e-misférica 5.2: Race and its Others (December 2008)
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Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. 270 pages, illustrations. $25.00 cloth, $14.00
paper.
Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007. 434
pages, illustrations. $27.95 cloth; $16.00 paper.
Micol Siegel | Indiana University
“For me,” explains Saidiya Hartman in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic
Slave Route, “the rupture was the story” (42). For Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave
Ship: A Human History, the story lies in a space of rupture as well, midst continents, at
sea. These two books locate themselves between and beyond the static units that have
structured understandings of race and nation, place and self. Like other recent scholars
interested in transnational movement and phenomena, troubling these categories allows
their work to revise notions of “Africa,” “America,” “black,” “white,” and more. The pair
shows how exciting such projects can be, and also their range, for Hartman and Rediker
produce opposite effects in important ways. Rediker may dwell in liminal space but his
aim is wholeness: he investigates the lives of slaves and sailors, people whose humanity
is more than partially obscured in history, to restore them to fullness and light. He listens
compassionately to people struggling to survive the Atlantic passage, recuperating their
humanity with carefully contextualized imagination. Hartman rejects wholeness, opening
her travel memoir with a classic voyage to Africa but crafting in the end a devastating
meditation on the impossibility of return.
Intimate and accessible, full of gorgeous, heart-tugging prose, Lose Your Mother is an
autobiographical search for a usable past both in the United States and in Ghana.
Hartman visits key sites along the slave routes, straining to hear the voices of her
ancestors. Most of the book takes place in Ghana, where her attention is diverted by
young entrepreneurs mining the gap between North American wealth and African lack,
irreverent local teens focused on Hollywood, Ghanaians’ disdain for slaves rather than
guilt over their ancestors’ roles in the trade, and Hartman’s growing sense of her own
irreconcilable strangeness in Africa. In the end, the din of those revelations drowns out
the possibility of hearing what she came to find. This is her point, and her lesson: even in
the dungeon beneath Cape Coast Castle, Hartman learns and teaches, “there were remains
but no stories” (116).
It is not that Hartman never tells stories; she does. She paraphrases accounts of early
published witnesses such as Ottobah Cugoano or Philip Quaque. She recounts historical
events. Though clearly disinclined to make the subaltern speak, she even occasionally
succumbs to the desire to give voice to the voiceless. Hartman both reveals and
denounces her own desire to represent the underrepresented. She relates the tale of
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Captain Kimber abusing a captive on board the Recovery, for example, combing
repeatedly through the event by reiterating its pieces in each voice recorded in the
transcript of Kimber’s murder trial. Ending with the perspective of the captive herself,
Hartman indulges in a heartening exercise of identification with a victim whose death
may be redeemed by the imagination of transcendence. Hartman berates herself for this
indulgence, wary of her motives just as she mistrusts those of the British abolitionists
who first publicized the shocking sadism. “If the story ended there,” Hartman writes, “I
could feel a small measure of comfort. I could find a salutary lesson in the girl’s suffering
and pretend a story was enough to save her from oblivion” (153). The book proceeds in
this unstinting juxtaposition of self-disclosure and self-censure as Hartman offers herself
as archetype to coax a similar critique from all who yearn for return, restoration, and
repair.
Hartman demands understanding and forgiveness for such yearnings, fully recognizing
the urgency of a collective reckoning with slavery. Why, then, does Hartman rally people
to do now voluntarily what they suffered historically in abduction and dispersal? The
title, in the imperative, leaves no doubt that this is what she commands. Lose your
mother. Imagine no return. Resist the temptation to fill the story-less gap. This is not a
psychoanalytic version of “throw down your bucket where you are” but a genuinely
radical intervention. Hartman is at work untangling a gnarled knot: some of the victims of
slavery historically and of racism in the present now reside in the belly of the world’s
principal superpower. Through no consenting act of their own, therefore, save perhaps
capitalist accumulation, they are implicated in the immiseration of Africa today. The
solidarities generated by the historical experience of racism, Hartman charges, are
wrongly projected onto Africans. When Hartman finds commonality with Africans in her
travels, she recognizes that it is a reflection not “of blood or kinship, but of affiliation”
(204). Recalling Stuart Hall’s wonderfully powerful concept of articulation but inflected
in a markedly familial vein, affiliation offers an active form of identification that can
recognize difference, conflict, and change over time, an alternative to the “emptiness and
irrelevance of an ‘African identity’ in making sense of the Atlantic slave trade” (208).
The sense of common African racial identity feeds, for example, the slave route tourist
industry in Ghana, a “potent means of silencing the past in the very guise of preserving
it,” for it conceals the enabling factors of the Atlantic trade: African slavery, exploitation
on the bases of class and gender, ethnic and regional conflict, and abuses of state power
(164). The framing of memory sanctioned by state-sponsored tourism and supported by
African Americans craving the balm of return also helps conceal and therefore perpetuate
the continued violence visited upon the African continent today, including the prevalence
of dungeons and the practice of slavery itself.
