LOSE YOUR MOTHER, a journey along the Atlantic slave route

270pp., illus., paperback, London, 2021

First published in the USA in 2007.

Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana.

“An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery ... splendidly written, driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts.” Elizabeth Schmidt, The New York Times Book Review

“This is a memoir about loss, alienation, and estrangement, but also, ultimately, about the power of art to remember ... a magnificent achievement.” Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection, Wayward Lives and Beautiful Experiments. She is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Prior to this appointment she was Professor in the Department of English and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a MacArthur fellowship in 2019. She lives in New York City.