Combining the depth and breadth of a scholar of slavery with the imagination and linguistic facility of a novelist, Saidiya Hartman has written a most poignant meditation on the ironies of black identity in a postmodern, multicultural world. As far as I could tell, not one taxi driver in Accra could find his way to African Liberation Square, but almost all knew the location of the U. I felt as though, when reading this book, all of the romantic narratives of Africa or a Pan-Africanist politic that I as an African-American cling to, were pillars that she destroyed one by one. In 1966, Colonel Kotoka and Lieutenant General Afrifa had deposed Kwame Nkrumah; there were coups again in 1972, 1979, 1981, 1982, and 1983. 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.

To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. As she described it, if she succeeded in keeping the ugly history of slavery at a distance, then perhaps she could be something more than a stranger, perhaps she could pass for being a young Ghanaian woman: "I didn't want to remember that I was an American. I wasn't able to dislodge the atrocities committed in wars of capture and slave raids: the elderly and infirm slaughtered by the conquering army, infants murdered by bashing their heads against trees, pregnant women disemboweled with a lance, girls raped, and young men buried in anthills and thrown onto pyres and burned alive. She scoured the library for misshelved volumes, reread five surrounding volumes, reviewed her early notes but never found that paragraph imprinted in her memory, “the words filling less than half a page, the address on Clark Street, the remarks about her appearance, all of which where typed up by a machine in need of new ribbon.I jumped out of the chair, turned off the lamps on the nightstands, and ran to the corner to shut off the overhead light. N. and plead the case for American Negroes and be the cause for their winning complete equality…The free people of Ghana may be able to strike the last of the shackles from their brothers in America. He muttered, "uh-huh," and then he asked, "When you go to Chicago, do you expect black folks there to welcome you because you're from New York? Hartman’s desire to know about slavery is thwarted at every turn: by grandparents who refuse to talk about the subject, by parents and a brother who urge her to stop brooding about the past and get on with her life, by the Ghanaians she encounters who either avoid the topic of slavery entirely or make it into a generic tourist attraction, and above all, by the huge gaps she encounters in her archival work, as the vanishing act of her great-great-grandmother’s testimony illustrates.

Their insistence on choosing my definition was, in and of itself, emblematic of being a non-citizen: the complete absence of autonomy for self-definition or determination. Mercenary soldiers, thieves, refugees, prostitutes, broke soldiers, corrupt policemen, and the desperate hard-pressed enough to try anything are out there on Osu Road too," John said.Each afternoon I went to the university library and read about the role of African merchants and royals in the Atlantic slave trade. Utopia had left its traces in my disappointment, and in the pang of desire that reminded me something was missing, something had been lost. Nor could I clear my head of what one historian had described as the trail of bleached bones that led from the hinterland to the sea. Slavery was never mentioned at my school, Queen of All Saints, although I learned about Little Black Sambo from my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs.