Lose Your Mother Audiobook By Saidiya Hartman cover art

Lose Your Mother

A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Preview
Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Lose Your Mother

By: Saidiya Hartman
Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $21.49

Buy for $21.49

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.

The slave, 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. There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping 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 whose lives were shattered and transformed by the slave trade. Written in prose that is fresh, insightful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a "landmark text" (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams).

©2007 Saidiya Hartman (P)2021 Tantor
African American Studies Americas Black & African American Social Sciences Specific Demographics United States
adbl_web_global_use_to_activate_T1_webcro805_stickypopup
All stars
Most relevant  
Saidiya Hartman unravels complex histories, challenging memories, and desires for freedom, for another social order. Her account is relatable, onerous, vulnerable, and generous as it takes the reader to many places and time periods. Beautiful written, this amazing blend of poignant memoir and informative historical text is a must read/listen to for everyone, who studies slavery, racism, colonialism, and memory.
Regarding the performance- Great narrator as well. I especially appreciated the altered voices to designate speakers.

A Generous Journey

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

This book is everything! So powerfully relevant and meaningful. My wife and I hope to visit Ghana soon and this is the exact perspective I need to have. Every no and then you get this feeling, when reading, that you’re engaged with a very special work. It’s such an important work, that I’m going grab a physical copy and slowly work my way through it, again. And the narrator was perfect!

Outstanding!!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

This is a wonderful account of person, trying to find herself in the world. My only issue was with the narrators attempt at a Ghanaian accent lol im a Ghanaian man, and let me tell you that was not it. It was more akin to a weak Caribbean accent. Other than that the story was brilliant!

Beautiful story, with depth and meaning

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I super enjoyed how this book really dug into the history of slavery as it was a practice in Ghana. It really set some foundation to the experience that they are having versus the experience that we are having in America. Amazing summed up the sense of searching for something that possibly will never found. Inspired me to create really introspective artwork around similar themes.

Amazing way to take on a complicated subject

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

The narrator is excellent except while reciting in the various accents she tried. This does not take away from this very important story/book.

A great book.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Great mixture of ethnography and theory for Black Studies. Forces the reading to think if they should “lose their mother”. Also a fan of the reader!

Great Discourse

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

depressing and wordy, too picturesque for such good data. hard to listen to, despite great amount of data

depressing and too wordy,

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.