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.
Prologue-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Slavery shattered lives, erased personal histories, and “made the past a mystery” (14). This realization conflicts with what Hartman hoped to find through her journey to Ghana: that “the past was a country to which I could return” (15). Hartman, an African American woman, returns to the home of her ancestors, but she finds that she is a stranger to a world that should be her home.
More than 700,000 enslaved Black people passed through Africa’s coastal ports during the era of slavery from the 16th to the 19th century. They were usually captured by warrior tribes overseen by the aristocratic elite. They were not family or kin to those who enslaved them, and they remained strangers in the white world to which they were taken to be used for labor.
The experience of being a stranger is endemic to slavery, Hartman argues. No one knows her in Ghana. Traces of her family and its history were erased long ago when the first ancestors were seized, removed from their villages, and marched to the sea.
Hartman speaks of her parents and their memories, which she hopes will establish bridges to the past; however, her mother remembers no further back than a grandmother who recalled the day in 1865 when a Union soldier rode to the farm and told her she was free. Her father’s family, which emigrated from the Caribbean, is more invested in succeeding in America than recalling the past.
Hartman argues that when African American writers have attempted to establish continuity with their precolonial African histories, they have often relied on family ties to the aristocratic warrior class that was responsible for enslaving fellow Africans. She points to Alex Haley, author of the book that became the culturally influential television miniseries Roots, as an example of this pattern. Hartman has a different narrative trajectory and a different project of historical reconstruction in mind. She wants to tell the story of those whose lineages were lost when they were seized. “To read the archive is to enter a mortuary” (17), she writes. The people she writes about—those who were not part of the aristocratic warrior class—were powerless in their African world and endured even harsher degradations in their new American world. She connects her own story to theirs: “I am a reminder that 12 million crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and the past is not over yet. I am the vestige of the dead, and history is how the secular world attends to the dead” (18).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Afrotopia”
Hartman spends her first two months in Ghana working at the Marcus Garvey Guesthouse, a dirty, repulsive hovel. Her host, Stella, tells her to turn off the lights at night. When Hartman sees soldiers drive by, she thinks there is a coup underway; it turns out instead that there is a fire next door.
Hartman begins her research after she moves to more comfortable quarters. The Ghanaians she speaks with are not concerned with or even aware of their country’s recent history. If they are, they sometimes prefer the good old colonial days to the new days of hardship after liberation: “The uncanny feeling that the new days were too much like the old ones plagued only dissidents, intellectuals, and the poor” (24).
Few know the names of streets devoted to liberation fighters. Yet, around them are signs of past colonialism and slavery. The Parliament meets in Christiansburg Castle, which used to be a Danish outpost trading in enslaved people: “Before the heels of parliamentarians clicked against the polished floors of the castle, captives restrained with neck rings and iron clamps were imprisoned inside the garrison” (22).
The country has also been subjected to economic neocolonialism in that it is dependent on foreign powers to survive. The United States pays for its currency, which is printed abroad.
Hartman encounters expatriate Americans such as Mary Ellen Ray and John Ray, who have lived in Ghana for 20 years. John is bitter that the Ghanaian revolution against colonialism failed to bring about a better life for the people. He argues that slavery continues in the form of economic inequality, as people are bought and sold all the time in the country, and he is skeptical of Hartman’s quest. “Every step you take in Ghana crosses the trail of slaves. It’s not hard to find a slave route. It’s the freedom trail you should be looking for” (27), he tells her. Mary Ellen hates life in Ghana; all Ghanaians try to rip you off and get your money, she warns. The Rays tell Hartman, “Don’t lie when you go back home. Everyone goes home and tells lies” (33).
Hartman ponders how this harsh truth tallies with the struggle for liberation. Once, many African Americans—such as Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X—saw Ghana (after Nkrumah led the 1957 fight for liberation) as a beacon of freedom, a place where African Americans could start a new life predicated on equality and freedom. But military coups and corrupt strongmen killed that dream. She recognizes that “[t]he Eden of Ghana had vanished long before I ever arrived” (37). Now Ghanaians suffer from a lack of basic resources, such as sewer systems, which reminds Hartman of the way enslaved individuals were obliged to live in their excrement during their imprisonment and the boat journey to places like America. That suffering continues.
Hartman emphasizes the presence of history as she breathes in the smells around her:
The reek of trading forts and slave ships identified the presence of merchant capital and human commodities on the West African coast, as the foul odor of toilet beaches and open sewers marked the end of ‘the beauty of the first days’ or the shortfall of independence. The smell hung in a black cloud over Accra (47).
Prologue-Chapter 1 Analysis
Hartman aims to complicate what she views as a simplistic narrative of slavery—one that celebrates the liberation of Black Africans from white colonial rule while ignoring or denying the role Africans played in enslaving other Africans. She describes the era just after Ghana gained its independence in 1957 when Black people from across the African diaspora came to Ghana to participate in building one of the first independent Black-led republics of the post-colonial world. Hartman is sympathetic to the optimism of this era. For many Black people in the US, who were facing a climate of intense discrimination, segregation, and racist violence, Ghana looked like a beacon of freedom and equality, and many expected it to be the harbinger of an emerging pan-African utopia. This collective dream, in Hartman’s view, required the unfreedom and inequality in Ghana’s history to be swept aside. As an example, President Kwame Nkrumah decreed that descendants of enslaved people in Ghana should never be identified as such—a move intended to erase the persistent class distinction between the enslavers and the enslaved and build a more egalitarian society. Only much later would The Harmfulness of Denial become apparent.
Arriving several decades after the revolutionary promise of Nkrumah’s inauguration, Hartman sees a Ghana that has been corrupted by despots and military strongmen. In addition, like much of the rest of Africa, Ghana is subject to a new kind of colonialism: foreign domination of its economy. Slavery may have ended, but tyranny persists. Instead of liberation for the Ghanaian working class, Hartman sees continued oppression and hardship. She is especially troubled by the fact that, in her view, Ghanaians seem to have lost their way. The demands of daily survival are so great that there is little room to think about the past. Hartman is concerned with the erasure of enslaved people from Ghana’s understanding of its history. For her, this erasure perpetuates the relationship between History and Dehumanization. History is written by those with the most power, who, in seeking to tell a flattering story of themselves, erase the experiences of those they have victimized. This is true not only of European colonial powers but also of the aristocratic classes within West Africa, who Hartman argues have told a story of their glorious past that erases the less powerful people on whose backs that glory was built.
She realizes that slavery is, as John Ray suggests, a power over life and death—not just a collection of old buildings. She notes that African merchants and royalty actively engaged in the enslavement of their fellows and sold them to foreigners. Enslavement was a way of controlling populations: Disobedient wives were sold into slavery, as were young men who disagreed with tribal leaders. Anyone might become a commodity. This is the kind of truth Hartman wants to reveal, instead of assigning virtues to Africans that they do not possess.
Not everyone in Africa was a victim of slavery; some were perpetrators—and, Hartman implies, some continue to participate in the erasure of enslaved people from collective memory. Hartman’s project is as much a sociological as a historical one. She is interested in Slavery as Enforced Forgetting—tracing the degree to which enslaved individuals were forcibly severed from their histories. As such, she realizes she will not find her “roots,” as they were erased when her first enslaved ancestors were taken from their homes. What matters to her now is to engage with the current reality of Africa.
