Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal

Volume 6 | Issue 1

Article 7

June 2008

Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with

Saidiya Hartman
Patricia J. Saunders
anthuriumcaribjournal@gmail.com

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Recommended Citation
Saunders, Patricia J. (2008) "Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman," Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies
Journal: Vol. 6: Iss. 1, Article 7.
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Saunders: Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman

What, then, are these three things of the thing?

First of all mourning. We will be speaking of nothing else. It consists always in
attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by
identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead (all ontologization, all
semanticizationphilosophical, hermeneutical, or psychoanalyticalfinds itself
caught up in this work of mourning but, as such, it does not yet think it; we are
posing here the question of the specter, to the specter, whether it be Hamlets or
Marxs, on this near side of such thinking). One has to know. One has to know it.
One has to have knowledge. Now, to know is to know who and where, to know
whose body it really is and what place it occupiesfor it must stay in its place. In
a safe place Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning, than confusion
or doubt: one has to know who is buried whereand it is necessary (to knowto
make certain) that in what remains of him, he remains there. Let him stay there
and move no more!
Jacques Derrida, Injunctions of Marx, in Specters of Marx 9

The Archaeologies of Black Memory symposium and seminar hosted by Small Axe and
the Caribbean Literary Studies Program at the University of Miami (June 2007) provided an
occasion for a number of scholars to reflect on some of the critical concerns raised by Derrida in
this opening epigraph, though not primarily (or even simply) in regards to the specters of Marx. I
am appropriating Derridas engagement with the ghosts of Marx because it has particular
relevance for the central focus of this two day symposium, the work of memory in producing
knowledge, in this case knowledge about black people who have been disappeared, nowhere to
be identified or localized, except (of course) in the archives of history. The questions though, that
haunt us are; what role does the archive, or should the archive, play in constructing knowledge
about black subjectivity? Put differently, to what extent can the archive represent the place that
these missing black bodies, denied the safe space of the marked burial space, have come to
(un)rest? Another set of questions that emerge from this line of inquiry about ghosts, the work
mourning, the archive and knowledge production highlights the problematic relationship
between scholars and their disciplinary conventions. There is an increasingly uneasy dialogue
taking place between scholars and the ghosts of history that inhabit the texts we depend on so
heavily to represent the lives and worlds they once inhabited. Derrida warns us about the
problematic relationship of the scholar or spectator and the specter, noting, a traditional scholar
does not believe in ghosts (12). To be sure, this statement has little to do with faith or beliefs
but more so the school of thought and conventions that inform epistemological boundaries of the
learned intellectual. There has long been a tradition in the theatre for imagining the voice of the

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specter, and subsequently, through the novel and poetry, writers could address themselves to the
ghost. But to reconstruct scholarly traditions in this regard involves nothing short of what
Derrida refers to as a hauntology or a staging for the end of history (10).
There are signs that suggest this hauntological project is underway in the poetic
engagements of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Kamau Brathwaite, Fred DAguiar, Erna
Brodber, and Marlene NourbeSe Philip. However, there is also a critical discourse emerging in a
number of disciplines centered on a similar dialogue, not only with the specter of the black
subject, but also with that of its alleged final resting place, or place of last known occupancy:
the archive. The Archaeologies of Black Memory symposium broadened the space for these
dialogues by bringing literary scholars, historians, anthropologists, poets and art historians
together to engage one anothers work and the shared interests in considering how we endeavor
to make the dead bodies we encounter in the archive mean for our Selves in this present
moment. Saidiya Hartmans book, Scenes of Subjection, asks us to consider the history and
processes of subjection that critically inform how and even where we encounter (and read) black
subjects in the archives of history. If, in Specters of Marx, Derrida insists that one has to know
it, and that one has to have knowledge of the who and the where, then Hartmans Scenes of
Subjection and, more recently, Lose Your Mother highlights the troubling complexity of attaining
knowledge of a body, a subject, a Being whose existence and life is tied to the pleasure, power
and profit of white plantation owners. Moreover, her work suggests that the very desire to know
itthe black subjectis a means of further effacing the suffering and pain of the slave whose
body (though missing) is being called upon to provide the evidence that we (the readers) need in
order to understand slavery.
My conversations with Saidiya Hartman, like those with NourbeSe Philip, are shaped
both by their individual efforts to consider what it means to try to understand slavery in our
present moment. Can we understand it by returning, yet again, to the archive, in the absence of
bones, of tombstones, to try to identify and localize the remains of the enslaved? More
importantly, have we begun to think critically about what it meant, for example, to throw one
hundred and fifty human beings overboard a ship in order to collect insurance monies, as was the
case with the slave ship, the Zong? There were/are no bodies (of evidence) other than the two
page legal document that remains in the archive, and that document alone is what allows us, in
Derridas words, to know it; or in this case to know of it, the horrifying event, but certainly not
the lived experience of what transpired aboard the Zong. But in the end, what NourbeSe and
Hartman ask us (the readers and the spectators) is this: what do we know, really? What can we
know, finally? But more importantly, how do we begin to articulate these stories, their stories,
this (un)knowing? These conversations take very seriously the question of the absence, or some
would even say, the impediments, in the work of mourning the millions of dead in the aftermath
of slavery. How do you tell a story that must be told and yet cannot be told? A number of
scholars, including Saidiya Hartman, suggest that we begin by not telling.

