Lose Your Mother

A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Saidiya Hartman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

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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).

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Book Excerpts

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Prologue 
The Path of Strangers
 
As I disembarked from the bus in Elmina, I heard it. It was sharp and clear, as it rang in the air, and clattered in my ear making me recoil. Obruni. A stranger. A foreigner from across the sea. Three children gathered at the bus station shouted it, giggling as it erupted from their mouths, tickled to have spotted some extraterrestrial fallen to earth in Ghana. They summoned me, “obruni, obruni,” as if it were a form of akwaaba (welcome), reserved just for me. As the words weaved their way through the crowd and landed on me, I imagined myself

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Praise for Lose Your Mother

“An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery, [Lose Your Mother is] splendidly written, driven by this writer’s prodigious narrative gifts.”—Elizabeth Schmidt, The New York Times Book Review

"This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember. Lose Your Mother is a magnificent achievement." --Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

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About the Author

Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection. She has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and is now a professor at Columbia University. She lives in New York City.

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Available Formats and Book Details

Lose Your Mother
A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
Saidiya Hartman

Trade Paperback

Trade Paperback
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks
January 2008
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780374531157
ISBN10: 0374531153
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 288 pages, Includes 27 Black-and-White Illustrations, Notes, and an Index
$15.00
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Hardcover

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Hardcover
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
January 2007
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780374270827
ISBN10: 0374270821
6 x 9 inches, 288 pages, 27 Black-and-White Illustrations/Notes/Index
$25.00

e-Book Agency

Learn more about this edition
e-Book Agency
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
January 2008
e-Book Agency
ISBN: 9781429966900
ISBN10: 1429966904
288 pages, Includes 27 Black-and-White Illustrations, Notes, and an Index
$9.99
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