This multivalent critique allows Lose Your Mother to advance a critique not only of
racism and the idea of race, but also of global capitalism. Like many contemporary
scholars, Hartman insists that slavery was no archaic, precapitalist holdover. Ruminating
on the etymology of the word “factory,” she recalls “the indissoluble link between
England’s industrial revolution and the birth of human commodities” (111). She sees the
trade in human beings as the generative spark of capitalism, producing wealth in the West
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and devastation in Africa (207-8). This critical thread also emerges in her focus on the
class distinctions within Africa that made the Atlantic trade possible. Yet as evident in
her equal indictment of other factors responsible for the trade (slavery within Africa,
gender violence, ethnic difference, and historical patterns of war between and within
states), Hartman’s Marxism is the nuanced, robust approach of a scholar who integrates
insights from multiple fields.
Here lies the shared core of these two books. The critique of capitalism is the central axis
of The Slave Ship: A Human History, as readers of Marcus Rediker’s analyses of the
marginalized and working denizens of the Anglo-Atlantic world have come to expect. In
this social history, written (like Hartman’s) for a broad popular and academic public,
Rediker narrates the wounding violence visited upon Africans captured for transport and
sale. The attempt to render slaves’ voices and experiences audible is a project with which
audiences will be acquainted, but there are unexpected insights along the way, and some
surprising turns. Examples include the focus on sharks as instruments of terror or the
strong final chapter on the slave ship Brooks. Picked up as abolitionist propaganda in the
1780s, the Brooks became the basis for the woodcut of tight-packed bodies that remains
seared into collective memory of the slave trade today.
Rediker is interested in solidarity, identification, and commonality. His discussion of
slaveholding and trading within Africa is a valuable exploration of the variegated
landscapes of kin and kingdom, class differentiation, and changes in the Anglo-African
slave trade as its Atlantic extension expanded. Observing, like Hartman, no sense of
sameness among “Africans” in this period, Rediker follows new notions of kinship
forged by shipmates belowdecks. These products of homogenizing brutality afforded
some a means of survival, providing solidarities that would combine with and resist
projections by Europeans, finally crystallizing into ideas of race. Like their cast of
characters, the borders of race and nation in these works are in motion, under
construction.
Rediker is interested in solidarities for their potential in seeding resistance not to slavery
alone but to its founding matrix, capitalism. Rediker tethers the history of the slave ship
to capitalism inextricably and intensely, converging with Hartman by beginning with a
reflection on the etymology of “factory.” Readers familiar with the overlap in meaning in
Spanish or Portuguese will be less surprised at these convergences, but in the AngloAtlantic tradition Hartman and Rediker share they are less obvious. Noting that “factor”
and “merchant” were synonyms in the sixteenth century, Rediker suggests that the ship
itself was factory, both in the sense of “a merchant’s trading station” (then) and in more
contemporary usage as a harshly disciplined, highly supervised workplace where wageearners produced “the commodity called ‘slave’” (45). As such the ship was a part of the
“well constructed machine” of the plantation, as planters conceived it (44). Calling slave
ships and plantations factories and machines, Rediker points out their technological,
industrial character, insisting, like Hartman, that slavery and plantation economies were
integral pieces of modern capitalism. It is towards solidarities based on shared locations
within capitalism, therefore, that Rediker hopes to move.
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To do so, Rediker integrates sailors into the accounting of the ravages of the Atlantic
trade. Rediker emphasizes the varied forms of coercion forcing sailors into employment
on slavers. The advance pay compelled some in desperate economic need; the ticket out
of jail convinced those incarcerated for indebtedness. Some were enticed or tricked when
drunk; others simply kidnapped. While on board they were subject to violent discipline,
the cruel caprice of the captain, and casualties and mortality at rates often higher than the
enslaved. Many were abandoned at ports far from home, sick or dying, cheated of their
pay, with no means of sustenance or care. In Rediker’s portrait, “free” and slave labor
converge in the ways they constrain the laborer, causing harm and often death, although
Rediker takes care not to imagine the unfreedoms he details to be identical.
This convergence of coercion underlies the final piece of Rediker’s critique of capitalism,
one with profound resonance today: the observation that the slave ship was a prison. With
some inmates shackled and confined belowdecks, some in less secure women’s and
children’s quarters, and some kept in place by the iron bonds of wage and contract,
shipboard prisons linked the jails where Africans waited to make the middle passage and
the chains and bars that would contain them in the New World. The slave ship’s “floating
dungeon,” as a contemporary called it, extended European prisons as well for many
sailors. While the distinctions between prisoner and guard are as sober as those between
slave and sailor -- or between slave and prisoner, sailor and guard -- still the comparisons
are thought-provoking. What does it mean for our understandings of industry or
modernity that their underpinnings are the slave-ship and the prison? As Hartman also
demands that we consider, and for our day as well, what if the trading station, the factory,
the slave-ship, and the prison are in practice identical?
These two books are unlike in discipline, method, focus, tone, source material, and
ultimate conclusions. Yet they share pieces of an argument along the route to a common
object of critique. Both chart the historical development of the idea of race as a product
of slavery, though Hartman goes further than Rediker in rejecting its utility now. Both
indict capitalism as root cause and constant extension of the racializing force of global
immiseration that was slavery. As such they illustrate the strength and breadth of work on
the black Atlantic as it has developed over the last fifteen years, moved and motivated by
a common set of inspirations.
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