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Saunders: Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman

The Interview: New York, October 2007

As theoreticians or witnesses, spectators, observers, and intellectuals, scholars believe
that looking is sufficient. Therefore, they are not always in the most competent position
to do what is necessary: speak to the specter.
(Jacques Derrida, Injunctions of Marx, in Specters of Marx)

Yet how does one recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from
the terrible utterances that condemned them to death, the account books that identified
them as units of value, the invoices that claimed them as property, and the banal
chronicles that stripped them of human features?
How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot
know? How does one listen for the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the
crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and
then assign words to all of it?
(Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts 3)

Patricia Saunders: Saidiya, thanks for taking the time to continue the dialogue we began in
Miami. I want to open the conversation by making some provocative connections between your
work, NourbeSes and the critical observation expressed by Derrida in this opening epigraph.
During my interview with NourbeSe we had an opportunity to discuss what I saw as a critically
provocative dialogue between your work and hers despite the differences in form. In particular, I
am struck by the attention you both pay to honoring the dead or what Derrida refers to as the
work of mourning (9). However, it seems to me that you are both concerned with the
unknowable the unspeakable, rather than the desire to possess or have knowledge of (in this
case) the enslaved subject imprisoned, so to speak, in the archive.
Saidiya Hartman: During the symposium, we were beginning to have a conversation about this.
Nourbeses work is very much about tending to the dead, and in her interview she discusses the
responsibility for undertaking this task. Thats something that we dont really talk about.
PS: And when you say responsibility, do you mean how we as scholars work in the archive, or
that this responsibility should be a part of, or reflected in, the scholarship we produce?
SH: Well, I would have to say yes to both. There is a moment in the interview with NourbeSe
where she talks about the kind of incredible responsibility involved in telling these stories and
how she didnt know if she could have told these stories earlier because of the pain and the
challenge and the difficulty involved in telling the stories. When we talk about history and the

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archive, I feel like theres a natural correspondence with Nourbeses work which has a great deal
to do with a concrete on- the- ground poetics, which is concerned with what it means to narrate
history differently. We have talked a bit about my work and its formal dimensions in terms of the
memoir/travelogue presentation part of itbut in the form there is the question of what it means
to narrate the past differently.
PS: One of the questions raised during the symposium concerned the degree to which poetry or
fiction allows for a more unapologetic and even critical reflection and engagement with the
archive that doesnt fetishize it, but also a consideration that encourages scholarly responsibility
to the lives and the people we encounter there. I would have to say, borrowing from the title of
the Small Axe interview with NourbeSe, that this relationship with the archive is very much
concerned, not just with defending the dead but also with being accountable to the dead. I see
this most readily in NourbeSes poetry, but I wonder working in prosewhether theres room in
academic discourse for participating in this not telling. I guess what I am asking is whether you
feel that poetry or fiction allows the writer/critic moreI dont want to say accessibilitya
space that makes the not telling less contradictory? But to take it a step further, is this why you
ended up working with the memoir/travelogue in Lose Your Mother.
SH: I really understood the project to be a critical prose monograph. I never thought that I would
write anything that anyone could attach the label memoir to. I didnt want to write that book.
Thats not me, and we know all the critiques of confessional discourse. Were all good
Foucauldians, so we know to stay away from that stuff. So I had to inhabit a rhetorical position
that was discredited on numerous fronts. To write Lose Your Mother I had to imperil myself and
make myself vulnerable to critiques from poststructuralists, Africanists, and historians. The
nature of the archive, and/or the absence of captive Africans as subjects in the discourse of
slavery, and the absence that haunts the physical spaces of confinement made writing the book
seem impossible. How does one write about a history that is this encounter with nothing; or write
about a past that has been obliterated so that even traces arent left. That entails more than a
critique of the archive. This absence or loss was a window onto the enormity of violence that
characterized the process of captivity and enslavements. Life worlds disappeared and destroyed;
the names of places that would never be remembered and all the names of persons that would
never be uttered again.
PS: When I listen to you talk about the absence that haunts the physical spaces, Erna Brodbers
novel, Louisiana comes immediately to mind. Not only is this narrative concerned with the same
absence, but also she seems to be grappling with the same critical questioning of the archive that
both you and NourbeSe are concerned with. Here is a writer/critic/social scientist who is not only
grappling with the contested and, at times, contradictory conventions of these disciplinary
discourses, but doing all of this in the name of challenging the methodology and processes of
recording history in the face of this absence; this is a daunting task, to say the least. In Lose Your
Mother, you describe the landscape itself as a witness, or a manifestation of the absences. There
is a moment where you point out that whenever you see the baobab tree, you are reminded that a

