Saidya Hartman Lose Your Mother Analysis

In Lose Your Mother by Saidya Hartman, Hartman gives the reader a unique perspective on the institution of slavery than is often examined. This work begins to question our previous knowledge of the slave trade and forces us to look at the story from a perspective that as a society we may not want to acknowledge. Her work demands a deeper understanding of the institution of slavery be known and no longer allows society to perpetuate the misunderstandings of slavery and Africa that we have been perpetuating since the trade started. Often we are taught slavery from a Western perspective; we discuss how America prospered from the industry and how devastating the institution treated the individuals it captured. However, we selfishly neglect …show more content…
However, Hartman describes the life waiting for Africans after they leave Elmina. Their lives were then indebted to excavating gold stuck in mines hidden away in forests. Hauling goods carried by merchants off the coast into the interior, working the land, tiling soil and harvesting crops. Along with the hard physical labor, slaves were then subjected to sexual abuse at the hands of their owners as well as being expected to labor children to be used in concubines and as wives. They were expected to tend to those who were of royal status by acting as caretakers and catering to their every whim as well as carrying anything they could ever think of needing (pg. 68). All without having to travel the ominous waters to the Americas. Exchanging people within the trade was common throughout Africa because it was a way to make money (pg. 69). Hartman explains that those who reside in Africa claim they did not know how badly whites were treating the slaves they bought and tried to only blame the West for the damage done during the trade. During her time in Ghana, Hartman meets a man who’s family had own slaves. He states that, In Ghana, kinship was the idiom of slavery, and in the United States, race was. The language of kinship absorbed the slave and concealed her identity within the family fold…, whereas the language of races et the slave apart from man and citizen and sentenced her to an interminable servitude” (pg. 73). Often the fact that Africans also owned and traded slaves is neglected. However, Hartman exposes just how involved the trade was even in parts of the world we would never