Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother is a non-fiction narrative of return and its futility. Hartman is a professor of 19th century literature specializing in representations of slavery. Her Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America appeared in 1997. In contrast to this work, Hartman constructs her memoir as a meditation on the impossibility of resolution. In contrast to both Morrison and Butler's neo-slave narratives, Lose Your Mother does not attempt to reimagine slavery and its immediate aftermath; instead, Hartman suggests that any attempt to do so necessarily runs up against the limits of the ethical imagination. In turns frustrating and beautiful, Hartman's text asks us to think about whether there are forms of literature commensurate to the task of representing the historical atrocities of slavery. How does Hartman's text contrast to that of Morrison and Butler? How does our often-frustrating experience of the text as readers affect our ideas about slavery, genealogy, roots tourism, and the politics of return?
As a work of non-fiction, Hartman's book includes, references or troubles over a lot of history that is either difficult to re-imagine or impossible to grasp (because of the lack of historical/genealogical documentation, because of the erasure or dismissal of the magnitude and present-day implications of the African slave trade, etc). This discomposed, indefinite historical record was paired with a smattering of discomposed, indefiite black-and-white photos, artwork or text documents. Last night I started searching for larger (more detailed) versions of some of the better-known pictures included, and I also wanted some more visual representations of 'place' and 'society' as these things are handled in Lose Your Mother. I thought I'd share some links to pictures that I came across:
ReplyDeletehttp://farm2.static.flickr.com/1051/3165991632_36d631d549.jpg
http://cache2.asset-cache.net/xc/50549709.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=E41C9FE5C4AA0A145010FB15FEB46409C0799AB5A6A31976122AB9AA57770956B01E70F2B3269972
http://cache3.asset-cache.net/xc/50549711.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=E41C9FE5C4AA0A145010FB15FEB46409A0A622B2B7B115E5C9848EFB78946894B01E70F2B3269972
http://old.antislavery.org/breakingthesilence/images/slave_routes/pictures/ghana_elmina2.jpg
http://www.rickmann-uk.com/wp-content/uploads/Elmina-Castle.jpg
http://www.slaverysite.com/images/images2.htm
This book is interesting to contrast with the Morrison and Butler novels in that its project, at its outset, is very similar to theirs, but by the end it differs from them quite drastically. For as dissimilar as Beloved and Kindred are, they shared the same basic project of reimagining the past so that contemporary readers could remember the atrocities of slavery. Lose Your Mother begins with the same goal, as Hartman departs for Ghana “intent upon finding the remnants of those who had vanished.” She plainly states, “I wanted to bring the past closer.” As the book progresses, Hartman grows increasingly more skeptical that such a project can succeed in the case of the Atlantic slave trade, because “what really happened” is either shrouded in silence, or becomes a prepackaged and commodified experience of slavery for the benefit of roots tourists. One could say that the only thing that Hartman “uncovers” about the history of slavery in this book is the impossibility of creating a thorough and coherent narrative of the origins of slavery. You can feel Hartman wrestling with these difficulties as she restlessly switches from one mode of writing to the next, from memoir to history to cultural studies to (possibly) historical fiction in her description of founding of the walled city of Gwolu on 222-9, in an attempt to find an angle of inquiry that grants her access to the “truth.”
ReplyDeleteThe fact that this book is non-fiction makes Hartman’s job much more difficult than if she was writing in fiction because she is beholden to history in a way that Morrison or Butler are not. This difficulty leads Hartman to question whether or not remembering (which essentially are what Beloved and Kindred are asking us to do) is ultimately that valuable. In the additional essay we read, Hartman points out that the dangers of simply remembering the fact of slavery can act as a “substitute for critical engagement” with history. While Hartman is thwarted in her initial project to encounter the truth about the origins of slavery, she is able to show that the cultural and personal repercussions of slavery are still being played out and that we need to continue to pursue “a sustained engagement with the past.”
Thanks, Liv and Andy. We can try to take a look at some of the images in class tomorrow, Live.
ReplyDeleteI read another Hartman book for research for my paper called Scenes of Subjection. It was published in 1997, ten years before Lose Your Mother. I thought that a lot of the research that she exposed in Scenes of Subjection were used for Lose Your Mother. I was curious about whether her research caused her to first question her own past and history, or if her own past spurred her research. Hartman’s language in her first book is very technical and theory based, I was much more engaged with the memoir format and appreciated the ease of access to the facts and the issues. I have always enjoyed memoir as a way to employ both fictional and non-fictional techniques to reveal truths. It’s like learning history by watching a television series. Hartman knows her history and reveals it to the reader, but I had to keep reminding myself that she could be manipulating facts. Especially at the end when she talked about her experience with the other members or the team, it reminded me that her perspective is only one part of story.