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Saunders: Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman

village once stood there. So, even the landscape itself is a reminder of absence, not because of
what is there, but what isnt there, what cant be summoned, recalled, or remembered. It must be
difficult to write into that space, how do you write into that?
SH: How do you write into that? Yes, that is the problem. It might also speak to the gendered
character of scholarship. Brodber, Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham come to mind.
Women often attempt to embody an archive or to be it. They are willing to make the body a
vehicle; courage and recklessness are required to be a host of history. In the conference in Miami
this question came up in regard to the archive and the repertoire. I think that part of Scenes of
Subjection was also about looking at the repertoire, looking at the forms of everyday life and
cultural practice from which I could galvanize certain narratives, or which offered counterhistories of slavery. So theres an archive of song, and of the dance form, but what are the social
texts and the historical texts that articulate those longings and aspirations, that take forms
commensurate or productively incommensurate to the experience described? Again, largely we
dont have them, with notable exceptions like DuBois. Regarding the memoir, for me, DuBoiss
Souls of Black Folk and Dusk of Dawn are critical models. DuBois is always using what Spivak
and Chandler would describe as the autobiographical example, which is not a personal story that
folds onto itself; its not about navel gazing, its really about trying to look at historical and
social process and ones own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an
example of them. In Lose your Mother, I wanted to tell a story capable of engaging and
countering the violence of abstraction. For me, that had to be embodied in physical story, and I
was the one who had to hazard the journey.
PS: So, in essence you become the conduit through which this narrative emerges.
SH: Right. And, in a way, it is very much like Brodbers Louisiana. Its the willingness to make
yourself a vehicle for these other stories. So I think that those were all the choices that dictated it,
and I think that theorists have made the point, whether its Hortense Spillers or Achille Mbembe,
about forms of power and sovereignty, about the character of black or native life, and the way
those forms of life or those forms of living death have been shaped by slavery and colonialism.
And so how could I make that argument, but in a narrative form? And why was I interested in
making it in a narrative form? I think that I was interested in writing a book that was narrative
because I feel that many of the people who care most about this issue are not inside the
university. Its like Hurstons work on voudoun, where she goes through the initiation and its
not only about the discipline of anthropology. Like Hurston, I think Brodber is asking us to think
about what it means for someone who is trained as a social scientist to reckon with the limit of
her discipline, then to want to be able to tell a story at another leveland thats that zone that is
so hard to name. Fiction writers and poets have the privilege of not having to name that as
method.
PS: In reviews of Lose Your Mother, the question of how to classify this text inevitably emerges.
Readers naturally want to situate your critical approach, narrative style or disciplinary

