A review by ktrain3900
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.5

I love this type of memoir, one that is knowledgable and vulnerable and conversational, and that doesn't come to any easy answers. How does one write an absence? How does anyone answer a question that can't even quite be asked, at least not asked of those who are here to answer? There's a risk to this sort of writing because it's never going to present a neat package, or a tidy moral, or clear lines, even when it would seem to be subject matter that should divide cleanly between good and bad, winners and losers. I particularly enjoyed the variety of the writing from chapter to chapter, moving between travel journal, speculative fictions, interviews, histories. This is an uneasy, profound, and personal accounting