Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.68 (675 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0374270821 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-04-19 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
She retraces the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy.There were no survivors of Hartman's lineage, nor far-flung relatives in Ghana of whom she had come in search. Her reflections on history and memory unfold as an intimate encounter with places--a holding cell, a slave market, a walled town builtto repel slave raiders--and with people: an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to build the first permanent trading fort in West Africa; an adolescent boy who was kidnapped while playing; a fourteen-year-old girl who was murdered aboard a slave ship.Eloquent, thoughtful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a powerf
"Brilliant one." according to anÃÂuk. I am only half way through the book but since the very first pages I have found it difficult to put Loose Your Mother down. Captivating, brilliant, and necessary.. Roots 2.0 Robert W. Kellemen What "Roots" was to the Boomer Generation, "Lose Your Mother" could and should be to the Generation Next. Saidiay Hartman's writing styles fits perfectly for a generation that longs for and loves narrative, story, and first-hand journal accounts.However, no one should thus assume that Hartman's writing lacks research credibility for she brilliantly weaves both rousing narrative and copious research to portray a powerful picture of one of history's ugliest . Five Stars Excellent
Chronicling her time in Ghana following the overland slave route from the hinterland to the Atlantic, Hartman admits early on to a naïve search for her identity: "Secretly I wanted to belong somewhere or, at least, I wanted a convenient explanation of why I felt like a stranger." Fortunately, Hartman eschews the simplification of such a quest, finding that Africa's American expatriates often find themselves more lost than when they started. Instead, Hartman channels her longing into facing tough questions, nagging self-doubt and the horrors of the Middle Passage in a fascinating, beautifully told history of those millions whose own histories were revoked in "the process by which lives were destroyed and slaves born." Shifting between past and present, Hartman also considers the "afterlife of slavery," revealing Africa-and, through her transitive experience, America-as yet unhealed by de-colonization and abolition, but showing sig