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investment in relation to a set of conventions. Given this, Im curious about the broader
dialogues taking place in a number of disciplines at this historical moment. It seems to me, based
on the scholarship presented at the conference, that a number of scholars are grappling with
whether the conventions themselves are the limitationsnot just in terms of the scholarship that
can be produced or the kinds of questions that can be askedbut also limitations of the archive.
And Im wondering whether that limitation extends to the critical tools that we have for engaging
the archive.
SH: Thats a good question. For me its about the relationship between the project of critique, a
relationship between critique and the relationship of that to a poetics. I mean in terms of the
relationship of critique to a revolutionary imagination that wants to discover, institute, initiate a
new way of telling, and theres a way that in Nourbeses Zong! poems she does both. Theres a
way that shes working with that legal template and in working with it shes utterly eviscerating
it and deconstructing it. In making all of its assumptions known, shes undoing those
assumptions by exacerbating them.
PS: Laying them bare?
SH: Right, but then shes also doing something more. Shes finding a way, as shes working
with silence, to give voice to the unutterable. And I would say thats the relationship between
critique and poetics.
PS: So, would you define that as a kind of fundamental shift in the discourse of thinking about
archives of memory and archives of history and experience of slavery?
SH: I think, yes, its a shift, although I dont know if its a shift that we can only trace
temporally, if its a shift of our moment, or if its the shift that any insurgent practice tries to
achieve in order to realize its goals. When one of those foundational texts, like The Souls of
Black Folkthis is a text assembled from a collection of essays which is this incredible critique
post emancipation, post Reconstructionthat form is a reflection of the need to assemble a
variety of forms in order to fully tell that story, to represent the breadth of experience. Theres an
economic discourse, a historical discourse, an elegiac discourse, and theres a performative
discourse. And I think that theres something of that in the drama of James Black Jacobins,
again in terms of the silence and withholding, and for me theres the critique of James not
actually being able to fully articulate and illuminate the consciousness of the Haitian masses. Its
as if in their consciousness as revolutionary actors who make the revolution succeed in a way
that Toussaint cannot, there is something about their consciousness that remains opaque. But part
of that opacity is there because it actually exceeds and goes beyond, rests outside the terms of an
Enlightenment discourse that made Toussaint legible, but also over-determined his failure. So, I
think that its the presence of that thing that cant be announced within the framework thats
already there and legible, that theres a hint of possibility. Its a possibility that for someone like
James remains encrypted in the voudoun songs. I think that its a project for people like DuBois,

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Saunders: Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman

James, NourbeSe, Kamau Brathwaite, Hurston and Brodberits a common and crucially
important project. And I think its why so many important black radical intellectuals have also
been playwrights, poets and novelists working across a variety of forms.
PS: How does your recent essay, Venus in Two Acts, take you in the direction of what you are
describing above? Or would you consider this a departure from that trajectory all together?
SH: In a way its the beginning of a new project. I try to make a statement about the cost of not
imagining, and I ask: can critique just be another way of remaining faithful to the limits of the
archive. And how do critics like myself continue to do what I doIm not going to go on to be a
fiction writer, Im someone who will continue to be involved in the work of nonfiction. But
theres a cost even in that. A former student, who is a historian, remarked that reading my work
is always so hard for her because on the one hand she looks at whats possible given the limits of
history as a discipline, and given the history thats produced its facts; but on the other hand that
there is a kind of optimism and possibility announced in Venus in Two Acts as well. I think
its a question I address in the essay itself: its the romance of resistance that I fail to narrate and
the events of love that I refuse to describe that raise important questions regarding the thing
historically; matters that are still contested in the present, that life eradicated by the protocols of
intellectual discipline.
PS: The project sounds a great deal like an archaeological dig where theres a kind of
anticipation of unearthing, but at the same time theres also a sense of having a context for
interpreting whatever is uncovered. Thats a difficult process. It is also clearly a project
concerned with caring for and about the deadbut its not the kind of honoring and recuperating
that memorializes people in stone as described in Verene Shepherds presentation on monuments
in Jamaica. In an interesting way its the anti-monument: it cant be fixed in that site, it cant be
set in that location, and yet it does a similar kind of work on the memory, the words attempt to
do this. But at the same time, it seems as though you are suggesting that language falls short,
necessarily so.1
SH: Yes, but I also think that the memory cant be fixed. In the temporality of my work and
NourbeSes theres something that remains open, thats why this is not simply the labor of
remembering. Its different because of the openness in the question of post-colonial: the sense
that the outcome is open and that intellectual labor is a part of that openendedness, is key to the
kind of work that I want to do.

