As we gather to read Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, here are some conceptual threads for tracing transversal operations through the book. These are also concepts from which we will begin our group conversation à la emissary (following Ronald’s proposition for Daughters of the Dust). Please feel free to add any that you happen to notice (forces of thought-action that animate the narrative and bring it to life).
Here it was— my song, the song of the lost tribe. I closed my eyes and I listened. (Hartman)
1. Stranger
A stranger is like water running over the ground after a rainstorm: it soon dries up and leaves no traces.
“Stranger” is the X that stands in for a proper name. It is the placeholder for the missing, the mark of the passage, the scar between native and citizen. It is both an end and a beginning.It announces the disappearance of the known world and the antipathy of the new one. And the longing and the loss redolent in the label were as much my inheritance as they were that of the enslaved.
Being a stranger concerns not only matters of familiarity, belonging and exclusion, but as well involves a particular relation to the past.
What we chose to disclose and what we withheld was determined as much by who we were— strangers meeting in a square— as by who we feigned to be— a singular we. The story that unfolded was less about what happened then than it was a way of navigating our present. Telling it over and over again, we hoped to discover a way of changing our lives.
2. Freedom (Disposession)
“The free people of Ghana may be able to strike the last of the shackles from their brothers in America.”
The narrative of liberation had ceased to be a blueprint for the future.
I knew that no matter how far from home I traveled, I wouldnever be able to leave my past behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a history of terror had produced that identity.
The slave and the master understand differently what staying implies. The transience of the slave’s existence still leaves its traces in how black people imagine home as well as how we speak of it. We may have forgotten our country, but we haven’t forgotten our dispossession.
This inchoate, fugitive elsewhere was espoused in their dreams, elaborated in their songs, and envisaged as their future; it was expressed in an idiom, which, like themselves, was born of the new country, a blend of African, Native, and European elements. “Possessing nothing,” according to Wilson Harris, “but breath and the calamitous air of broken ties in the New World,” enslaved Africans sustained, amended, and abandoned the customs, manners, and proclivities of the Old World. They created a new language out of the languages they had known and the languages foisted upon them. They danced the old dances for new purposes. They built dwellings like the ones in which they had lived with new materials. They remembered and renamed old gods and invented and adopted new ones. Cleavage— the separation from and clinging to the Old World— gave rise not only to dispossession but as well to a new set of possibilities.
I shall return to my native land. Those disbelieving in the promise and refusing to make the pledge have no choice but to avow the loss that inaugurates one’s existence. It is to be bound to other promises. It is to lose your mother, always.
3. Architecture / Monuments / Holds
Monuments, like graves, are intended to preserve the dead and to suspend the past. But everything I could see refuted this. I still thought of the castle as a tomb, but if it were, then where were the mourners? Didn’t a gravesite require the company of the bereaved?
“Africa was a land of graves without bodies.”
No one I spoke with could recall asking a parent about the edifices that lorded over the coast, or shared with me an adolescent adventure about scaling the walls of the castle, sneaking across the bridge, peering into the moat, or dashing through the courtyard.
The slave hold was burrowed deep in the earth. Unlike the Portuguese who originally built Elmina Castle to store nonhuman goods, the British designed Cape Coast Castle to warehouse slaves.
“The castle looks very fine from the sea,” wrote the French trader Jean Barbot in 1681, but “the most noteworthy item is the slave-house, which lies below ground. It consists of large vaulted cellars, divided into several apartments, which can easily hold a thousand slaves… The keeping of the slaves thus under ground is a good security to the garrison.”
The interior of the dungeon exposed an open wound of earth, and the roughly hewn walls perspired, making the chamber dank. The cells were hollowed out of the rocky deposit of a hillside, which had been a sacred shrine devoted to the local pantheon of gods.
The arched ceiling of the vault and the tubular shape of the connecting cells resembled a large intestine. Walking from one end of the dungeon to the other, I did feel as though the castle were ingesting me, as though I were inching my way along the entrails of power.
No one imprisoned in the dungeon of Cape Coast Castle had ever described it. There was no record left behind by the captives who entered and exited the underground. Not a single account.
4. Time (the afterlife of slavery)
They were baffled that what had happened more than a century ago could still hurt me, although the same individuals recited proudly their family genealogies back ten and eleven generations.
Whenever we had our “what’s wrong with the race” conversation, my brother would punctuate his argument with, “Slavery was a long time ago.” I would answer back about the uneven playing field, the disparity between white and black wealth, racial profiling, the war being waged against the poor, and the prison system.
