Difficult Diasporas. Samantha Pinto
“uncontrolled” body—she was the very method of control. Brought to London from Cape Town in 1810, Baartman performed under the draw of nascent sideshow curiosities but also as a “representative” of her racial-sexual identity, marked by her steatopygia, or her supposedly enlarged bottom. Her body was a marker of classification, and her performative value was not because of her anatomy but because of its construction and marketing as being the “common property” of black women. As her recent biographer, Rachel Holmes, articulates, “The success of the Hottentot Venus depended upon a contradiction: Saartjie needed to be perceived as a unique novelty, while absolutely typifying the stereotype of a Hottentot” (2007, 42)—again, exception and example. Anne Fausto-Sterling has traced not just Baartman’s “use” as a racial signifier through comparative anatomy but also other indigenous women featuring in racial typology dating back to the late sixteenth century (2000, 205). More recently, there has been an explosion of work on Baartman through the lens of disability studies (Rosemary Garland Thompson references her as part of the history of display of “othered” bodies in Extraordinary Bodies [1997] and her introduction to Freakery [1996]) and black diaspora studies, both in the realm of her continued visual legacy in drama such as the aforementioned Parks’s Venus and visual artist Renee Cox’s work and in the “return” of her remains to South Africa in 2002 and the subsequent commemoration of her singular legacy in postapartheid South Africa (as noted by critics such as Neville Hoad [2007] and the documentary The Life and Times of Sarah Baartman [1998]). And in 2010, Alexander’s poem prefaced the introduction to Deborah Willis’s edited collection on the legacy of “Venus,” in Black Venus 2010 (2010), the first major anthology work to consider her legacy of representation, from historical, visual, and cultural studies perspectives. As Willis herself notes, much “variation” exists in critical investments and naming of the genealogy of the Venus Hottentot, but as exception and example, she stands with a planetary body of work and reference surrounding her.7
Alexander’s poem itself, “The Venus Hottentot (1825),” is divided into two sections which come to represent this collective cultural impulse to recover lost history and to question that historical representation in any and all of its forms—much as the 2008 Crais and Scully biography suggests in its title: Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. The first section is entitled “Cuvier,” the last name of the French scientist who circulated and did experiments on Baartman, and it tracks the known world, the “biography,” of whom we can only know as a performance through the archive, the Venus Hottentot:
Science, science, science!
Everything is beautiful
blown up beneath my glass.
Colors dazzle insect wings.
A drop of water swirls
like marble. Ordinary
crumbs become stalactites
set in perfect angles
of geometry I’d thought
impossible. Few will
ever see what I see
through this microscope.
Cranial measurements
crowd my notebook pages,
and I am moving closer,
close to how these numbers
signify aspects of
national character.
Her genitalia
will float inside a labeled
pickling jar in the Musée
de l’Homme on a shelf
above Broca’s brain:
“The Venus Hottentot.”
Elegant facts await me.
Small things in this world are mine. (1990, 3–4)
It is a short section, in the first person, with couplet lines that enjamb themselves, giving the effect of strain or a failing order. The “Cuvier” section lays out a particularly contained narrative of the genealogy of black women’s bodies; “Science, Science, Science!” the section begins, repeating the frame of reference lest we “miss” it. Cuvier’s narrative is one of objects, “small things” which make up an exacting but completely exterior world. Things are “blown up”—“insect wings,” “cranial measurements,” “genitalia”—things are preserved to be “seen” by Cuvier and by a future viewing public. His genealogy is one of moving “closer” in order to go further, to the museum, and so on. His narrative, as Alexander imagines/constructs it, is one of assigning reference, naming. It is the part, the artifact, which is named, “her genitalia” in a jar given a referent but “her,” the body and subject, left unmade. Of course, Alexander’s reverse act is to name/construct “Cuvier,” to limit him to these contained lines, to a “small” body of ownership, of knowledge, a small lineage (3–4). Her appropriation of his voice takes Alexander’s knowledge and reframes the referent under Hottentot’s name, rather than the conventional genealogy that would locate Cuvier, then Baartman. Alexander’s use of historical detail and multiperspective interior monologue to remake narratives of race and sexuality marks her’s intervention into the patterns of reference that identify Baartman’s meaning, a failing series of parts standing in for what was always a performative, constructed whole or, in Gilman’s words, the “specimen” acting as “pathological summary of the entire individual” (2010, 86). “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” is a critique of taking from the specifics of historical detail a compulsory narrative of gendered and racialized subjectivity, the “tragic case” repeated, imminently and endlessly.
If Cuvier’s historiography is relegated to the limits that Alexander imposes on his referents, then her wish to inhabit or rewrite the genealogy of the Venus Hottentot reads as expansive, not as a recovery project for a “ghost,” per se. And indeed, it is not the “fact” of Venus’s bottom, nor scientific discourse alone, that gives the bottom, as sign, its historical and cultural weight: “Bottoms were big in Georgian England,” Baartman biographer Holmes tells us, as was public debate about Baartman’s status as either “slave” or “free agent” in the emerging capital market, one that marked her ability to, for instance, speak several languages as a skill set that implied consent perhaps even more than her corporeal presence did (2007, 43).8 Alexander herself references this move in her Callaloo interview when asked about her interest in Hottentot:
Hopefully what the poem gives her also is an intellectual range. When I say intellectual, I don’t mean book stuff but a rich and textured inner life that belies the surface exploitation and presentation. I guess that’s what I’m most interested in. It’s a very interesting black-people-character question because our surfaces are so wildly distorted in Western culture. Therefore, to go into the inside, there is all this contrast and distance frequently with how we are seen and who we are inside. (Phillip 1996, 502)
Though the rationale sounds perhaps seductively sentimental, notice that Alexander describes her process here not as a corrective measure but as a descriptive one; she, as her Venus Hottentot does in the next section in the poem, is describing the terrain in which she writes on race, gender, and sexuality. The “interior” is the bottom, full of “contrast and distance,” unresolved for her poetic genealogy. Like Alexander’s conception of her audience, her relationship to constructing Saartjie Baartman as reference is a question of narrative capacity or range, not a reproduction of “the illusion of realism” and “mastery” that characterizes nineteenth-century engagement with Baartman or the narrative that locates her as a model of resistance (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 6). Her mapping does not deny even as it seemingly conflicts with surface signs of meaning. Alexander’s poem and the collection it frames contest the constructed conflict between sexuality and intellectual production as a false split between exterior and interior.9 “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” shifts poetic genealogy to questions of moving into rather than moving over to something larger than such “small” objects. It insists not on the sum of their representative parts but