Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Product Information

The vision of an African continental family or a sable race standing shoulder to shoulder was born by captives, exiles, and orphans and in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade. 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. 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. George Jackson, writing his father from a cell in Soledad Prison, imagined that he would crawl back from the grave of solitary confinement. It is how Ghanaians refer to the government and how they perceive it: as a fortress and a foreign entity protected by great white walls.

I don't think Stella, the housekeeper at the Marcus Garvey Guest House, was the person I first heard use these words to describe the proverbial blindness of Westerners, but she might as well have been. But just as she gleaned something in her great-great-grandmother’s refusal to engage, she hears something beyond “the story I had been trying to find” in a small, walled town in the interior, one of the few places where the slave raids had been resisted: “In Gwolu, it finally dawned on me that those who stayed behind,” the survivors of the slave trade, “told different stories than the children of the captives dragged across the sea. I was willing to enter the dungeon again and again and encounter the disaster anew, as if the Portuguese were still in transit, as if the sugar crops had yet to be planted in Brazil, as if the first slave had yet to be exiled, because, at this late date, I was still hoping for a different outcome. Guns, brandy, cowries, and gold decided their fate, ensured their disappearance, and dictated that they be forgotten.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. 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. What better illustration of the degradation of gold than its capacity to transform persons into things; what better example of its offensive character than the excremental conditions of the barracoon; what better sign of its mutability than the "black gold" of the slave trade.

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.She extended her arm and patted the top of my hand in a gesture that I might have mistaken for maternal if it hadn't seemed so perfunctory. The book provides valuable insight into hearts and minds of blacks in the Diaspora, who are more than ever trying to bridge the gaps in time that the trans-Atlantic slave trade severed—mostly through tourism and DNA technologies to trace one's "roots". She lived near the Fulbright compound (virtually all of the tenants of the Kwatchie family were Fulbright scholars) and invited me over to dinner the following evening. 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.