ReplyDeleteEarly in the book, when Saidiya Hartman is introducing us to the history of Elmina Castle, she takes a moment to consider if it could be "fair to blame" the men who claimed the soil where the castle was to be built, which in turn results in a rumination on the nature of the narrative of history, of cause and effect; "Deciding the matter of cause and effect is, by necessity, belated; causality is the benefit of retrospection. One apprehends the signs of an inevitable demise only in hindsight" (59). However, as Hartman traces the slave routes through Ghana, she repeatedly comes to realize that she fails to find the line of cause and effect, even with the "benefit of retrospection." She then goes on to suggest that perhaps it is a "character of events," a "collective force of circumstances." And so she sets out on her journey to understand the collective narrative of slave trade routes in Ghana. More interestingly though, she sets up a binary that she finds to be inherent in the narrative of history, “The randomness and contingency of history nonetheless produces two classes, winners and losers” (59). It is through this lens that Hartman sets up her “us against them” research. Not until the end does Hartman also realize the binary between the slaves who were sent to America and those who were enslaved in Africa. “Theirs [the slaves of Africa] wasn’t a memory of loss or of captivity, but of survival and good fortune . . . My narrative was a history of defeat, which at best was the precondition for a victory, long awaited, but that hadn’t yet arrived” (233). The other narrative is what Hartman came to Ghana for, it is what was “missing back home” (198). And in the end, once Hartman understands the language of triumph, she can understand the song the girls sing in Gwolu. While she “fails” to find the links of the history of slavery, she realizes that the work of creating identity rests in names, “it mattered whether the ‘we’ was called we who become together or African people or slaves, because these identities were tether to confliction narratives of our past” (231). To be an African-American descended from slaves coming together with Africans descended from slaves transcends the boundaries of the “winners and losers” binary of history that Hartman talks about early in the book. It is not in an attempt to get beyond the history, but to forge a new future with a shared narrative.
ReplyDeleteTaking up Andy’s comparison of Morrison and Butler’s novels Beloved and Kindred with Hartman’s memoir Lose Your Mother, in which Hartman returns to Ghana “intent upon finding the remnants of those who had vanished,” I think it useful to examine the differences in how the slave figure appears in each of these works. For instance, while Morrison and Butler can—through the characters they’ve conjured up in their fiction—access specific, detail-rich moments of slave life in the Americas, Hartman, on the other hand, must settle for whatever she is able to discover in her “journey along the Atlantic Slave Route” about “those who had vanished” from Ghana. And as Hartman seems to suggest, there is surprisingly little evidence left in Ghana of those who had been sold into slavery and shipped to the New World. Indeed, each time she interviews a local and asks about “those who had vanished” from Ghana, she is met with blank faces, silence, evasion. It is as if those who’d been sold and fated for the Middle Passage had indeed—through the present-day Ghanaians refusal to acknowledge their painful past— vanished into thin air. The result is, essentially, a book about ghosts—ghosts who cannot even haunt the places Hartman visits. In the underground slave hold in Cape Coast Castle, she is distraught by the realization that she cannot access the past, cannot feel the presence of the thousands of slaves who’d been imprisoned and mired in their own feces in the same dungeon centuries ago.
ReplyDeleteThis sense of absence—an absence of the very slaves Hartman has come to Ghana seeking—pervades the book. And Hartman wants us to feel this absence. Despite the potential ‘handicap’ involved in writing a book of non-fiction (as opposed to fiction) about the slave trade in Africa, she still could have, like Morrison and Butler, accessed the past more and provided us with stories of slaves from that time. As she does with the girl murdered by the captain of the Recovery, she could have given us a few narratives of some of the Ghanaian slaves whose stories had been recorded. But she chooses not to do this. She chooses instead to show us the silence, the absence. To let us feel just how much these people really have ‘vanished’. In fact, perhaps the only real evidence Hartman gets of these slaves having once existed comes at the end of the book as a group of jump-roping girls sing a song about “those taken from Gwolu and sold into slavery in the Americas.”