Because of the slave trade you lose your mother, if you know your history, you know where you come from. To lose your mother was to be denied your kin, country, and identity. To lose your mother was to forget you past."(Hartman 85)
This powerful statement was rendered in the letter of the adolescent boy named Isaac who waited outside the entrance of the Elmina castle. I wanted to begin here as it seems to sum up the critical themes pertinent to understanding Hartman's journey to Ghana. To be certain this is a personal journey with public significance. Underlying the desire of Hartman to “fill in the gaps” of her own family history is the equally important desire of finding a place for herself within the twenty-first century. As Hartman writes, “I am a reminder that twelve million crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the past is not yet over. I am the progeny of the captives. I am the vestige of the dead. And history is how the secular world attends to the dead.”(18) The past is not over because its wounds have not yet healed. As Hartman continues, “If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black Americans, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus, and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.”(6) Hartman like the millions of other African Americans who yearn for Africa have what Robin D. G. Kelley would call Freedom Dreams—dreams of Africa as a refuge for a type of freedom not to be seen in the United States of America. What Hartman, and I would argue many others like her who make the “freedom trek” to Africa soon realize however, is that the Africa imagined in their dreams is just that, imagined. Imagination however, is critical beyond its correspondence to reality. It is the means through which the inheritors of family histories make sense of the gaps and silences of events rendered “too horrendous to represent.” Hartman in this way is comparable to the re-enactors of “War Games” who used re-enacting as a way to live the silenced histories created by their forbearers. Hartman in the opening views herself as a heroic figure who interprets her decision to embark on the journey of no traces, to “liberate” her grandparents from what she assumed to be the limited confines of a ruptured history.
In the text, Hartman infuses her personal journey to Ghana with the history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The history of the slave trade and slavery in North America serves to fill in the gaps of Hartman’s own experience in Ghana. As readers, we are imaginatively ushered into a present landscape of Ghana that while devoid of many markings of its past, is richly layered as a dynamic site that Hartman wills to not forget. It is this known history of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade however, that in many ways blinds Hartman to the unknown history and present state of Africa. It is the unknown that Hartman metaphorically represents through the conceptualization of “darkness.” As Hartman writes, “I lived in darkness, not the darkness of African inscrutability or the gloomy cast of a benighted landscape but rather a blind alley of my own making, in the deep hole if my ignorance.”(174) Hartman’s ignorance lies in her “compromised sight” or myopic vision of Ghana seen through a selected lens of Western privilege. In embracing the darkness figuratively, Hartman is made to see. As Hartman writes, “As I made my way through streets, familiar and unknown, the people hidden from view and the things I had failed to notice now bumped into me in the night.” (175) Because much of Hartman’s experience is narrated in the comforts of the light, this moment of embracement with darkness is made all the more significant, as it reveals that made inaudible—the commoners of Ghana. The irony of Hartman’s blindness to the commoners of Ghana is that it was the commoners of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade who Hartman wanted to resuscitate through her journey to Ghana.
The renewed vision of Hartman, enabled through traversing the dark streets of Ghana, precludes the final realization of her journey at Gwolu. It is here that Hartman realizes the dual narratives of the slave trade. As Hartman writes, “In Gwolu, it finally dawned on me that those who stayed behind told different stories than the children of the captives dragged across the sea.”(232) Hartman, who in the opening fashioned herself as a child of the captives, implicates herself within the narrative told across the sea. In Hartman’s desire for a story of defeat told through the language of the conquered she almost missed the story of survival told in Ghana through the language of the triumphant. What Hartman learned through Gwolu is that “…identities sometimes had to be jettisoned in order to invent new ones. Your life just might depend on this capacity for self-fashioning. Naming oneself anew was sometimes the price exacted by the practice of freedom.”(233) It is this yearning for freedom that defies the distance between Hartman, as well as other African Americans, and the Ghanaian citizens. The legacy that Hartman possesses as her own is that of the fugitive. This point is critical as it seems to construct a platform from which Hartman demystifies the past as a potential platform of conversation between transnational fugitives. The stateless freedom dream overcomes the divide between insiders and outsiders of the histories told across the borders.
By the end, Hartman is named “Sister,” she has entered the “circle” to which she assumed she was previously denied as an Obruni, through her place in the Diaspora. The song sang by the young girls on Gwolu is now “her song” of her “lost tribe.” I found this scene to be critical in light of Hartman’s pre-Ghana intentions to recover the past through place. The presumed “defeat” of her grandparents was owned by Hartman. This “defeat” was heard in listening to her family’s stories for the unspeakable. In listening to silence Hartman missed, as she realizes through the listened song at Gwolu, that which had and continues to be spoken. The unspeakable is what she, and many African Americans who traverse to the Slave Castles of West Africa are looking for in order to sooth the repeatedly opened wounds of slavery in an often unforgiving present. Hartman’s desire and I would argue many African American’s desire to “liberate” their ancestors from the limits of their imaginings of freedom, is a self-named responsibility. The responsibility of faithfully rendering the past for Hartman, beyond its surfaced importance to her family becomes the means through which she is able to self-fashion her own relationship to the past and the present.
Before I end I wanted to include a brief background on some of the concepts referenced by Hartman in “Lose your mother” that I think are significant.
Naming
When Hartman includes the piece about the ability of self-naming as an outcome “…exacted by the price of freedom,” she is referencing the trend of many African Americans, post-emancipation, to change their names to correspond with their new status as freedmen. As many may already know, during slavery the act of naming was typically done by the slave masters. Post-emancipation, the first thing that many African Americans did was to change their names. The act of naming is, as Sadiya’s re-naming reveals, still a critical act of freedom-declaration employed by African Americans today.
Denied Paternity- Constructed Kinlessness
To be a slave in Africa and in the New World was to be denied authorized kinship. As best articulated by writer Hortense J. Spillers in “Mama’s baby, Papa’s maybe,” kinlessness or rather, the constructed kinlessness presumes the fashioning of human beings as property. This constructed kinlessness ultimately serves two purposes, 1) it allows the captor to assume the voice of the de-voiced captive slaves and 2) it serves as a tool of the captor to undermine the African female’s reproductive capacity for mothering. The enslaved in this instance is deemed an orphan denied of any genetic link. On this contention, Spillers argues, “The denied genetic link becomes the chief strategy of an undenied ownership, as if the interrogation into the father’s identity—the blank space where his proper name will fit—were answered by the fact, de jure of a material possession”(398). When you lose your mother, you lose ties with the only official genetic link recognized under slavery. As Spillers writes, “The destructive loss of the natural mother, whose biological/genetic relationship to the child remains unique and unambiguous, opens the enslaved young to social ambiguity and chaos: the ambiguity of his/her fatherhood and to a structure of other relational elements, now threatened, that would declare the young’s connection to a genetic historic future by way of his siblings” (398). It is for this reason that the diasporic connection forged between Sadiya Hartman and Ghana in the ending is all the more significant. The importance of the mother can also be further revealed in the common metaphoric representation of Africa as "she." This can be heard in phrases heard throughout the Diaspora like "Mama Africa," The motherland, etc.
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