Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman
Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Lose Your Mother
A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Author: Saidiya Hartman

Narrator: Allyson Johnson

Unabridged: 8 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/19/2021


Synopsis

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.

The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger—torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way and with figures from the past whose lives were shattered and transformed by the slave trade. Written in prose that is fresh, insightful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a "landmark text" (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams).

About Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. A MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, she is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and lives in New York.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Zanna on February 23, 2020

I think it would be correct to say that Saidiya Hartman is an academic and went to Ghana to do academic research. That she decided to communicate that research as this highly accessible and moving personal story, I am deeply grateful for. But the quality of insight in this book (and perhaps the inte......more

Goodreads review by Kenyon on September 23, 2011

This review was published originally in Left Turn Magazine. www.leftturn.org THE NAKED TRUTH LOSE YOUR MOTHER: A JOURNEY ALONG THE ATLANTIC SLAVE ROUTE BY SAIDIYA HARTMAN Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007 One of the most painful political battles I've ever had was with a white activist. When co-authoring a......more

Goodreads review by Bea on October 22, 2019

The book centers around the interesting relationship between African Americans and Africa, particularly the relationship between African Americans and Ghanaians. The disillusion of the opening chapters is heartbreaking, but soon the narrator's sadness turns into a kind of bitterness that refuses to......more