Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

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I felt as though, when reading this book, all of the romantic narratives of Africa or a Pan-Africanist politic that I as an African-American cling to, were pillars that she destroyed one by one. As a house slave, she was spared the onerous work of the field, dressed better than the hands, dined on crumbs and leftovers, and traveled with her owners. No better demonstration of the missed opportunities and the tragic disappointments of Utopia could be found than in the work of its sixteenth-century architect Thomas More. But the quality of insight in this book (and perhaps the integrity as well, the commitment to refuse easy answers and excuses, to seek the true truth without sparing oneself in any way, is not only a personal quality of the author but something of the spirit of the field) to me seems pretty strongly validating to the whole institution of academia and studying stuff deeply.

When the path home disappeared, when misfortune wore a white face, when dark skin guaranteed perpetual servitude, the prison house of race was born. Or forget the disobedient wives who were sold under the pretext of witchcraft, the quarrelsome young men who were sentenced to slavery for being troublemakers, and the ever-growing list of petty infractions punishable by slavery that cost many commoners their lives.Eloquent, thoughtful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a powerful meditation on history, memory, and the Atlantic slave trade. And the longing and the loss redolent in the label were as much my inheritance as they were that of the enslaved. In following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, I intend to retrace the process by which lives were destroyed and slaves born. Look hard enough and you'll find the underworld occupied by drudges, inferiors, conscripts, and prisoners.

The less senior branch of the well-to-do were employed by international corporations and aid organizations; a few were entrepreneurs.I have felt lacunae in various awesome museum and gallery events relating to Black and West African histories and cultures. In contemporary post-Nkrumah Ghana, Hartman confronts her own sense of pure Generation X despondency: “I had come to Ghana too late and with too few talents. Who wouldn't yearn for a place where the color line didn't exist and black bodies were never broken on the rack or found hanging from trees or expiring at the end of a police officer's gun or wasting away in a cell on death row? Their insistence on choosing my definition was, in and of itself, emblematic of being a non-citizen: the complete absence of autonomy for self-definition or determination.

N. and plead the case for American Negroes and be the cause for their winning complete equality…The free people of Ghana may be able to strike the last of the shackles from their brothers in America. A personalized approach to history that pushes me to read more and will have me pondering for some time. Hartman delineates a clear divide between how African-Americans view their ties to slavery and the African continent, and the perspective of the Ghanaians she meets, who largely see visiting African-Americans as a source of tourism revenue and do not readily discuss slavery, which they see as a source of shame - to those of slave ancestry in particular.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. Atop the dune I could see Christiansborg Castle and the little fishing village that sat on the other side of it. informing the speaker that first, I knew what the word meant, and second, I didn't relish the label. It was as if these words were always floating about in my head, just waiting for the right occasion.

The decisive break the revolutionaries had hoped to institute between the past and the present failed. I found myself, like most members of the small community of nearly one thousand African-American expatriates, living on the periphery of Ghanaian society.Utopia had left its traces in my disappointment, and in the pang of desire that reminded me something was missing, something had been lost. Neither blood nor belonging accounted for my presence in Ghana, only the path of strangers impelled toward the sea. Even when otherwise undetected, I was betrayed when I opened my mouth and heard my father's Brooklyn brogue rippling across the surface of my studied speech, wreaking havoc with the regimented syntax enforced by my mother the grammarian, whose scrupulous speech was a way of masking her southern origins and blending into New York. In 1787 Prince Hall didn't believe so when he petitioned the General Court of Massachusetts, along with seventy-three other black men, requesting that the state repatriate its black residents because he thought it doubtful that they would ever experience anything other than racism and inequality in the white man's country.