Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

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I found myself, like most members of the small community of nearly one thousand African-American expatriates, living on the periphery of Ghanaian society. I needed to see the Atlantic, which was where I reckoned with the dead, the men and women and children who were all but invisible in most of the history written about the slave trade; academics had continued to quarrel about how many slaves packed per ton constituted "tight packing" and a deliberate policy of accepting high mortality, estimate rates of cargo productivity in the slave trade versus the other kinds of commodity trade, and quantify the gains and losses of the slave trade with algebraic formulas that obscured the disaster: Deck Area = Constant × (Tonnage) 2/3.

I hadn't accepted Mary Ellen's dinner invitation to prove I wasn't a fool to an old man I had never seen before this evening, so I ignored John and sipped the lukewarm beer Mary Ellen had placed in front of me. I came of age in the demise of liberation movements and after the visionaries had been assassinated. Incidental death occurs when life has no normative value, when no humans are involved, when the population is, in effect, seen as already dead.African Americans weren't the only ones who desired a monumental history and hungered for a grand narrative. For Mary Ellen, there was no longer a future in being an African American, only the burden of history and disappointment. For the first time since my arrival I was very nearly home…I drove into Cape Coast before I thought of the gruesome castle and out of its environs before the ghosts of slavery caught me. The new era was to incarnate the best features of antiquity and to create "the golden city of our heart's desire.

As we drove through the monochromatic brown stretch of farmland broken only by dull grazing cows, Poppa would stick his hand out the window at regular intervals and declare, "Land used to be owned by black folks.

No doubt he remembered his grandfather, whose land had been stolen by a white neighbor upon his death, forcing his wife and children off the property. Instead I would seek the new commoners, the unwilling and coerced migrants who created a new culture in the hostile world of the Americans and who fashioned themselves again, making possibility out of dispossession.

They claimed to love Ghana but stayed at the Golden Tulip, one of Accra's five-star hotels, when they visited. I turned on the radio, but all I could find was static, except for a prerecorded program on the Voice of America Radio about Jackie Robinson breaking the color bar in baseball. In a gesture of self-making intended to obliterate my parents' hold upon me and immolate the daughter they hoped for rather than the one I was, I changed my name.The summer of 1974 would be the last time we visited Montgomery, Alabama, for anything other than a brief four-day trip, and Poppa, sensing this, introduced us to our past. Upon hearing the news that Nkrumah had been overthrown, African Americans wept as Ghanaians rejoiced and danced in the street.

Saidiya Hartman’s book is about, in part, having a lack of that, a lack of sense, and a lack of belonging. I chose Ghana because it possessed more dungeons, prisons, and slave pens than any other country in West Africa—tight dark cells buried underground, barred cavernous cells, narrow cylindrical cells, dank cells, makeshift cells. IN 1957, Ghana's independence was a beacon of freedom to the civil rights movement and Nkrumah, the liberator of black people worldwide. The very term "slavery" derived from the word "Slav," because Eastern Europeans were the slaves of the medieval world. Her reflections on history and memory unfold as an intimate encounter with places—a holding cell, a slave market, a walled town built to repel slave raiders—and with people: an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to build the first permanent trading fort in West Africa; an adolescent boy who was kidnapped while playing; a fourteen-year-old girl who was murdered aboard a slave ship.The political opponents of the Osagyefo, the Redeemer, who after the coup were now the leaders of the country, distrusted the Afros because they had been religiously loyal to Nkrumah. Combining the depth and breadth of a scholar of slavery with the imagination and linguistic facility of a novelist, Saidiya Hartman has written a most poignant meditation on the ironies of black identity in a postmodern, multicultural world. I blockaded the door with a chair and put on running shoes so I would be able to flee if and when I needed to.