The Location of Memory in Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother

PS: Would it be fair to say that Lose Your Mother is a continuation of that same kind of critical
project of engaging the archive begun in Scenes of Subjection? Its clear that contextually its a
different project, but it seems to me that traveling to these archival sites of memory and

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displacement in Ghana is a different way of thinking about the archive vis--vis the physical
connection with the location, with the evidence (or lack thereof) and imagined memories of what
transpired in these spaces. On the one hand you say youre going to Ghana to try and connect,
but it seems to me that Scenes of Subjection is about problematizing the readers expectations of
what they will find there, or, for that matter, in the archive. So was the move out (physically and
formally) in Lose Your Mother an effort to rethink the authority and powerful presence of the
archive by situating yourself in the physical space of the archive?
SH: Thats a great question and there are many answers. I think that youre right, in Scenes of
Subjection, theres that suspicion of the archive but the thing is that when you have a plentiful
archive, of the Freedmens Bureau papers, the WPA narratives, and the hundreds of slave
narratives produced in the U.S., then you have an archive that you can read symptomatically and
against the grain. But in order to do a symptomatic reading, it presumes a kind of canon, and
there was no canon or vast archive available regarding the experience of the captives in the
Atlantic slave trade. After my Fulbright year in Ghana, I came home thinking about what was I
going to do. How could I write a book with no texts, with no evidence, with no traces? In so
many traditional historiographies of the slave trade, the paucity of the archive was what
permitted historians not to represent the experience of those who were enslaved. So what was I
to do with this limitation? And the archive of the trade in some ways proved to be a distraction
I mean, it wasnt a trade for us. It was war and death, and kidnapping, but there was, again, the
volumes of trade documents. Now we see younger historians like Stephanie Smallwood, Vincent
Brown and Jennifer Morgan who are reading those documents against the grain, largely as a way
to understand the European logic, the kind of capital logic that translated humans into
commodities. All of which is to say that a critical reading of the archive is possible. Youre right
to point out the deep connection between Scenes and Lose Your Mother. Both books struggle to
understand the experience of slavery, to reckon with its violence, to attend to what remains. So
Im always writing about the present. Scenes closes in on the liminal status of the freed subject,
the ambiguity of that status, the impossibility of that status, and the crisis of citizenship, which is
about the immediate aftermath.
PS: Lose Your Mother is also bound up with contemporary expectations about our inherited
relationships, memories, recollections and encounters with slavery. In your case these encounters
and memories are revealed or even withheld in the archive and also in the landscape of Ghana,
the slave ports/towns where Africans were taken and sold into slavery. Throughout the narrative
there is a provocative gap between what I would have to call a psychic recollection of a past that
is present, and a distant history that we cannot connect with at a fundamental level.
SH: You raise an important point that is connected to what I think is a crucial question: what
does it mean to have this psychic inheritance of an experience for which one has no memory,
where people are still living in the temporal space of being an ex-slave? We dont possess
memories of slavery ourselves and that coupled with the incredible absence of witnesses of the
experience, particularly in terms of the slave trade, is part of the whole displacement from

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Saunders: Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman

Africa. So for me the book is a meditation on memory, on memory and history, written in the
form of a travelogue. But the journey through time and space is a device, a vehicle, a formal
means to exist in the physical landscape of slavery and to embody that history and to carry it.
And that explains the significant difference between what I do and what a guild historian does,
to borrow Michel Rolph-Truillots phrase. Im writing about an experience that I psychically
inhabit. Most history isnt written from that perspective.
PS: It seems to me that one of the things that you were doing in Lose Your Mother and in the
paper delivered at the conference (Venus in Two Acts,) was trying to think through the
contemporary condition of the slave past.
SH: Yes, I am engaging the slave past in order to understand the future that we inhabit. There are
great texts like W. E. B. DuBoiss Black Reconstruction, Jamess Black Jacobins, and Walter
Rodneys How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, that undertake this labor. However, for the most
part it has been poets and writers who have enabled me to think critically about history and to
figure out a way of talking about the immediacy of an experience that most others consider
remote.
PS: Yes, Lose Your Mother and Venus in Two Acts both end with a gesture towards thinking
about slavery in relation to a very contemporary condition
SH: Yes, its the contemporary condition and, you know, some readers get that, some dont. As
you know Ive never been trained as an AfricanistIm not an Africanist, but I wanted to think
comparatively about the memory of slavery. The first summer I traveled to Ghana my head was
going in circles because there was a Pan-Africanist vocabulary about slavery and colonialism
that I took for granted. I mean we, those of us in the diaspora, were always made aware of the
oppressive and destructive impacts of slaverywe all understood that from reading Walter
Rodneyafter all wasnt that everyones Bible? So it hadnt even occurred to me, I mean
literally the thought never crossed my mind, that there could be benefits of the slave trade? But
the text I encountered in the Cape Coast Castle Museum suggested exactly that. There were just
certain kind of things that I took for granted in terms of the critique of modernity and its cost,
right, thats pretty standard in the black, radical, postcolonial tradition of criticism. So I was
surprised, no, shocked, to discover that the imperial history of the slave trade was alive and well
in the public memory of slavery in Ghana, which was my naivet. The struggle over the meaning
of the past is still being waged. Every book written in the wasnt Britain wonderful for having
abolished the slave trade mode ends on a celebratory note that establishes the distance and
remoteness of that history from our present. One British scholar goes so far as to celebrate the
fact that Ghanaian youngsters feel that the history embodied in the castles have no relevance to
the present. British philanthropy and African forgetfulness are cause for rejoicing at Westminster
Abbey. Not being an African historian, I had to think about comparative memories and the way
memories are mobilized, which required me to engage the question of African slavery.
Alongside all of the historical questions, there was the issue of the form. What form was

