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 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Markets and Martyrs”
Hartman visits Elmina, the location of the infamous castle where enslaved people were kept before being transported to other countries. Now it is a modern marketplace, and she is struck by the way Ghanaians are consumed with everyday commerce. Sellers sit at tables with their goods displayed. Shoppers stroll by and bargain. Wealthy people drive past in Range Rovers. To Hartman, it is strange that people are so focused on the present and immune to the message of the past: “It was to my eyes a terrible beauty. It didn’t seem right that this prodigal and teeming display of life brushed against the walls of a slave warehouse and failed to notice it” (50). Ghanaians do not seem to know or care that the emblem of slavery stands so close by.
The market reminds Hartman of gold, and she describes the way the search for gold brought the Portuguese to Africa’s west coast in the 16th century. Initially, the Portuguese colonialists were not interested in enslaved people, but they learned that if they bought enslaved people from African royalty elsewhere and brought them to the “Gold Coast,” they could sell them for gold to other Africans. “The exchange between persons and things, or property rights exercised in people, were common modes of acquiring wealth in Africa” (69). By 1600, the Portuguese had enslaved 500,000 Africans. By 1700, the number had grown to 2 million. The traffic in souls was booming. Most were sent to Europe and other parts of Africa. By the end of the 18th century, there were 60 markets in Ghana dedicated to the trade of enslaved people.
Hartman recounts the mythical story of the first agreement between a European and an African. The leader of the first Portuguese expedition, Diego de Azambuja, met with King Caramansa, of a local African tribe, on the beach near where Elmina is now, and they supposedly agreed to engage in trade. As a result, people became pieza, a piece of currency that could be traded. An enslaved man might be worth a woman and two children, for example.
Hartman tries to understand why contemporary Ghanaians care so little about this history. She does recognize the hard lives many lead; unemployment is 30% and simply surviving is difficult. “With a shrug of resignation, a taxi driver or clerk or seamstress would tell me that Ghanaians had too many pressing concerns in everyday life to ruminate about the past” (71). She understands: Who has time to reflect on the horrors of the past when the present is so difficult? In addition, many Ghanaians feel that colonialism helped them become modern; they became literate and were introduced to Christianity. Many Pentecostal Christians especially feel colonialism was a benefit to Ghana. Some express pride that their ancestors owned enslaved people, viewing this as a mark of their family’s high social status. Their only regret is that the wealth acquired from the slave trade did not last. On the other hand, those who are ashamed of the past often do not wish to recall it.
Hartman realizes once again that she is obruni here, a stranger. The Ghanaians are Africans, not African Americans—their history is very different from hers. They boast of family lines going back many generations, while the descendants of enslaved people sent to the Americas have no similar history. They are the products of a giant erasure that occurred when their ancestors were taken away from Africa. Hartman notices that the castle has a new coat of white paint, which she views as a metaphor for painting over the history of slavery.
Hartman also struggles with cross-cultural communication and identity in Africa. A stranger refers to her using the n-word, asking her whether this is the correct word to use for an African American, and Hartman feels hurt that her dream of finding a land where she would no longer be unequal and dispossessed is fading. Here, too, she is branded with words of shame.
Ultimately, Hartman wants to feel united with Ghanaians because of their shared history of enslavement, but she cannot—because some Africans preyed on others and sold them into slavery.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Family Romance”
The chapter title, “The Family Romance,” refers to the romantic idea that stable lineages and birth lines exist for all. For the descendants of enslaved people, that idea is mythical. Family lines for enslaved people were broken: “Our genealogy added up to little more than a random assortment of details about alcoholics, prosperous merchants, and dispassionate benefactors” (77), Hartman writes.
Enslaved women were routinely subjected to sexual exploitation. Hartman calls out a “classic story of slavery” that blames enslaved women for the actions of their white rapists, a story in which a white man “succumbs to the evil of the peculiar institution and a wretched dark woman ‘lays herself low to his lust’” (77). Meanwhile, Black fathers disappear into anonymity, while white fathers are present in the names they give their children with enslaved women. Without a Black father, the children of Black women and white fathers have no real lineage or genealogy. They inherit the condition of enslavement rather than benefitting from their partly white origins, and they are cut off from their white past.
In Hartman’s own family, the white side tries to pay the Black side to stop using the Hartman name. No one is sure where the name came from anyway—supposedly from a Jewish merchant. Hartman discovers in Curaçao, where enslaved laborers were rebranded for sale, that she has a grandfather with the surprising name Maduro. She also has a string of female relatives who are Van Eikers.
Chapters 2-3 Analysis
Looking for her origins in Africa, Hartman sees few tangible signs that they ever existed. This absence of any record of her family history is evidence of Enslavement as Enforced Forgetting. The title of Chapter 3, “The Family Romance,” suggests that, for descendants of enslaved people, the idea of a stable and knowable family history is fiction—a fantasy that can never be fulfilled in the real world. In countless ways, enslavers seek to erase any link to the enslaved person’s past. Hartman uses the market in Elmina as a symbol of how this erasure continues in the present: Elmina is a place where, not long ago, enslaved people were held captive before being shipped to the Americas. Now it is a bustling, modern marketplace where, Hartman implies, people are much too focused on making money in the present to worry about how money was made in the past.
Increasingly, Hartman feels unable to relate to the Africans whose ancestors did not experience slavery. Their histories have not been broken as hers has. They often have little property or wealth, but they have a sense of connection to a knowable past and sometimes view their ancestors’ role in enslaving other Africans as a source of pride. By contrast, descendants of enslaved people have incomplete family histories. As Hartman explores her family history, she finds that even surnames like Hartman are unstable, evidence of Enslavement as Enforced Forgetting. As the system of slavery seeks to transform human beings into property, it strips them of all connection to family and homeland. Hartman, like many other descendants of enslaved people, is unable to trace her surname to its origin and thus find the first ancestors who lived in America. It is possible the name was borrowed for no biological reason at all. White enslavers routinely raped Black women, so many descendants are mixed race. Instances of sexual predation often preclude any coherent lineage or genealogy.
For Hartman, this means that she has not only lost touch with her African ancestry but also with a clear line of descent from even her white ancestors. She repeatedly comes face-to-face with an orphan-like identity that stems from the African American slave experience, demonstrating the truth of what she says in the prologue: “The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger” (5).