I shall return to my native land. The children and grandchildren of the rebels might have reiterated the same vow. Inevitably, time did erase the Old World or, at least, blunted its features and silenced its image. No doubt there were also those who chose to “murder the memory” because it was easier that way. Forgetting might have made it less painful to bear the hardships of slavery and easier to accept a new life in a world of strangers. Perhaps it wasn’t a choice at all, and the past slowly disappeared over the course of years, or the shock of enslavement destroyed it in one fell swoop. How long did it take for the mother tongue to be eradicated by a new language? Was the ephemera of everyday life— the pat and scratch of women’s feet in the compound at dawn, the low rustle of reeds in the lagoon, the rhythm and nonsense of childhood games, the murmur of trees at nightfall, the mutter of wakeful spirits, the charcoal skies of harmattan, the aroma of boiled cassava, the spire of anthills, or the amber color of grasslands in midafternoon— the first thing to disappear or the only thing that lasted?
Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on “what happened then” than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell.
The only part of my past that I could put my hands on was the filth from which I recoiled, layers of organic material pressed hard against a stone floor.
I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it.
Everyone told me a different story about how the slaves began to forget their past. Words like “zombie,” “sorcerer,” “witch,” “succubus,” and “vampire” were whispered to explain it. In these stories, which circulated throughout West Africa, the particulars varied, but all of them ended the same— the slave loses mother. Never did the captive choose to forget; she was always tricked or bewitched or coerced into forgetting. Amnesia, like an accident or a stroke of bad fortune, was never an act of volition.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I replied. “Why did they want the ones who had forgotten to return?”
5. Kinship (Master/Slave)
In Ghana, kinship was the idiom of slavery, and in the United States, race was. The language of kinship absorbed the slave and concealed her identity within the family fold (at least that was the official line), whereas the language of race set the slave apart from man and citizen and sentenced her to an interminable servitude. But, as I found out, the line between masters and slaves was no less indelible, even when it wasn’t a color line.
The lines of division between kin and stranger, neighbor and alien, became hard and fast during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. It decided who lived and died, who was sold and who was protected. In Ghana, slavery wasn’t a rallying cry against the crimes of the West or the evils of white men; to the contrary, it shattered any illusions of a unanimity of sentiment in the black world and exposed the fragility and precariousness of the grand collective we that had yet to be actualized.
The stories my aunts shared were offered as an antidote to shame and they esteemed a web of intimacy and filiation outside the law of paternal sanction.
Love makes a place for the stranger; it domesticates persons from “outside of the house” and not “of the blood”; it assuages the slave’s loss of family; it remakes slaveholders as mothers and fathers. Owning persons and claiming kin are one and the same; so love cannot be separated from dispossession or property in persons. Affection perhaps softens the sting of dishonor but does not erase it. The slave does not enjoy the rights and entitlements of “royals” and “nobles,” those who are the legitimate heirs of the lineage. Love extends the cover of belonging and shrouds the slave’s origins, which lie in acts of violence and exchange, but it doesn’t remedy the isolation of being severed from your kin and denied ancestors.
It is only when you are stranded in a hostile country that you need a romance of origins; it is only when you lose your mother that she becomes a myth; 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.
6. Beloved
WICS25 or T99— no one wants to identify her kin by the cipher of slave-trading companies, or by the brand, which supplanted identity and left only a scar in its place. I’m reminded of the scene in Beloved in which Sethe’s mother points to her mark, the circle and cross burned on her rib, and says to her daughter, “This is your ma’am… If something happens to me and you can’t tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark.” 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.
To lose your mother was to be denied your kin, country, and identity. To lose your mother was to forget your past. The letters distilled the history of the transatlantic slave trade to this: I was an orphan.
PARTUS SEQUITUR VENTREM— the child follows in the condition of the mother. The bill of sale includes “future increase,” so that even the unborn were fettered. “Mothers could only weep and mourn over their children,” according to the ex-slave Mary Prince, “they could not save them.” The stamp of the commodity haunts the maternal line and is transferred from one generation to the next. The daughter, Sethe, will carry the burden of her mother’s dispossession and inherit her dishonored condition, and she will have her own mark soon enough, as will her daughter Beloved.
The comings and goings of the spirit child aggrieve its mother. The first eight days after a child is born are filled with anxiety, because the mother hasn’t yet discovered if her infant is a wandering ghost rather than a human child. To prevent the child from dying again and returning to the spirit world, she attempts to trick the forces that would claim its life. So the mother marks the infant to make it ugly or she names the child odonkor— slave— fettering the child to keep her in the world. Or she scars the child with the tribal markings of the slave class. This sleight-of-hand convinces the spirits that the child’s life is not valuable and thus not worth taking. Mothers, disavowing their love, have called their children donkor (slave) in order to save them, while slaveholders have called their property “beloved child” in order to protect their wealth.
