When looking at the memoir, Hartman made some theoretical and literary and theoretical contributions to the understanding and knowledge of slavery. She works and tries to give full detail on the "non-history" of slavery. She rises the fact that slavery is slowly starting to successfully erase any form of writing an intelligible past. Hartman’s writing style involves her weaving her creative mind, historical construction, and even her own biography. Hartman goes to Africa to evoke and explore the emptiness of black experience. This experience was on in which the captive became a slave, dislocated from Africa, and became silenced and alienated from individuality.
