quotation from Lose your Mother

Quotation from Saidiya Hartman's moving journey in Lose your Mother:

"'STRANGER' IS THE X that stands in for a proper name. It is the placeholder for the missing, the mark of the passage, the scar between native and citizen. It is both an end and a beginning. It announces the disappearance of the known world and the antipathy of the new one. And the longing and the loss redolent in the label were as much my inheritance as they were that of the enslaved" (8).

In this book, Hartman journeys to Ghana to trace the history of the Black Atlantic slave trade, only to discover that tracing does not always result in a recovery, but, at times, a forgetting.