This morning I re-read Sadiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother. In 2009, when I first discovered the text, I was living in Harlem, studying at Columbia, barely surviving, and always hustling. Hartman’s intellectual journey and fragmented familial history was her attempt to undo the erasure of her ancestors, to search for the intimate encounters of New World Blacks. As the progeny of African captives, our otherness is marked by the folks who survived the Middle Passage and enslavement, people who excite a transient dial between joy and pain, with a splash of ratchetness interwoven with prophetic dreams. Upon dismemberment in Ghana, she discovered that her skin folk saw her as a “foreigner from across the sea.” A line had been drawn. Africans who never left the continent had moved on from recognizing us as their own, or rather, the ethnic groups that Hartman encountered had a new set of problems—the postcolonial ghosts of British imperialism—the vast continent that kept on growing. Different sets of traumas attended to the cultural separation and difference that made her feel like that far removed cousin sitting awkwardly occupying a seat at a family table As I read Hartman’s prose and absorbed the pain of knowing that we Black Americans are strangers in the country of our birth and aliens on the continent that our ancestors were stolen, I wept. I lamented for the dead I will never know and the living who never see me as their own.
Tomorrow, I travel to South Africa. To the best of my knowledge, this will be the first time that someone in my family has been to sub-Saharan Africa since slavery. Re-reading Lose Your Mother demonstrated that I am not fully prepared for the emotional burden of having a lifetime of being alien, strange, and foreign. I will try to gather my ancestors and listen to the ghostly redolent strength, guiding us, inspiring us, and reminding us to continue our legacy of survival.