It was a world in which blackness too often translated into “no human involved.”
Here it was— my song, the song of the lost tribe. I closed my eyes and I listened. (Hartman)
1. Stranger
A stranger is like water running over the ground after a rainstorm: it soon dries up and leaves no traces.
“Stranger” is the X that stands in for a proper name. It is the placeholder for the missing, the mark of the passage, the scar between native and citizen. It is both an end and a beginning.It announces the disappearance of the known world and the antipathy of the new one. And the longing and the loss redolent in the label were as much my inheritance as they were that of the enslaved.
What we chose to disclose and what we withheld was determined as much by who we were— strangers meeting in a square— as by who we feigned to be— a singular we. The story that unfolded was less about what happened then than it was a way of navigating our present. Telling it over and over again, we hoped to discover a way of changing our lives.
2. Freedom (Disposession)
“The free people of Ghana may be able to strike the last of the shackles from their brothers in America.”
The narrative of liberation had ceased to be a blueprint for the future.
I knew that no matter how far from home I traveled, I wouldnever be able to leave my past behind. I would never be able to imagine being the kind of person who had not been made and marked by slavery. I was black and a history of terror had produced that identity.
The slave and the master understand differently what staying implies. The transience of the slave’s existence still leaves its traces in how black people imagine home as well as how we speak of it. We may have forgotten our country, but we haven’t forgotten our dispossession.
This inchoate, fugitive elsewhere was espoused in their dreams, elaborated in their songs, and envisaged as their future; it was expressed in an idiom, which, like themselves, was born of the new country, a blend of African, Native, and European elements. “Possessing nothing,” according to Wilson Harris, “but breath and the calamitous air of broken ties in the New World,” enslaved Africans sustained, amended, and abandoned the customs, manners, and proclivities of the Old World. They created a new language out of the languages they had known and the languages foisted upon them. They danced the old dances for new purposes. They built dwellings like the ones in which they had lived with new materials. They remembered and renamed old gods and invented and adopted new ones. Cleavage— the separation from and clinging to the Old World— gave rise not only to dispossession but as well to a new set of possibilities.
I shall return to my native land. Those disbelieving in the promise and refusing to make the pledge have no choice but to avow the loss that inaugurates one’s existence. It is to be bound to other promises. It is to lose your mother, always.
3. Architecture / Monuments / Holds
Monuments, like graves, are intended to preserve the dead and to suspend the past. But everything I could see refuted this. I still thought of the castle as a tomb, but if it were, then where were the mourners? Didn’t a gravesite require the company of the bereaved?
“Africa was a land of graves without bodies.”
No one I spoke with could recall asking a parent about the edifices that lorded over the coast, or shared with me an adolescent adventure about scaling the walls of the castle, sneaking across the bridge, peering into the moat, or dashing through the courtyard.
The slave hold was burrowed deep in the earth. Unlike the Portuguese who originally built Elmina Castle to store nonhuman goods, the British designed Cape Coast Castle to warehouse slaves.
“The castle looks very fine from the sea,” wrote the French trader Jean Barbot in 1681, but “the most noteworthy item is the slave-house, which lies below ground. It consists of large vaulted cellars, divided into several apartments, which can easily hold a thousand slaves… The keeping of the slaves thus under ground is a good security to the garrison.”
The interior of the dungeon exposed an open wound of earth, and the roughly hewn walls perspired, making the chamber dank. The cells were hollowed out of the rocky deposit of a hillside, which had been a sacred shrine devoted to the local pantheon of gods.
The arched ceiling of the vault and the tubular shape of the connecting cells resembled a large intestine. Walking from one end of the dungeon to the other, I did feel as though the castle were ingesting me, as though I were inching my way along the entrails of power.
No one imprisoned in the dungeon of Cape Coast Castle had ever described it. There was no record left behind by the captives who entered and exited the underground. Not a single account.
4. Time (the afterlife of slavery)
They were baffled that what had happened more than a century ago could still hurt me, although the same individuals recited proudly their family genealogies back ten and eleven generations.
Whenever we had our “what’s wrong with the race” conversation, my brother would punctuate his argument with, “Slavery was a long time ago.” I would answer back about the uneven playing field, the disparity between white and black wealth, racial profiling, the war being waged against the poor, and the prison system.
