41 pages • 1 hour read
Saidiya V. HartmanLose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Come, Go Back, Child”
This chapter makes a complex comparison between the spiritual experience of slavery and Hartman’s position as a returned descendant of enslaved Ghanaians.
She goes to the castle, where several boys approach and hand her letters so well-worn they have clearly been read many times. Intended for returned descendants of enslaved people, the letters request help with various things, such as buying pencils for school. Hartman takes the letters seriously and begins to meditate on their meaning. She recalls the kosanba, a spirit child “who dies only to return again and again in a succession of rebirths” (86). In her view, the boys have mistaken her for a kosanba. They think she is an enslaved person who experienced death and has returned.
At one time, Ghanaian mothers feared their newborns might be the kosanba and be taken back to the land of the dead, so they called their babies bad names, including “slave,” to make them appear worthless. Hartman compares this practice to the behavior of traders who called their slaves “beloved child” (86) to mark their commodities as valuable.
Hartman notes, “‘Don’t go.’ ‘Stay put.’ These are the words of the master” (87). The enslaver wants to keep the enslaved in this foreign, painful condition. Thus, all slave experience is shaped by the notion of “elsewhere” (97). “The slave is always the one missing from home” (87), she writes. Residing in one place, the enslaved person belongs in another. This duality accounts for slave revolts, such as the one that occurred in 1733 in St. John. Former African royals reportedly spoke scornfully to their Dutch enslavers and refused to work. The event was short-lived and easily suppressed. Many of the despairing rebels took their own lives to avoid returning to slavery.
Hartman considers how different generations of Black people relate to or think about their lost homeland: “I shall return to my native land. The children and grandchildren of the rebels might have reiterated the same vow. Inevitably, time did erase the Old World, or, at least blunted its features and silenced its image” (96).
The first generation would experience loss, but as time goes on, each generation forgets, so that finally homeland dissolves into a nebulous idea of “elsewhere” (97), anywhere that is not slavery. “Of course, the children born in the Americas had no other world to forget” (97). Hartman recalls that her father felt no connection to Africa. He traveled the world as a merchant marine and “accepted the peril and promise of being without a country” (99).
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Tribe of the Middle Passage”
Hartman describes the arduous journey across the Atlantic as generating a new tribal identity among enslaved people—one characterized by shared loss. As descendants of enslaved people travel to Ghana in search of their roots, she theorizes that the Tribe of the Middle Passage has returned to a homeland that no longer recognizes them.
Many African Americans who return to Ghana to recover their roots buy or rent expensive homes along the coast, generating resentment among native Ghanaians. But Hartman views these houses as representing a debt—“a history of things owned, stolen, and destroyed” (102). The homes also are a “bittersweet reminder of the freedom they would never enjoy in America” (102). The houses speak of the impossibility of return or of fulfilling the nostalgic dream to recover one’s origins in Africa.
Hartman rents a room in one of the houses. Her landlord is a Black rabbi who, with others, runs an organization called One Africa Productions, which produces The Door of No Return Ceremony—a reenactment event intended for descendants of enslaved people and designed to heal the pains of history. After 30 years, the rabbi, Kohain, has given up the struggle for equality in America. Yet he does not characterize his return to Africa as an act of false optimism. “‘It doesn’t really matter where you live,’ he said. ‘Everywhere in the world African people are in struggle’” (105).
As a young adult, Hartman became radicalized, embraced socialism, and increasingly identified with her African heritage. She changed her name. She dated a young man from the projects, shocking her mother. And she refused a scholarship from a company known for exploiting Black workers in the Southern US. “I wanted to imagine a present not tethered to a long history of defeat” (107), she writes. Now, in coming to Ghana, she wants to find a present untainted by the history of slavery, but that goal proves difficult.
As Hartman sits by the ocean one day, a young Black filmmaker from Atlanta joins her. Like Hartman, Khalid is aware of the tragic nature of the African American position. When he asks how she feels about her return to Ghana, she cries and compares it to a crash in which one’s family is destroyed. He agrees and says it feels like returning to a cemetery. He would never live here.
Hartman and Khalid also discuss the good they see in Ghana. Hartman describes seeing young boys playing soccer. Some have shoes and some do not, so they share pairs. As they run down the field, they each have one shoe. Khalid compares this to Atlanta, where boys are killed for their designer shoes. “They are poor here but less defeated” (109), he concludes.
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
The “middle passage” in the chapter title refers to the route slaves traveled across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the United States. In Chapter 5, Hartman argues that this notoriously grueling journey gave rise to a new tribe—a shared identity among people who had been forcibly uprooted from their families, homelands, and histories. This way of theorizing the journey from Africa to America offers a modicum of hope in the face of Enslavement as Enforced Forgetting: In America, enslaved people and their descendants have forged a new kind of community.
Hartman struggles with the sense that the nature of her project dooms it to failure. She wants to find the truth of slavery, but slavery is characterized by loss and erasure. Slaves stolen from their homes became commodities, severed from their humanity, their histories, and their families. They no longer had fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters; they were orphans, existing nowhere and longing to be elsewhere. The non-identity of the slave means that Hartman’s project of recovery must fail. She compares the erasure to a destructive car crash, the analogy suggesting that what is lost through enslavement cannot be regained.
For the same reason, those African Americans who return to Ghana to reconnect are also doomed to failure. They are outsiders. Their wealth draws resentment, and they themselves represent historic loss. Slavery may have destroyed their ancestors’ lives, but their participation in the US economy separates them from the poorer Ghanaians and the roots they seek. The very thing that allows them to return prevents them from returning.
These conundrums trigger despair in Hartman. There is no present untainted by slavery. Everyone in Ghana works to forget slavery, but when Africans return from America, it becomes impossible not to see its legacy.
