Lose Your Mother, Book Review by Kam Williams

Lose Your Mother:
A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route
by Saidiya Hartman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
288 pages, illustrated
ISBN: 0-374-27082-1

Book Review by Kam Williams

“If in the era of the trade the enslaved had been forced to forget mother, now their descendants were being encouraged to do the impossible and reclaim her… Under the stewardship of Shell Oil, USAID, and a consortium of North American universities, the Ghanaian Ministry of Tourism and the Museum and Monuments Board crafted a story for the ten thousand black tourists who visited the country every year hungering for knowledge of slave ancestors.
Tourism provided a ready response with a tale of the Atlantic slave trade
as a distinctly African-American story… Local cottage industries in slave route tourism began sprouting up all over Ghana… Every town or village had an atrocity to promote- a mass grave, an auction block, a slave river, a massacre. It was Ghana’s equivalent to a fried chicken franchise.
Few of the tour operators, docents, and guides put any stock in the potted history of the ‘white man’s barbarism’ and the ‘crimes against humanity’ that they marketed to black tourists or believed the Atlantic trade had anything to do with them. They only hoped that slavery would help make them prosperous.”

• Excerpted from Chapter Eight, entitled “Lose Your Mother”

When Saidiya Hartman was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, she decided to spend 1997 in Ghana studying the slave trade. As an African-American, she expected to be welcomed as a long-lost sister upon her arrival on the continent, but says that instead was greeted only by the slur “Obruni” (which means white foreigner) everywhere she went.
Even more disturbing than the ostracizing appellation was the attitude of the indigenous people she encountered, for they either “teased me about searching for my roots” or “responded with indifference to al my talk of slavery” because “they were used to Americans with identity problems.” They even made fun of her having adopted the Swahili name.
Needless to say, this dismissive treatment was a bitter pill to swallow, as it contrasted profoundly with what Saidiya had anticipated encountering on the continent. Yet, she still stuck it out for the full year, conducting rather exhaustive, if emotionally-draining field research which had her making a cross-country trek to visit all sorts of sites having anything to do with slavery, from dungeons to prisons to pens to forts to castles to auction blocks.
The upshot of her efforts is Lose Your Mother, an enigmatic memoir as much about exorcising demons borne of delusion as it is about a futile search for traces of ancestors nowhere to be found. And at every turn, the author, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, found herself a lonely outsider dealing with the anguish stirred up by the ghosts of slavery she senses all around her.
The hard cold truth she discovered was that no one in Africa cared about her profound sadness and emptiness when it came to unearthing her past. Her hosts merely saw her obsession with the slave trade as something to be exploited. In fact, they thought of it as silly, since everybody in Ghana now wants to migrate to America. Thus, as suggested by the book’s title, Saidiya Hartman seems to be saying that it is foolish for other black Americans to think fondly about Africa as their Motherland, because of all the unsympathetic hustlers there who see the returning descendants of slaves not as brothers but as relatively rich honkies to be exploited for their naivete.
Written in a very engaging fashion, this thought-provoking, post-sentimental, and ultimately heartbreaking neo-narrative is a clarion call for a serious attitude readjustment. If embraced, it is likely to lead to an overhaul in Pan-Africanist thinking. For the fundamental question repeatedly raised here by implication is whether African-Americans are more African than American or vice versa. Saidaya provides plenty of anecdotal evidence to support her thesis that the latter just might be the answer.