For the Record: Assignment on West African Narratives of Return

This assignment is excerpted from a section entitled, “Stranger in the Village” in a course entitled Freedom Dreams. This particular section exposes course participants to writers from across the Black diaspora who pursue, write about, and/or imagine various acts of “return” to West African countries such as Benin, Nigeria, and Ghana.  

Throughout the course, students are invited to speculate on the meaning of terms such as “archive,” “memory” and “record” / “record keeping.”

In this specific exercise, students have completed a reading of Chapter 8 of Saidiya Hartman’s critical memoir entitled, Lose Your Mother. 

Students are asked to prepare responses to the following prompts in anticipation of discussion. Responses must include a close reading of a passage from the chapter and answer a prompt: 

• What unexpected or “experimental” methods have black writers used to describe “return”? How does this method challenge your idea of return?
• What symbols, places, and rituals are described at the sites of return? 
• What competing narratives do storytellers, historians, and griots share about acts of memory, or conversely, about acts of forgetting? 
• What kinds of rituals escape or evade traditional forms of record-keeping and why? 

During discussion, students take turns presenting their ideas to the community and responding to peers. Participants are encouraged to remark on the challenging, creative, and dynamic strategies required of those who study black archives locally and abroad. 

Materials Used: 

Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008.

For the Record: Assignment on West African Narratives of Return by Mariel Rodney is marked with CC0 1.0