41 pages • 1 hour read
Saidiya V. HartmanLose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “So Many Dungeons”
Hartman describes the underground dungeons in which enslaved people were held before being shipped out. Enslaved people lived in their own excrement, which over time formed a layer of soil more than a foot deep for archeologists to discover. “Waste is the interface between life and death. It incarnates all that has been rendered invisible, peripheral, or expendable to history writ large, that is, history as the tale of great men, empire, and nation” (115), Hartman relates. She expounds on this idea, comparing the loss of humanity—of becoming a tradable thing—to death: “The lesson imparted to the captives by this grand design was that slavery was a state of death” (111).
Another version of death arises in a common slave narrative describing the fear of being eaten by whites. Enslaved people become food, like any other captured animal, and thus “[c]annibalism provided an allegory for usurping and consuming life” (114), Hartman explains. “[T]he slave was the prey hunted and the flesh eaten by the vampire of merchant capital” (114).
Hartman is struck by the absence of any accounts of what it was like to survive the castle and its dungeons. “No one imprisoned in the dungeon of Cape Coast Castle has ever described it” (121), she notes. Philip Quaque, a Black priest, who lived in the castle and wrote long letters home to England, never mentions the dungeons and only once refers to a slave revolt aboard a ship. Ottobah Cugoano’s “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery” describes his experience of being captured as a child and taken to a dungeon, but he elides the horrifying experience of life in the dungeon.
Hartman also touches on how Black people living in America process their slave history—again tying the legacy to a kind of death. “Racism, according to Michel Foucault, is the social distribution of death; like an actuarial chart, it predicts who would thrive and who would not” (129), she notes. And so death and loss persist. Black Americans are still considered less than human today: The police regularly victimize them, and, at any age, they are more than twice as likely as whites to die. She describes the proscriptions her parents learned to live with while growing up in Alabama. The ghost of slavery still “haunts the present” (133), she asserts.
Chapter 7 Summary: “The Dead Book”
Hartman tells the story of the torture and murder of an enslaved girl on the British ship Recovery in 1792. The event led to a trial, and William Wilberforce, the British politician responsible for the banishment of the slave trade in 1807, cited the murder in a speech he gave to Parliament.
The motivation for the murder is unclear. (The enslaved girl was reputed to have refused the captain’s sexual advances or to have been ill with gonorrhea when brought on board the vessel.) Regardless, the murder was gruesome: The captain hoisted the naked girl above the ship deck and then beat her for hours (128-38). The captain faced charges after the ship’s surgeon reported him to the authorities, but the judge directed the jury to view violence on the high seas as different from violence on land—justifiable to preserve the empire. Not only that, but the enslaved girl was viewed as a commodity, one of the “things” the ship’s insurance agent “arranged […] in classes according to degrees of perishability” (148). Hartman continues: “Death was just a variant of spoilage. A dead girl was not really all that different from rotten fruit” (148).
The captain was acquitted, and the surgeon was accused of perjury. The captain later stalked Wilberforce on the streets of London, demanding an apology and money as compensation. Wilberforce refused. Eventually, his brave opposition to slavery prevailed, and the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, although Hartman notes that the word “gradual” was inserted into the legislation, reducing its impact. Slavery endured many more decades before it disappeared entirely at the end of the 19th century.
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
The commercial enterprise of slavery and its inhumanity treatment are linked: Slaves necessarily became things in the eyes of their captors, who considered them tradable commodities. In Chapter 6, Hartman uses graphic descriptions of the physical horrors enslaved people endured in Ghana’s dungeons to drive home this point: To commodify a person is to strip that person of humanity. That mindset requires a remarkable, deliberate effort of ignorance. While many turned away from the unpleasant smells emerging from the dungeons, they also turned away from the stench of slavery itself and pretended it was not occurring. This deliberate ignorance continues into the present, evidence of the connection between History and Dehumanization. The fact of slavery is simply erased in many historical accounts, an erasure that compounds the loss of identity that comes with enslavement. Throughout the book, Hartman is interested in how power shapes history, as the most powerful members of a given society seek to build a story that serves their interests. In this process, the most vulnerable are often erased from stories of the past. In the time of slavery, enslaved people were literally erased from their homeland—their bodies and their histories wiped away. In the present, as history ignores what happened to them, they are erased again.
In Chapter 7, Hartman uses the torture and murder of an unnamed enslaved girl in 1792 to show the intensely personal cost of this kind of erasure. The ship captain who committed this act did so in full view of his ship’s crew, confident that his victim’s enslavement would mean that he would face no consequences. Hartman describes the trial of the captain to show how legal language contributes to the dehumanization of enslaved people. Because the girl was classed not as a passenger but as cargo—a commodity subject to spoilage and arranged “arranged […] in classes according to degrees of perishability” by the ship’s insurance agent (148), the captain was acquitted and was left free to demand an apology from his accuser.
The dehumanization that comes with enslavement also means a loss of the law’s protection. Because the law did not treat the girl as human, it did not consider her killer a murderer. Though William Wilberforce, a prominent member of Parliament, later used this episode to successfully argue for the abolition of the slave trade in England, Hartman argues that the dehumanizing effects of slavery continue to be felt into the present day—a phenomenon she calls “the afterlife of slavery” (6).
