Lose Your Mother

I really enjoyed reading Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother but I also had difficulty thinking about it in terms of historical tourism without trying to relate it to the other texts we've read, so I'm afraid you are going to be getting more of a comparative response than an in-depth analysis of Hartman's work on its own.

Hartman is obviously engaging in a form of historical tourism, but it’s a strange, tragic sort of tourist experience. Most examples of tourism that we’ve analyzed have framed the experience as educational or somehow self-improving: by going to see the Maasai warriors or learning how candles were made in Colonial Williamsburg, the tourist gains a wider grasp of the variety of human experiences and and comes away knowing something about a culture’s history. What Hartman and other African Americans who travel to Ghana to experience the slave route sites are looking for is a moment of homecoming, a reconnection with roots previously cut off. When tourism carries that sort of emotional weight the experience ends up driving home all the more intensely how inadequate the act of tourism is.

Hartman’s experience reveals the inherent impossibility of what historical tourism tries to achieve. She goes to Ghana with a vague vision of resolving her history and the experiences of slaves traded across the Atlantic. She acknowledges that she shouldn't expect to feel at home at Ghana but even so every rebuff or reminder of her otherness hurts her. At every place she visits - Elmina Castle, the underground dungeon of Cape Coast Castle, Salaga - she is forced to recognize again and again that the one thing she is searching for, the slave, is absent from the site. Her "tour" of the slave route shows her, and us, that the act of commemorating is always a poor approximation of the thing it commemorates. This is all the more true in places meant to commemorate the slave trade, which is by nature a transient industry. Africans sold into slavery left Africa for the diaspora, so the sites in Africa must commemorate an absence rather than a presence.

In a way, all sites of historical tourism commemorate an absence - Sweet Auburn commemorates a community that has fallen apart, the Holocaust Museum memorializes an act of destruction that was meant to eradicate a people, war re-enactors commemorate a period of time and a form of warfare that is long-gone. In Ghana, however, there is an added element of outsider status; Hartman represents the slaves she is looking for at these sites, taken out of time and then returned to Ghana to find that everything has kept on going without her. Her frustration at realizing that the sites that mean so much to her as the descendant of slaves have evolved into wholly unrelated places for those who remained in Ghana reminded me of something we talked about in conjunction with Linenthal’s book: how Jews who travel to concentration camps in Eastern Europe are often appalled to see locals living comfortably around these sites of trauma and using them for non-commemoration purposes. At the same time, however, they are disturbingly aware that for locals, “trauma” or “death” tourism has become a viable economic opportunity. Hartman has this same realization: an experience that for her is disturbing, traumatic, and full of inherited memory is for her tour guides and African companions an opportunity to improve their financial situation.

A site of historical tourism is meant to freeze time and transport the visitor to a specific moment, but when those sites are integrated into living cities and societies there will always be the tension between those who visit to experience that specific moment and those who live in the shadow of the site their whole lives. Conversely, however, a site removed from a community and time, such as Colonial Williamsburg, will always have to contend with issues of authenticity and accuracy. Hartman’s conflicted relationships with Ghanaians, fueled by the dissonance between what she expects from slave sites and what Ghana sees as worth commemorating is made all the more complex because of her own pre-trip expectation that she might feel at home in Ghana in a way she hadn’t in America.

This has been more of a personal reflection and an opportunity to process my thoughts rather than any sort of organized response with a central point, but I guess I’ll finish with a couple questions: What exactly did Hartman get out of her experience? At the end she says that she feels a sense of connection with an African spirit of rebellion and statelessness, that she finds her Africa in ‘the courage of suicidal girls aboard slave ships,” (234) but what does that mean for her relationship with the sites she has been visiting? She realizes that the slavery stories told in Africa are ones of victory and triumph because they managed to avoid the fate of Hartman’s ancestors, but does that make the gulf between her and the Ghanaians she was hoping to feel a connection to even wider?