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 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Lose Your Mother”
The phrase “lose your mother” refers to the practice of instructing newly enslaved people to let go of the past, to forget who they are. “In every slave society, slave owners attempted to eradicate the slave’s memory, that is, to erase all the evidence of an existence before slavery” (155). The purpose was to render captives docile and to keep them from desiring escape or revenge:
A slave without a past had no life to revenge. No time was wasted yearning for home, no recollections of a distant country slowed her down as she tilled the soil, no image of her mother came to mind when she looked into the face of her child (155).
Donkor, the Ghanaian word for slave, itself implies valuelessness. In essence, enslaved people are “the living dead” (157). They have ceased to exist and have no past that provides them an identity, no link to ancestors or tribe. They might as well not exist. The word underscores the beliefs that allowed aristocratic elites to enslave fellow Africans of lower social status.
Even as modern Ghana wishes to ignore its slave past, it actively encourages African Americans to come “home” and spend their tourist dollars. The government promotes slavery tourism—but the need for money only highlights the fact that abolition and decolonization have not truly succeeded.
“Lose your mother” also describes Hartman’s overall argument that African Americans must come to terms with the erasure of their African roots. “The heirs of slaves wanted a past of which they could be proud, so they conveniently forgot the distinctions between the rulers and the ruled and closed their eyes to slavery in Africa” (164). The links to ancestors are gone, so it is Mother Africa that African American slave descendants must “lose” and recognize as fantasy.
The story of slavery with which African Americans seek to connect has nothing to do with the present struggles of most Ghanaians. What each of these two separate communities made of the history of slavery—how they have understood and lived it—provides little ground for solidarity between them. African Americans want to regain their African patrimony and escape the racism of the United States; they want to go “home.” Meanwhile, Ghanaians desire an escape from the impoverishment of the present in Africa. The road to freedom they most often imagine is in the opposite direction: migration to the United States (165). Hartman notes that Ghanaians “jok[e] that if a slave ship bound for America docked off the coast today, so many Ghanaians would volunteer for the passage that they would stampede one another” (170).
But the legacy of slavery endures in America, too, in the form of systemic racism that prevents many Black Americans from experiencing true freedom. When she was younger, Hartman petitioned for reparations for slavery. Now, she’s skeptical of such calls, viewing them as an embarrassing act of supplication that recalls traditional imagery of enslaved Black people on their knees begging white enslavers for forgiveness or of Black people acknowledging the beneficence of white leaders like Abraham Lincoln. She writes, “The bid for emancipation reproduced the abject position of the slave” (167). Hartman believes that reconstructing society is the only way to address the legacy of slavery.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Dark Days”
Occasionally, Hartman recounts anecdotes of her experiences in Ghana to make a historical point. In this chapter, she describes how hydroelectric power is unreliable in such an arid country, and low water levels necessitate electricity rationing. On one night, Hartman is out walking when she sees a man taking a bath by flashlight in the street. She remarks that the wealthy can afford generators, but the poor cannot, and she takes this scene as a metaphor for the unequal distribution of financial resources in life—and especially in Ghana.
She also reminds the reader that Nkrumah, Ghana’s first leader, built the dam that generated the country’s electricity after Ghana became independent. “The blackouts introduced me to the multitude outside the circle of light. They were the ones Nkrumah had wanted to lead to the New Jerusalem and catapult into a new era” (177). Nkrumah declared that countries like Ghana had to achieve in a generation what other nations had 300 years to accomplish. Shortly after the dam started working, Nkrumah was overthrown by a military coup.
Chapters 8-9 Analysis
Hartman has difficulty fulfilling her desire to speak for the common people, the people without resources or power who were taken captive and enslaved. The absence of useful records about the lives of these people is evidence of the relationship between History and Dehumanization. Ghana’s official history, Hartman finds, is often the history of its ruling classes—those who participated in the enslavement of others. The common people—those who were subject to enslavement—have been erased from history as if they had never existed.
While the powerful sought to erase enslaved people from history, enslavers also sought to erase history itself from the enslaved person’s mind. In Chapter 8, Hartman explains the origin of the phrase that forms the book’s title: “lose your mother.” This instruction was given to newly enslaved people—a command to forget where they came from, to forget any connection to life before enslavement. This is the clearest possible illustration of Enslavement as Enforced Forgetting—enslavers sought to sever the enslaved person from their family, their community, and their history to render them powerless. This loss of history and memory has ongoing consequences.
Hartman sympathizes with the economic suffering of Ghanaians and understands when they express an interest in finding something better in America. Hartman now recognizes the irony of her quest to return to Ghana to recover lives lost to slavery. She wants to understand something that in its very nature cannot be understood or seen clearly because its nature is to disappear—it is gone.
She finds the periodic blackouts such a vivid metaphor for her quest. She wants to see things that fall outside the circle of light, yet the fact that they fall outside means that they cannot be seen. It is in the nature of slavery to recede from view, to erase things. Its legacy is too horrible, too shameful.
