Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal - Loving Through Loss - Reading Saidiya Hartman’s History of Black Hurt - Article 6

Aug 29, 2026

This essay examines the diasporic sensibility shaped by loss and the enduring hope of redemption, arguing that standard diaspora historiography often overemphasizes survival and inspiration while neglecting grief. It reads Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother as “wake work,” an act of remembrance that links the transatlantic slave trade to the formation of modern black personhood and politics. Through critique and travel-like narrative reflection, the essay frames modern social crises as consequences that began in the brutal production of stolen lives.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages12

Reading Time18 min

AccessFree to download

Loving Through Loss

Diasporic dualism and historiography

“Wake work” and Lose Your Mother

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal | Volume 6 | Issue 1 | Article 6 | | --- | --- | | June 2008
Loving Through Loss: Reading Saidiya Hartman’s History of Black Hurt
Harvey Neptune
[anthuriumcaribjournal@gmail.com](anthuriumcaribjournal@gmail.com)
Follow this and additional works at: [http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium](http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium) | | Recommended Citation Neptune, Harvey (2008) "Loving Through Loss: Reading Saidiya Hartman’s History of Black Hurt," Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol. 6 : Iss. 1 , Article 6. Available at: [http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol6/iss1/6](http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol6/iss1/6) This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal by an authorized editor of Scholarly Repository. For more information, [please contact](please contact repository.library@miami.edu)[ repository.library@miami.edu](please contact repository.library@miami.edu). Neptune: Loving Through Loss: Reading Saidiya Hartman’s History of Black... Love has nothing to do with it; love has everything to do with it. Saidiya Hartman An abiding dualism courses through the diasporic sensibility. On one hand, a feel for inconsolable loss is intrinsic to the life of these communities. Diasporas bear histories of a deep and enduring sense of alienation: from place, from personhood and, in the most severe cases, from human purpose. On the other hand, diasporic peoples are armed with a bottomless belief in the possibility of redemption. Told from this perspective, historical accounts of diaspora tend toward epics of the human will to survive and, incredibly at times, of the surreal search for a full life. This Janus-faced notion of diasporic communities is not novel; in practice, however, it has yet to establish a firm grip on the historiography of Africans and their dispersed descendants. Rather than attending to both profiles of this past, historians have tended to contemplate one side of this story, the inspiring aspect. Taking black people’s pain and suffering as a predicate (taking it for granted, some might say), we largely nominate as our main subject their determination to overcome a wretched racial inheritance, their will to make a way out of the darkness of melancholia and perhaps even into the light of the marvelous. Recently, however, this syntax has come under question. A developing historiographical tendency has begun to bring balance to the portrait of blacks across the globe. Demanding that despair, defeat and death be given its just share, this loose affiliation of scholars insists that the time has come for black people to look back, too, in grief.1 One of the most provocative recent contributions to this growing corpus of what I like to think of as “wake work” is Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Transatlantic Slave Route. Learned, eloquent and unflinching, the book offers a meditation on the haunting contemporary presence of the past commerce in human lives between Africa and the Americas. It is an ambitious work, nimbly braiding autobiography, literary criticism, historiography and travelogue; and its author is splendidly up to the task. Without cue or hiccup, the narrative glides from childhood recollections to critical theory to blunt reflections about the fate of postcolonial Ghana. Topical wanderlust, notwithstanding, the study’s underlying point is clear and consistent: the modern trade in Africans festers as a virtually incurable wound in the constitution of modern black personhood and politics. A commerce that crushed millions of lives on both sides of the Atlantic, it cannibalized the continent then demoralized survivors and their offspring—people who would wind up bearing the brand of blackness. For Hartman, the many miseries that plague the

FAQs

What core dualism guides the essay’s view of diaspora communities?

The essay contrasts inconsolable loss with a bottomless belief in redemption, showing how diasporic life holds both despair and the possibility of a full life.

How does the essay critique traditional diaspora history?

It argues that historians often emphasize the inspiring side, treating black suffering as a starting premise while failing to give grief, defeat, and death their proper place.

Why is Lose Your Mother described as “wake work” in the essay?

The essay presents Hartman’s book as remembrance that retraces coerced steps across the Atlantic, mourning those lost in the middle passage and confronting the haunting presence of the past.

Aug 29, 2026

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