Quote/Note:
Saidiya Hartman. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Page 16: “My graduate training hadn’t prepeare me to tell the stories of those who had left no record of their lives and whose biography consisted of the terrible things said about them or done to them. I was determined to fill in the blank spaces of the hisorical record and to represent the lives of those deemed unworthy of remembering, but how does one write a story about an encounter with nothing?”
Page 19: “‘No matter how big a stranger’s eyes, they cannot see.’ I don’t think Stella, the housekeeper at the Marcus Garvey Guest House, was the person I first heard use these words to describe the proverbial blindness of Westerners, but she might as well have been.”