“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.” — Assata Shakur

This Black August, we will gather to read and discuss four books that challenge the ways we think about our world, about Blackness, about Hawai‘i, and our places in the midst of all of it.

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman (2007)

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history. The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger―torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. There are no known survivors of Hartman's lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way and with figures from the past whose lives were shattered and transformed by the slave trade. Written in prose that is fresh, insightful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a "landmark text" (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams).

Facilitator: Dr. Akiemi Glenn

Akiemi Glenn is the founder and executive director of the Pōpolo Project, a multimedia exploration of Blackness in Hawai‘i and the larger Pacific. With genealogical ties to the forest and coastal areas currently known as North Carolina and Virginia, her research considers the interplay of space, geography, community, and language. Akiemi's primary interests are in how Indigenous peoples, refugees, captives, migrants, and other diasporic peoples in the Pacific and the Americas use language to construct, navigate, and politicize their identities.