By a prominent US scholar of slavery. A mixture of history, memoir, and essay. Organized around an extended stay in Ghana and an exploration of the key sites of the slave trade there. An intense, often painful meditation on loss, forgetting, remembering, legacies of relentless violence, and the impossibility of return. Focused to a significant extent on the afterlives of slavery in Africa and how it is and isn’t remembered there, and the complex and fraught connections of those things with slavery’s memories and afterlives among the diasporic descendents of those enslaved. A book that says and stays with the Hard Things, that bursts comforting illusions and names contradictions, that refuses easy answers and imagined pasts or futures whose promises of solace would only deceive. A very generous offering of self, experience, and hard reflection, and not one primarily meant for me, but one I was so glad of the chance to learn from. And the writing is so brilliant. It is a kind of writing I wish I was able to do – the combination of incredible, piercing thoughtfulness with an approach to craft that I would categorize as decisively and wonderfully “writerly” rather than “scholarly”, and a seamless synthesis of modes of narrative that begin from the self with those that traverse the social and historical. An excellent and important book.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.