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adequate to this project? Im an incredibly private personI never wanted to write a personal
book. I never wanted to write anything someone could refer to as a memoir. But I had to be there
to be the bridge between the present and the past, since I too was part of the remains.
PS: Well its also interesting that you raise that because the form certainly strays into personal
territory and yet it seems actively involved in denying the reader access to all of the conventions
that could solidly identify the content of the text as a memoir. There is a very personal aspect of
the book, one that draws the reader into a conversation in a seductive way, as if to take the reader
into your confidence as you begin to discuss the personal, but it is a personal that isnt simply
about youit is also the formation of an intellectual, the formation of a radical politics and
SH: The formation of a diasporic subject
PS: There is a very personal element that is seductive because it promises to expose the
pathways to the formation of this intellectual, this diasporic subject. I think that every intellectual
is engaged in that very personal kind of work regardless of their explanations for why they write
the books they write. There are always deeply personal questions we are trying to work through
and understand. But the reality of the situation in Lose Your Mother is that yours was an
experience of failed expectations, from day one. Given the desire to answer these personal
questions, how did you adjust to the failed expectations? Or even the resounding silences that
occurred when you met people and encountered locations that were not responsive and did not
measure up to your sense of their relationship to history.
SH: Ah the disappointment. It made me think and value the critical labor of eighteenth-century
writers like Ottobah Cugoano and his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and
Commerce of the Human Species. Cugoano refuses to describe the experience of the captive
because he says that it would be needless to describe it. The nature of black suffering is all too
familiar. And thats the way in which our present also creates an impasse, because to what end
does one represent such scenes when black suffering is all too ubiquitous? Recently, in the
Sunday edition of the New York Times, there was a photo of Congolese women who had been
raped in the war and who were attempting to elude the gaze of the camera, accompanied by a
casual, gratuitous description of their brutalization. What is the point of such descriptions? Did
the Sunday readers, put down their lattes and stop nibbling on their croissants? The chronicle of
black pain doesnt mobilize a response, it doesnt arrest the reader, and it doesnt incite a crisis.
Perhaps for us, for black people, but even that is not certain. So we see the violated women, we
read the text and we turn the page. In my work, I endeavored to make palpable that kind of
silence, the silence of Cugoanos refusal and withholding, and to use it critically in my own
narrative. The strategic use of silence was a way to ask: what does it mean to live in this present?
Someone like Sylvia Wynter would say, when we look at this whole language of the human with
1492 being a moment when we have the invention of the human and blacks are positioned on the
other side of that, that we continue to remain on the other side. So in some sense, again, looking
at the slave trade is about looking at this moment in the emergence and development of

