All This "Talk of Slavery"

At a moment when several countries are commemorating the bicentenary of Britain's abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, Saidiya Hartman has published Lose Your Mother, an unforgettable book that's bound to keep people on both sides of the Atlantic talking for a very long time about slavery's fraught legacies and the complicated meanings of diaspora. Lose Your Mother is a book that blends scholarship with personal history and experience to produce an unapologetically haunting narrative of slavery. It narrativizes Hartman's journey to key Ghanaian sites once central to the transatlantic slave trade: Salaga, the largest nineteenth-century slave market in Ghana; and Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle, two slave dungeons where African men and women were "warehoused" by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British before being shipped to the New World to become plantation slaves. Issues of belonging and irreparable loss mark Hartman's explorations of the impact of the slave trade on African Americans and Ghanaians. An abiding sense of grief and disappointment infuses her reflections on diaspora, kinship, ancestry, and Ghanaian participation in the slave trade, so that her book reads ultimately as both testimony and injunction: "Lose Your Mother."

After writing Scenes of Subjection, a book about United States slavery, Hartman went to Ghana on a Fulbright Fellowship for a year, a choice she says she made because "Ghana possessed more dungeons, prisons, and slave pens than any other country in West Africa" (7).¹ She also sought out Ghana because, despite being born in the United States, she "felt like an alien" in the United States and "had grown weary of being stateless" (4). Like many African American, Caribbean, black Canadian, and black British travelers, Hartman could not resist the magnetic pull of the slave dungeons, perhaps the only sites in West Africa that can be claimed unambiguously by New World blacks as points of origin/departure. These dungeons, each possessing its own infamous "door of no return," are a constant contemporary attraction for diasporic blacks because their portals were the miserable archways out of Africa, the last sliver of the continent and anything akin to "homeland" that Africans would have touched or seen before being imprisoned in slave ships bound for the Americas.

In the sixties, too, before the slave castles became sites of contemporary pilgrimage for diasporic blacks, Ghana had an international allure. A steady stream of transnational activists and Pan-African revolutionaries, weary of colonialism and state-sanctioned forms of exploitation and disenfranchisement, fled to the "mother land" harboring freedom dreams. They accepted Kwame Nkrumah's invitation to settle in Ghana, hoping that his political plans for global black liberation and an anti-colonial African state would yield them some measure of the freedom and respect they had been continually denied. This was W. E. B. Du Bois's stance in 1961 when he went into self-exile in Ghana. Earlier, in 1954, the famous writer Richard Wright spoke passionately, if sometimes skeptically, in his acclaimed book Black Power about the possibilities for anti-colonial freedom struggle and productive political change in Ghana: "the fight will be long, new, unheard of, necessitating a weighing of life in terms that modern man has not yet thought of," Wright argued.² Many might say the same is true today, and many blacks who continue to go to West Africa, whether as tourists or émigrés, view it not only as a crucial or missing link to their ancestral identity, but as a vital link to their spiritual redemption, rebirth, and liberation. In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman takes a different view, one no less interested in black liberation and the possibilities of transformation but staunchly skeptical nonetheless of all-too-easy avowals of kinship and brotherhood that disavow the violence of the transatlantic slave trade and the millions it murdered and displaced.

Where others have gone to Ghana before her to be "healed" or to forge connections, Hartman's concern is with disconnections—those moments of rupture, or decalage, as...