Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

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Even so, the dreams of the émigrés were a part of my inheritance, which I couldn't entirely shake loose, no matter how hard I tried.

And European traders were transforming humans into waste and back again through the exchange of gold. 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.

Telling the truth risked fueling the racism that could see Africa only through the Kurtzian lens of horror, warring tribes, filth, pestilence, famine, and AIDS. I would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not been made and marked by slavery. The Amsterdam News expressed a similar sentiment: "The independence of Ghana breaks another link in the powerful chain that…enchained the black man…It is not so much a question of color that we rejoice over Ghana as it is a question of freedom. Slaves and servants and wives were killed so they could accompany the chief as they had during his lifetime.

Not only did black Americans identify with the anticolonial struggle, they believed that their future too depended upon its victory. Yet the relative advantage she might have enjoyed when compared with other slaves didn't prevent her from being sold when her owner discovered himself in a "situation.In Lose Your Mother, Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Ghana's current president, Jerry Rawlings, had been a flight lieutenant in the Air Force when he seized the state through a military revolt on December 31, 1981; he had staged the last successful coup. Do you know what it feels like to be living in a place for nearly twenty years, scraping to get by and still being treated like a foreigner? Instead I would seek the commoners, the unwilling and coerced migrants who created a new culture in the hostile world of the Americas and who fashioned themselves again, making possibility out of dispossession. The revolutionaries had come to Ghana believing they could be made anew, reborn as the African men and women they would have been had their ancestors not been stolen four hundred years ago.

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. In our native country, he wrote, "We shall live among our equals and be more comfortable and happy, than we can be in our present situation; and at the same time, may have a prospect of usefulness to our brethren there.Hartman's (a professor of English at Columbia University) outstanding book Lose Your Mother, is a first-person exploration of what it means to be the descendants of the dispossessed—the cast-offs of African society during the period of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to this very day. Telling the truth risked savaging the dreams of those who might never travel to Africa but still imagined soil on which they would be embraced.