to a lost place and a lost people.
Hartman herself, as a descendant of enslaved Africans now residing in the US, yearns to return to her roots and to know her personal history. Hartman is accustomed to defining slavery as an act of violence with dehumanizing consequences, and she expects Ghanaians to see it the same way—as a crime against humanity. She is shocked to realize that slavery is seen quite differently in Ghana than it is in the US. Those whose ancestors benefited from the trade in enslaved people sometimes take pride in this fact as a mark of their family’s high social status. Others prefer not to remember it at all, and become frustrated with Hartman for dredging up the past in a country where so many are struggling to get by in the present. These attitudes strike Hartman as another form of erasure: Just as enslaved people were instructed to forget their homeland, their homeland has also forgotten them.
For many American descendants of enslaved people, Africa has been presented as a distant beacon of hope. When Hartman first arrives in Ghana, she works at the Marcus Garvey Guest House—named for the early 20th-century Black nationalist leader who advocated for people of the global African diaspora to return to Africa. The dream of a return to Africa draws its strength, in Hartman’s view, from the severing of memory that comes with enslavement. Even many generations later, descendants of enslaved people may dream of being reintegrated into the continuous history and identity that they lost with enslavement. What Hartman realizes in Ghana is that this dream treats Africa as a monolith—a longed-for homeland in which all descendants of African people are equal—ignoring political and class divisions within African countries. Before the histories lost to enslavement can be restored, Hartman argues, African people who participated in the slave trade must face their history.
History and Dehumanization
Hartman focuses on humans’ ability to take others’ humanity from them—even from people just like them, their fellow Africans. She singles out the warrior aristocratic class in West African society, especially the Asante, who preyed on others for profit. They stole humans and sold them; they also mistreated them physically and emotionally. They marched them for long distances, chained them, and confined them in tight quarters. In some instances, enslavers tortured and killed some to serve as an example to others. The goal of these actions was to keep victims docile and obedient—enslaved.
Hartman is critical of other African American writers such as Alex Haley and Maya Angelou, who ignore the violence of Africans against Africans in their attempts to recover an idealized African heritage.
For Hartman, the inhumanity is in the roots seekers like her return to Africa to find. It begins in the villages of Ghana’s northern plains, home of the poorer people whom the Asante conquered and enslaved. Their dehumanization begins with words such as donkor—names that reduce people to things. Language can shape identity: Once enslaved, a person loses their connections, their value, and ultimately their humanity. As a result of this linguistic violence, they can be mistreated and converted into commodities on the market.
European demand for enslaved people meant that the long-standing practice of enslavement suddenly took place on an industrial scale. Enslaved people were transported across the Atlantic in dehumanizing and deadly conditions. They were stored in their own excrement and treated as no more than waste themselves. They were converted into currency, a pieza—a “piece” to be sold rather than a whole human being.
That dehumanization continues today in the erasure of enslaved people and their descendants from Ghanaian histories. Hartman notes that the practice of historiography often means telling the stories of empires and powerful families, while the ordinary people on whose backs that power was built are made to disappear from language just as they disappeared from their villages.
The Harmfulness of Denial
Many contemporary Africans are in denial about their ancestors’ role in the slave trade. Some deny that Africans took part. Others claim they were forced to do so, that they had no choice because they would have been enslaved themselves. Hartman sees the truth of this last point and recognizes the degree to which colonial pressures from the US and Europe made the trade in enslaved people within Africa much more widespread and predatory than it would have been otherwise, even as it disheartens her to see Ghanaian people try to justify a horrific institution that led to such pain for her ancestors.
What is even more disappointing to her is the way people in today’s Ghana ignore the signs of slavery around them. They carry on with their ordinary lives in spaces that whisper of a hideous history. They even carry out the functions of government in a castle where enslaved people were once stored before being shipped to the Americas. The Ghanaian present, she argues, has been built on the bones of a horrific past that has not been properly acknowledged.
Hartman discovers just how far out of touch many Africans are with the reality of slavery when she mixes with African scholars, who she feels should know their history well. Instead, Hartman encounters a discouraging absence of knowledge and a pervasive disconnection from slavery’s reality. One of the scholars, dressed in clothing that to Hartman signals her membership in the global bourgeoisie, puts on shackles and dances in a mocking parody of an enslaved person, as if slavery were all in fun. Another scholar claims that “involuntary servitude” in Africa was not slavery because slavery was what Europeans did. To Hartman, denial is no solution. She finds it imperative to see the truth of history. Only then can we undo the wrongs of the past.
