Lose your mother

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Hartman, S. (2007) Lose your mother: A journey along the atlantic slave route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Contents

Prologue: The path of strangers

  • Slave, "stranger"
  • "In order to betray your race, you had to first imagine yourself as one" (5)
  • Africans selling other Africans into slavery were not "selling out" brothers and sisters
    • No "African" racial identification
  • African as a race emerges from enslaved people in search of kin, solidarity (6)
    • At the same time as it is used to dominate and brutalize by Europeans
  • Slavery "made the past a mystery, unknown and unspeakable" (14)
  • Challenges of archival research regarding slavery
    • Commercial records, ships' manifests, receipts (17)
    • Oral histories later recorded reflect "warring" desires: to remember, to forget (16)

Jump offs

  • Alex Haley, traced genealogy to Juffure, "lost son" (7)

One: Afrotopia

People mentioned in this chapter

  • Thomas Sankara
    • Figure in Ghana's independence (24-25)
    • Dream of a White House in Harlem (30)
  • Wilks, Van Dantzig, McCaskie
    • Scholars writing about slavery from Ghana ? (27)
  • Walter Rodney
    • Ruling classes joined hands with Europeans to exploit the "African massess" (30)
  • List of many black intellectuals who traveled to/thru Ghana in 50s/60s (36-37)

Nkrumah

  • "liberator of black people worldwide" (34)
  • experienced Jim Crow as a student (36)
  • imagined a u.s. of africa (36)
  • Took power in Ghana as an autocrat, leader for life
  • Ousted by CIA after less than a decade (37)
  • Divisive figure, beloved outside of Ghana, largely despised within (38)

Dispossession

"I was black and a history of terror had produced that identity." (40)
  • Mary Ellen, no longer calling herself African-American after years in Ghana (29)
  • Meaning of "African-" as a prefix
    • A sign of which Africa? Imagined past, future, present?
    • Many layered, many peopled country
    • No unified African identity prior to the mass enslavement of Africans by Europeans

Death context of slave trade

  • For every slave who made it to Americas, 1-5 died

The Eden of Ghana

  • Black expatriates from the US
  • Optimistic nation-building (37)
  • 1950s-60s
  • Idealizing a progressive country of egalitarian ideas, post-colonial
  • Marcus Garvey's vision of a unified African diaspora
    • A dream that did not resonate with Hartman's post-civil rights experience in the US (39)
  • After coup, many fled out of fear of persecution (38)

Hartman's return

  • Not the optimistic project of the exceptional
  • Not a return home or search for family
  • "For me, the rupture was the story" (42)
  • For previous visitors (Angelou, etc) obscuring the slave history was necessary to fitting in
    • "Kinship was as much about exclusion as affiliation. As it turned out, eluding the slave past was the prerequisite to belonging." (42)
  • Loneliness at realizing that ultimately one is not African (46)

Dead Eden

  • Ghanians debate whether or not they were better off under colonial rule (45)
  • Ghana does not print its own currency
  • Enmeshed in debt programs orchestrated by World Bank and IMF (45)

Gold : Shit

  • "Mounds of waste were also the testament of pillage and exchange" (47)
  • People always enslaved to deal with "filthy work"
  • Gold traded for people, then fashioned into chamber pots

Jump offs

Two: Markets and martyrs

Elmina

  • Named by Portuguese traders ("El Mina") for its gold (51)
  • Initially, Ghanians were not enslaved but purchased slaves from Kongo and Benin (51)
    • Portuguese sailors/traders were middlemen
    • Slaves were more valuable in Gold Coast/Ghana than Lisbon/Portugal
  • In 1637, Dutch take over castle at Elmina (52)
    • Demand for labor in American colonies sharply increases demand for enslaved people from Africa
    • At end of the 17th c., slavery becomes more lucrative than gold (52)

Slave scars fade

  • Slave history no more visible in quotidian Elmina than in "Boston or Rhode Island or Charleston" (54)

Meeting of Azambuja (Portugal), Caramansa (Gold Coast) in 1482

  • Azambuja explained intent to create a storehouse
    • Interpreted from Portuguese by an enslaved African person
    • Caramansa, "friends who met occasionally remained better friends than if they were neighbors" (61)
  • Elmina Castle was built
    • No one knows exactly what was said in the meeting
  • Catholicism spreading throughout African royalty
    • King Dom Affonso of Kong (mani-Congo) converted in 1490 (64)
    • Enslaved women from Benin branded with a cross (63)

