Legacy Associated with the Slave Trade - Book Report/Review Example

Legacy Associated With The Slave Trade Introduction: Saidiya Hartman, in loose your mother,journeys along a Ghanaian slave trade route,taking on the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast.Reckoning with her genealogy’s blank page;she traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the twentieth century in a captivating narrative.Coming from a background bereft of survivors of her lineage,neither distant relative,she travelled to Ghana practically in search of strangers.Universally,the most acceptable definition of the slave is a stranger practically torn from kin and country in the sense that for one to lose their mother is to suffer the shame of losing their closest kin,and to be forced to inhabit an unfamiliar world is to have to face life as a stranger.Being an offspring of slaves as well as an American in Africa,Hartman carried the baggage of a stranger.Reflecting on history and relying on memory,her epic journey unfold as a heart-warming encounter with places that include a holding cell,a slave market,a walled town build to deter slave raiders and with people:an Akan prince who collaborated with the Portuguese by granting them permission to build the first permanent trading fort in west Africa;an adolescent boy kidnapped while playing;a fourteen year old girl who was murdered aboard a slave ship (Hartman,2008). Saidiya Hartman’s story of retracing the routes of the Atlantic slave trade in Ghana is an authentic and thought-provoking narrative about the ignoble legacy associated with the slave trade from the 16th century to the present times.It is an excellent illustration of what innovative scholarship can do in erecting a powerful pedestal meant to make us better understand our identities and how history shapes them.As a well written book,the writer combines a novelist’s eye for detail: “My appearance confirmed it:I was the proverbial outsider.Who else sported vinyl in the tropics?”with the self-effacing but inwardly aware voice, “On the really bad days,I felt like a monster in a cage with a sign warning: ‘Danger,snarling Negro.Keep away’”. Seemingly,the core of Hartman’s “lose Your Mother” is tailored into nudging our conscious out the dark zone of utter forgetfulness, into the abstract appreciation of the tragedy brought upon the countless,nameless and sadly faceless Africans.Tagging the strings of our sense of scale,she makes us feel and picture the horror of the African slave trade,by immensely measuring the destruction and displacement thereby wrought,through its impact on the individuals-Hartman herself,members of her immediate family that she avoids but thinks about, the Ghanaians she meets while carrying out her field work and ultimately the slaves she imaginatively reconstructs from the slave records (Hartman,2008). Interestingly,her own journey begins as a graduate student,in the volumes of Yale library where she stumbles upon a reference to her maternal great-great-grandmother from a volume of slave testimony from Alabama.However,her moment of serendipity is short-lived by her great-great-grandmother’s reply when asked about what she remembered of being a slave: “Not a thing.“Not surprising,those who were forced into slavery were severed from any connections with family,clan,or memory;and compelled to adapt to new identities as slaves.Slave traders apparently induced the forgetfulness (amnesia),using various potions to subdue their captives(to erase memories of those responsible for imprisoning them),by trauma of captivity,as well as voluntarily by way of survivors choosing to suppress what they remembered of home as it was so painful.This loss of story,and the attendant longing for that “ place”,became the foundation of African culture in America: “This inchoate ,fugitive elsewhere was espoused in their dreams,elaborated in their songs,and imagined as their future;it was expressed in their idiom,which,like themselves,was born of the new country,a blend of African,Native and European elements (Hartman,2008). “Moreover,it also gave birth to romantic notions of Africa: “It is only when you are stranded in a hostile country that you need a romance of origins;it is only when you lose your mother that she becomes a myth;it is only when you fear the dislocation of the new that the old ways become precious,imperiled,and what your great-great-grandchildren will one day wistfully describe as African.” Hartman’s desire to know about slavery is made more difficult seemingly at every turn:grandparents who decline to talk about the subject,parents and a brother who urge her to cast away everything about the past and get on with her life,Ghanaians she encounters who either avoid the subject of slavery completely or make it into something of tourist attraction,over and above,by the huge gaps encountered in her archival work.This makes Hartman respond by what she calls the “non-history” of the slaves,fuelling her drive “to fill in the blank spaces of the historical record and to represent the lives of those deemed unworthy of remembering.” The author selects Ghana as it provides a clear background against which people can vividly picture the manner in which families,religions,towns and culturally rich lives shamefully were cast into a dark void where all traces of identity were effectively erased and lost.Ghana possessed “more dungeons,prisons and slave pens than any other country in west Africa,” she writes. “Nine slave routes traversed Ghana.In following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast,I intend to retrace the process by which lives were destroyed and slaves born.” Besides Hartman “who dreamed of living in Ghana” since college is also drawn by the country’s Pan-African movement ideal by Kwame Nkuruma(the founding president of the country) that since its independence in 1957, invited into the country members of the African diaspora to freely join her rank and file (Hartman, 2008). Hartman,in contemporary Ghana comes into terms with her own fear when she confronts ‘Generational-like despondency’ thus: “I had come to Ghana too late and with too few talents.I couldn’t electrify the country or construct a dam or build houses or clear a road or run a television station or design an urban water system or tend to the sick or improve the sanitation system or revitalize the economy or cancel the debt.No one invited me.I was just…about as indispensable as a heater in the tropics.” No one was willing to talk to herabout slavery.To many Ghanaians the current social and economic challenges were enough troubles to mull over than dabble with old news about slavery.Moreover,it was too painful a memory to those who wanted to evade the shamefulness of collective guilt in remembering the ways that Africans in the former Gold Coast facilitated the slave trade.With a tinge of sorrow,towards the end of her stay in Africa,Hartman has to contend with the fact that she has not found “the signpost that pointed the way to those on the opposite shore of the Atlantic.” She had had nothing in her reconstruction of the lives of particular slaves except to rely primarily on her imagination.However,in the same manner that she gleaned something inher great-great-grandmother’s declination to engage,she catches a glimpse of something far more than “the story I had been trying to find” in a small,walled town in the interior where the slave raids had been resisted: “In Gwolu,it finally dawned on me that those who stayed behind,” those who had been fortunate enough to survive the slave trade, “told different stories than the children of the captives dragged across the sea (Hartman,2008).” Hartman in her narrative,cuts across as being a thoughtful commentator on the perplexing and confounding differences that riddle the majority of impoverished Africans who need and depend on tourism income on one hand,and the group of African Americans who travel to Ghana with the purpose of searching for something deep and more complicated than anything that mere money can buy. Saidiya Hartman’s book is a narrative that epitomizes the fundamental questions that have lingered for centuries but have for a long time tagged at the heart-strings of the collective human psyche.Its focus on what exactly are the memories of the slave trade and its horrors and complexities along the Atlantic shores of the African continent has awakened and renewed attention in relation to the memories still lingering in the minds and hearts of Africa’s diaspora.It has tackled the conundrum that many in the African diaspora face and contendwith when having to look back at a trail-les history for which few, if any records can be found. The story is not only bold but eloquent, and profoundly affecting. “Lose Your Mother” is a powerful and scholarly voyage into history, memory, and the Atlantic slave trade. Reference Hartman, S. V. (2008). Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Read More