Hartman argues that slavery not only reduced people to the non-human status of commodities but also imposed on them a living death that cut them from their past and their kin. Uprooted from their native land, enslaved people become strangers, losing their connections to home and family as they are turned into a commodity, a tradable thing. Newly enslaved people were instructed to “lose their mother” and become nameless. Because of this enforced forgetting of the past, Hartman defines the condition of enslavement as that of harboring a persistent dream of elsewhere, of return to a lost place and a lost people.

Hartman herself, as a descendant of enslaved Africans now residing in the US, yearns to return to her roots and to know her personal history. Hartman is accustomed to defining slavery as an act of violence with dehumanizing consequences, and she expects Ghanaians to see it the same way—as a crime against humanity. She is shocked to realize that slavery is seen quite differently in Ghana than it is in the US. Those whose ancestors benefited from the trade in enslaved people sometimes take pride in this fact as a mark of their family’s high social status. Others prefer not to remember it at all, and become frustrated with Hartman for dredging up the past in a country where so many are struggling to get by in the present.