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capitalism, the development of this whole language of the human, the rights- bearing subject, the
man and the citizen.
PS: Are you optimistic about the possibilities of Pan-Africanism in the present?
SH: I think that some people have said that they think that in my book Im saying we need to
leave Africa behind. Im not saying that at all. For me its about the kind of possibility of
political connections that are vital, that are real, and not about some fanciful notion of who we
once were (for a $50 ritual you can regain your Asante heritage). But its really about trying to
find points of crossing that are related to a future that might be different from the present on both
sides of the Atlantic. And I think that thats why I revere the Pan-Africanist generation and that
moment when they held sway on the world stage; it was a moment in which it seemed like a
radical Black global politics was destined to be triumphant.
PS: So do you think its impossible now, or is it simply a different way of thinking about what
politics means to this generation? The Africa of our parents generation was about a kind of anticolonial resistance, an identity that wasnt simply about finding a past that could connect us to a
larger whole. But it was really this sense of being part of a common struggle that may have been
different in Trinidad and Jamaica, and yet a sense that their fortunes were our fortunes guided
their participation. But today the way Africa lives in the contemporary imagination of black
Americans is so distinctly different than it was even forty years ago.
SH: I think whats ironic is the Pan-Africanist of the present, the kind of African Americans who
are largely living in Africa happily, the corporate Pan-Africanists. The young black Vice
Presidents of large companies like Coca-Cola and Shell Oil, or cultural attaches of mining
companies, are working for these multi-national corporations and living the African dream in
exclusive enclaves.
PS: So its a multinational corporate brand of pan-Africanism, not necessarily a socially or
cultural based political model of pan-Africanism?
SH: Right, its not about the political.
PS: Its about commerce?
SH: Its about commerce and trade. But when I think of those people I know who are in the
forties set and younger, many of those people are corporate people who are in South Africa,
Nigeria or Ghana. Whats interesting, though, is that many of the corporate upper-middle class
African American ex-patriots want the full benefits of their class privilege, but in the U.S. racism
always tempers that. And thats actually a difference between an African American and a
Caribbean experience because you can just be your full bourgeois self at home. The corporate
expats are interesting. I heard a radio interview with an investment banker who had lived in
Nigeria for four years and returned to Florida for a vacation. She was staying at a four star hotel

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resort, and her son was in the swimming pool and a little white girl in the pool asked her son if
he was a nigger. And she said it was at that moment that she decided that she wanted to return to
Africa because she didnt want her son to have the kind of experiences that awaited him in the
U.S. Her return to Africa was less like that earlier moment of people going to Tanzania or
Nigeria or Ghana because there was some political dream that was being articulated by those
progressive nation states then that those from the diaspora wanted to realize. I know a number of
African Americans who are in the professional, diplomatic, NGO, and USAID sector. They live
much better in African countries than they could in the U.S. Theyre living pretty well and the
inconveniences of life in the Third World are worth it when compared with Look a Negro or
forty-one bullets. The irony is that they are less vulnerable because they are safely situated
within the enclosure of empire and foreign capital, which is the very same force making the lives
of Africans vulnerable and disposable. Also, I think that theres something for people who
understand home as a place to which they belong. I mean, youre here, but where is home for
you?
PS: Ive been living here for thirty years of my life, but Trinidad and Tobago is still, and has
always been, the place I call home. But that is as much about how I inhabit my own social and
cultural realities of having parts of my life lived and experienced in other places for extended
periods of time. Most of my adult life has been spent moving between these two homes. So, to an
extent, I dont think choosing is an option.
SH: And thats a great psychological armor.
PS: Yes, I guess that is true. I think near the end of the book you say that being in a place doesnt
necessarily make it home. And as you suggest, at the conscious level, there is the psychic impact
of that knowledge. Its not something you live in a present day-to-day way, but there are certain
instances in which you know, to borrow NourbeSes idea, that belonging isnt just about being
accepted in a particular space, but it is about the notion of being long in (and longing for) a
space. So that there is a longing for some kind of connection that is precisely about the day to
day, about being able to subscribe to a certain set of values that, not only are you invested in, but
youve helped to create. I think that thats what drives some of the people to go to go to Ghana
and Nigeria and other parts of Africa. It is an alternative to the reality that, three or four
generations later, there is still this sense of non-belonging that is based largely on race in
America.
SH: I also think that there is something about the virulence of racism in the present, theres
something about the possibility of being subject to random acts of violence just because of the
color of your skin. And I dont know if its also, meaning again this is the personal history
New York is home for me, but I dont actually have deep roots here. My mothers family is from
the South. My fathers family is from the Caribbean. So what it means to be really grounded in a
place, I dont know. I was once talking with someone, a Southerner who did work on SNCC, and

