Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

£5.495
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Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

RRP: £10.99
Price: £5.495
£5.495 FREE Shipping

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Description

For those chained in the lower decks of a slave ship, race was both a death sentence and the language of solidarity. While the Afros were far too intelligent to believe the past could be forgotten, they definitely wanted their distance from slavery and colonialism.

I found myself, like most members of the small community of nearly one thousand African-American expatriates, living on the periphery of Ghanaian society. Padmore organized the first meeting of Independent Africa's Heads of State and the first All African Peoples Congress. Hartman has found a most compelling narrative voice that enables the dreaded Middle Passage and the tomb of slavery to speak to a new generation of readers. I had not come to marvel at the wonders of African civilization or to be made proud by the royal court of Asante, or to admire the great states that harvested captives and sold them as slaves. I don't know if it was the bare bones of Ella's story or the hopefulness and despair that lurked in Poppa's words as he recounted it, as if he were weighing the promise of freedom against the vast stretches of stolen land before him, that made me eager to know more than what Poppa remembered or wanted to share.

As I drank the beer Mary Ellen placed in my hand, I wondered how Ghana would look in my eyes by the end of the year. When Nkrumah explained that he was very thirsty, the waiter pointed to a spittoon and said, "You can drink there. Lose Your Mother is a radiant book that takes readers through much which feels beyond imaginative confrontation.

A group of children were playing near the fetid pool, and one boy created ripples on its surface with his small arc of urine. As a house slave, she was spared the onerous work of the field, dressed better than the hands, dined on crumbs and leftovers, and traveled with her owners. They cast a harsh light on the limits of our imagination, underscore our shortsightedness, and replicate the disasters of the world we seek to escape.

It reads like a cross between Bruce Chatwin and Toni Morrison, top-notch travel-writing and scintillating prose and soul. Or forget the disobedient wives who were sold under the pretext of witchcraft, the quarrelsome young men who were sentenced to slavery for being troublemakers, and the ever-growing list of petty infractions punishable by slavery that cost many commoners their lives. Richard Wright had visited the Gold Coast in 1953 and written a powerful account of the struggle for independence. Hartman delineates a clear divide between how African-Americans view their ties to slavery and the African continent, and the perspective of the Ghanaians she meets, who largely see visiting African-Americans as a source of tourism revenue and do not readily discuss slavery, which they see as a source of shame - to those of slave ancestry in particular. The seat of government was housed in what had been a Danish slave-trading post and then the headquarters of British colonial administration.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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