A profound and harrowing meditation by a descendant of slaves who journeyed to Africa to understand her past

The slave, Saidiya Hartman observes, is a stranger torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way, and with figures from the past, vividly dramatising the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and American history.

"An original, thought-provoking meditation on the corrosive legacy of slavery ... driven by this writer's prodigious narrative gifts." - The New York Times

"[Hartman writes] with striking intimacy, evoking the feelings and the conditions of Black life" - New Yorker

"Praise for Saidiya Hartman: "She was so smart that I thought the windows were gonna blow out, the quickness of her mind and the sharpness of her critique were breathtaking."" - on meeting Hartman