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he was just talking about the connection and experiences he had there so that the South felt for
him like an ancestral land.
PS: While Trinidad may be home for me its also the constant movement between these two
spaces that makes me know that Im living and a part of both places/spaces. Because theres life
for me in both of these places and I am a part of communities here and there. When I go back
home and I see relatives aging, that pulls you back home because theres an immediacy of life
and living there that, while you are a part of it psychologically and emotionally, you havent
been there to witness and participate in the day-to-day physical activities of life.
SH: I think that part of the journey of Lose Your Mother is not about home as inheritance, but
home as making. I am writing about the journey in terms of thinking about what the poetics of
making (again) involves. Thats what revolutionary movements do, and I think thats what
diasporic identities are, and thats often what freedom communities, whether they be maroon
communities, or social movements,the possibility of dwelling or inhabiting a place. Its not
about inheritance but its about creating conditions that make dwelling possible.
PS: When I first finished reading Lose Your Mother there was this kind of immediate
dissatisfaction, not so much with the book itself, but with the process.
SH: So what was the disappointment about, say more.
PS: Because it is such a personal journey, it is as much about the individual subject of history as
it is about a collective experience. And yet by the end of the book its clear that the collective
you encountered in Ghana is not a oneness based on skin color. It is so very clear that we who
become together is a collective that is yet to even begin to take shape on the other side of the
Atlantic (Hartman Lose 231). So I suppose the disappointment may well be that there has not
been enough of an avenue between Africans on the continent and Africans in the Americas to
begin to engage in this project of becoming together. Yes, as I think about it more now, I think
that is the source of my disappointment. It is tied, I think to what you mentioned earlier, what
you described as the poetics of making anew, with one another, a narrative that is of our making
and our time.
SH: Its almost as if there are two endings really in the last chapter, and one is on this note of
becoming a whole again, and the fugitive dream that exceeds this part of the world. And for me,
this is about a kind of radical black internationalism. I think thats what Pan-Africanism was.
The fate of Ghana was connected with Vietnam. So I think that theres that echo, and then
theres something ironic, theres something sweet, theres something sentimental about the last
song.
PS: Whats empowering about the fugitive dream is that it leaves open this possibility for us to
imagine and refashion out of what isnt there. So we have the power and the authority to create
what we want to be in that space, which is both the empowering part of it and a really terrifying

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part of it as well. Because what does that mean, especially in the contemporary context, where
Africa is at once so distant from us and yet, particularly in the here and now, so very, very
present in terms of how black subjectivity is read, experienced, and lived on a daily basis,
especially here in the U.S.
SH: But in terms of the dissatisfaction, Id like you to say some more about it because for me the
question is: What do you make of this absence? On the one hand, its a promise and on the other
hand its a parody because its saying, okay, heres your song.
PS: I keep re-reading the end of the book because theres a part of me thats very much invested
in that creative moment, the possibility of what this remaking might mean. It suggests that we
have the wherewithal to write the tune and to write the lyrics. And yet theres a part of me that
believes that this is also a very privileged space.
SH: Lose Your Mother has one of those endings that is about listening for that song that is our
song, that song that actually travels across the diaspora, that song that might engender a new
form of radical black politics and its about waiting for that song. I cant fill that song in. Maybe
that song would have been Marleys song at a certain period in time but in our moment it feels
like were waiting to hear that song. So in that sense it wasnt only that I was trying to
underwrite closure but also the politics thats animating this meditation on the path we are on in
this moment of waiting, of anticipation, of not knowing.

Acknowledgements
This interview took place over the course of several conversations in New York between October
2007 and July 2008. The conference and the collaborative publication of the special issue of
Small Axe and Anthurium based on papers presented at the conference were made possible by a
generous grant from the Ford Foundation. I am indebted to Saidiya Hartman for taking the time
to do this interview, but also for committing the intellectual energy necessary to generate and
support these kinds of dialogues among writers and critics. I also want to extend my gratitude to
number of people with whom I discussed Saidiyas work at great lengthin many parts of this
interview, the questions I raise emerged out of conversations with Charles Carnegie, Harvey
Neptune and Rosanne Adderley. Finally, I would also like to thank Malcolm Frierson and
Michelle Ramlagan for their assistance in the transcription of the audiotapes.

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Notes
1

See Kamau Brathwaites The Zea Mexican Diary, 7 Sept 1926 - 7 Sept 1986.

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. Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. 1940. New
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. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New
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. Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe. 12.2 (2008): 1-14.
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Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington D.C.: Howard UP, 1981.

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