I shall return to my native land. The children and grandchildren of the rebels might have reiterated the same vow. Inevitably, time did erase the Old World or, at least, blunted its features and silenced its image. No doubt there were also those who chose to “murder the memory” because it was easier that way. Forgetting might have made it less painful to bear the hardships of slavery and easier to accept a new life in a world of strangers. Perhaps it wasn’t a choice at all, and the past slowly disappeared over the course of years, or the shock of enslavement destroyed it in one fell swoop. How long did it take for the mother tongue to be eradicated by a new language? Was the ephemera of everyday life— the pat and scratch of women’s feet in the compound at dawn, the low rustle of reeds in the lagoon, the rhythm and nonsense of childhood games, the murmur of trees at nightfall, the mutter of wakeful spirits, the charcoal skies of harmattan, the aroma of boiled cassava, the spire of anthills, or the amber color of grasslands in midafternoon— the first thing to disappear or the only thing that lasted?
Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on “what happened then” than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell.
The only part of my past that I could put my hands on was the filth from which I recoiled, layers of organic material pressed hard against a stone floor.
I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it.
Everyone told me a different story about how the slaves began to forget their past. Words like “zombie,” “sorcerer,” “witch,” “succubus,” and “vampire” were whispered to explain it. In these stories, which circulated throughout West Africa, the particulars varied, but all of them ended the same— the slave loses mother. Never did the captive choose to forget; she was always tricked or bewitched or coerced into forgetting. Amnesia, like an accident or a stroke of bad fortune, was never an act of volition.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I replied. “Why did they want the ones who had forgotten to return?”
5. Kinship (Master/Slave)
In Ghana, kinship was the idiom of slavery, and in the United States, race was. The language of kinship absorbed the slave and concealed her identity within the family fold (at least that was the official line), whereas the language of race set the slave apart from man and citizen and sentenced her to an interminable servitude. But, as I found out, the line between masters and slaves was no less indelible, even when it wasn’t a color line.
The lines of division between kin and stranger, neighbor and alien, became hard and fast during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. It decided who lived and died, who was sold and who was protected. In Ghana, slavery wasn’t a rallying cry against the crimes of the West or the evils of white men; to the contrary, it shattered any illusions of a unanimity of sentiment in the black world and exposed the fragility and precariousness of the grand collective we that had yet to be actualized.
The stories my aunts shared were offered as an antidote to shame and they esteemed a web of intimacy and filiation outside the law of paternal sanction.
Love makes a place for the stranger; it domesticates persons from “outside of the house” and not “of the blood”; it assuages the slave’s loss of family; it remakes slaveholders as mothers and fathers. Owning persons and claiming kin are one and the same; so love cannot be separated from dispossession or property in persons. Affection perhaps softens the sting of dishonor but does not erase it. The slave does not enjoy the rights and entitlements of “royals” and “nobles,” those who are the legitimate heirs of the lineage. Love extends the cover of belonging and shrouds the slave’s origins, which lie in acts of violence and exchange, but it doesn’t remedy the isolation of being severed from your kin and denied ancestors.
It is only when you are stranded in a hostile country that you need a romance of origins; it is only when you lose your mother that she becomes a myth; 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.
6. Beloved
WICS25 or T99— no one wants to identify her kin by the cipher of slave-trading companies, or by the brand, which supplanted identity and left only a scar in its place. I’m reminded of the scene in Beloved in which Sethe’s mother points to her mark, the circle and cross burned on her rib, and says to her daughter, “This is your ma’am… If something happens to me and you can’t tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark.” 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.
To lose your mother was to be denied your kin, country, and identity. To lose your mother was to forget your past. The letters distilled the history of the transatlantic slave trade to this: I was an orphan.
PARTUS SEQUITUR VENTREM— the child follows in the condition of the mother. The bill of sale includes “future increase,” so that even the unborn were fettered. “Mothers could only weep and mourn over their children,” according to the ex-slave Mary Prince, “they could not save them.” The stamp of the commodity haunts the maternal line and is transferred from one generation to the next. The daughter, Sethe, will carry the burden of her mother’s dispossession and inherit her dishonored condition, and she will have her own mark soon enough, as will her daughter Beloved.
The comings and goings of the spirit child aggrieve its mother. The first eight days after a child is born are filled with anxiety, because the mother hasn’t yet discovered if her infant is a wandering ghost rather than a human child. To prevent the child from dying again and returning to the spirit world, she attempts to trick the forces that would claim its life. So the mother marks the infant to make it ugly or she names the child odonkor— slave— fettering the child to keep her in the world. Or she scars the child with the tribal markings of the slave class. This sleight-of-hand convinces the spirits that the child’s life is not valuable and thus not worth taking. Mothers, disavowing their love, have called their children donkor (slave) in order to save them, while slaveholders have called their property “beloved child” in order to protect their wealth.
It was a world in which blackness too often translated into “no human involved.”
Thank you for this! Pertinent conceptual grouping that helps through the reading!
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