Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route is a nonfiction work in which US literature scholar Saidiya Hartman journeys to Ghana to explore the history of slavery and her ancestry. The book is unique because it is an admission of failure as much as a description of her findings. She concludes that, as an African American, one cannot return to one’s roots because slavery has erased them.

Content Warning: The source text and study guide discuss slavery, racism, racist violence, and sexual violence.

Hartman emphasizes that the colonial trade in enslaved people began as a product of internal power dynamics combined with externally imposed colonialist imperatives. Powerful warrior groups within West Africa had been preying on weaker neighbors and enslaving many of them centuries before European colonists arrived. Under colonialism, slavery became a global economic activity: The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British arrived in Africa and claimed indigenous lands and peoples for themselves. By the end of the 17th century, the Atlantic slave trade, the “seed” of European capitalism that provided free labor and ample wealth, was thriving—and it endured until the 19th century. Its legacy is the large population of descendants of enslaved Africans who live in the Americas and Europe today.