Lose Your Mother

To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, to inhabit the wolrd as an outsider. Seeking her own origins, Saidiya Hartman follows a slave route back to Ghana, tracing the history of the Atlantic trade. But there are no known survivors of her lineage, no relatives to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers. A genre-straddling masterpiece of historical travel writing. Lose Your Mother confronts the impossibility of return for the descendants of the enslaved and, with courageous candour, reckons their enduring losses.