Saint George

  • Patron saint of the Portuguese violence (64-65)
  • Knight, martyr, and sufferer
  • Remembered by Catholic slavers for his torture and miraculous survival

Ill-fit of Catholicism to the experience of enslaved Africans

  • Slavery as a "rebirth" into dead-man-walking status (68)
  • Further torture and death held no promise or hope or fulfillment of prophecy as it might have for St. George
  • "Slavery annulled lives, transforming men and women into dead matter, and then resuscitated them for servitude." (68)

Pieza

  • Pieza is "a mercantile unit of human flesh" (68)
    • Healthy adult male is the standard == 1
    • Elderly, young, infirm may count for less than 1

Importance of mourning

  • Professional mourners may be hired (70)
  • Dead who are not sufficiently mourned may return to haunt the living (70)
  • Who mourned the losses of the slave trade?

Ghanian descendents of slaves

  • Ghanians alternately recount 10s of generations of ancestors
    • And remain silent about their own histories in the slave trade
  • Memories of slavery seem to involve
    • Being ashamed of an enslaved ancestor, in which case one does not speak of it (72)
    • Or vaguely at peace with a slave-owning ancestor, not a point of pride but somewhat better than the alternative
  • "Terror" relegated to the American experience (72)

Three: The family romance

Tracing ones genealogy back to an owner

  • Owners instead of fathers, offspring instead of heir (77)

Norms and habits of Dutch slavery

  • 4th largest exporter of slaves
  • 477,782 reported between 1630-1794; 89,000 from Gold Coast (78)
  • Enslaved people twice branded (79)
  • Fatherhood by owners was not possible (80)
    • Children born to enslaved women effectively had no father
    • Matrilinial kinship out of crisis, violence, dispossession (81)

Branding as an emblem of kinship

"The mark of property provides the emblem of kinship in the wake of defacement. It acquires the character of a personal trait, as though it were a birthmark" (80)

Four: Come, go back, child

Love cannot be separated from dispossession

"The origins of [the derogatory word for "slave" in Akan], odonkor are in the words "love" (odo) and "don't go" (nti nka). Odo nti nka: because of my love for you, don't go." (87)
  • "Owning persons and claiming kin are one and the same" (87)
  • Traces of slave transience in the contemporary Black experience of "home" (87)
    • "It's why one hundred square blocks of Los Angeles can be destroyed in an evening." (87)

Luxury and dispossession

"Who else but a rich American could afford to travel so far to cry about her past? Looking at me, the boys wished their ancestors had been slaves. If so, they would be big men." (89)

Mina slaves revolt in St. John, 1733

  • Prior to fall of the Bastille (July 14, 1789), "revolution" implied a return or restoration (91)
  • Amina rebels drew from the Akwamu ruling elite
    • Akwamu principal exporting state on Gold Coast from 1680-1730
    • Torn apart by civil war after a king enslaved some of his subjects to repay debts (92)
  • Amina slaves had reputation of being rebellious (92)
    • Not righteous fist of egalitarian idealists, but "complaints of the entitled and boasts of the superior." (93)
    • They didn't destroy the plantations because they planned to rule them (w/ slaves) after the successful rebellion (94)
  • "Had they been willing to refashion their identities, would the other slaves have joined them?" (94)
    • This would have required a relinquishing of the past that motivated their present revolt
    • The Amina were not animated by visions of a new future (96)

Needing a romance of origins

"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." (98)
  • How is a past lost?
  • Children hear stories of a homeland
  • Stories beget myths, fantasy (98)

Five: The tribe of the middle passage

"The rich ones have come too late" (101)

  • Homes in Elmina owned by African-American expats
    • Disparity between these dwellings and the typical domicile of the local population
    • Further emphasizes the sense that enslavement in the Americas is an advantage
  • African-Americans are "tenants", not returning sons and daughters (104)

"Evangelicals were welcome, protesters need not apply" (104)

  • Relevance of the Pentacostal missionary (104)
    • Beyond behavior+appearance, how is that belief system a better fit?
    • A better fit than Catholicism?

Jump offs

  • Sankofa, film about Slavery set in Elmina Castle
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