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Article Excerpt
There are two beginnings that sound this essay's themes. The first is Stephen Jay Gould's essay "The Hottentot Venus," an influential source for renewed interest in Saartjie ("Sarah" or "Sara") Baartman, which begins not with his discovery of Baartman's preserved genitalia at the Musee de l'Homme but with an anecdote on the importance of seeing differently. He recalls advising a classmate that while adults always looked up, "little folk" might "find all manner of valuable things on the ground if only we kept our gazes down" (291). Having learned, in adulthood, to look up as well as down, Gould discovers Baartman's genitalia on a shelf just above the brain of Paul Broca. (He found no women's brains or any male genitalia.) As the essay proceeds, an emphasis on vision becomes increasingly problematic, since Gould's sympathies never transcend a non-reciprocal gaze that reaffirms Baartman's purported racial and sexual otherness. Although he notes that Khoi-San "languages [...] were once dismissed as a guttural farrago of beastly sounds" but have since been "widely admired for their complexity and subtle expression" (300), Gould's prioritization of vision replicates the original dismissal of Baartman's voice by Georges Cuvier, whose autopsy report of her "mentions, in an off-hand sort of way, that Saartjie [...] spoke Dutch rather well" and had some familiarity with English and French (Gould 296, emph. mine). Framed through this visual logic, Gould's reflections continue an Enlightenment tradition in which visual observation is privileged over aural observation as bearer of scientific evidence, and thus they sustain Baartman's status as visual icon of racial and sexual difference.
A second beginning of significance here is that of Barbara Chase-Riboud's novel Hottentot Venus, which opens with "The Heroine's Note," a paragraph from Baartman's perspective explaining colonialism in South Africa and the origins of the appellation "Hottentot." After colonizing South Africa, the Dutch renamed the members of the Khoekhoe nation "Hottentots," an insult, equivalent to "nigger,""which means 'stutterer' in Dutch, because of the way [the Khoekhoe] language sounded to them" (xi, emph. mine). The Hottentot epithet refers not to the visual forms of difference through which race is often categorized but to less tangible forms of sonorous difference. This process of appellation attenuates the forms of identification available to Baartman and the narratives that she can construct, for, as she reveals, "to tell this, my true story, I was stuck with a name we didn't choose but must use so that those who gave us these names may listen" (xi, emph. mine). For Chase-Riboud, the visual scrutiny of Baartman's body represents a secondary form of scrutiny that substantiates her difference with more viable forms of "evidence," but that also necessarily succeeds the more ephemeral form of sonorous difference that the sounds of her voice construct.
During displays on English and French stages, Baartman was used to demonstrate visually ideological preoccupations with physical and cultural differences between Europeans and Africans, and Gould's essay does little to overturn that visual prejudice. However, Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus and Chase-Riboud's Hottentot Venus use images of sound and speech to counter the visual demarcations between self and Other that her staged display was meant to reify. These texts forego the use of her sexual features as icons of racial and national difference and, instead, deploy the voice to renegotiate the terms of national identification. Baartman's speech moves her observers from the comfortable position of spectators to the uncomfortable one of audience compelled to acknowledge in her voice the lack of difference between spectacle and audience, between repudiated Other and national community. In these narratives, Baartman's speech problematizes national identifications during a series of deeply symbolic interactions with audiences at London's Piccadilly Circus, with a British court, and with Cuvier's troupe of naturalists at Paris's Jardin du Roy. Despite the varying effects of Baartman's speech in each space, Parks's and Chase-Riboud's narratives reveal throughout that sounds play a crucial role in the construction and the destabilization of exclusive national identities. Their representations of Baartman position the speaking subject--and the sounds of the subject speaking--as simultaneously essential to national identification and subversive of its foundational principles of imaginary exclusion. In their narratives, sounds and voices enable recognition of non-visual differences that both produce and disrupt communal affect.
Analyses of the "Hottentot Venus" traditionally rely upon a limited historical record constituted by European impressions of Baartman's body's symbolic meanings. Born in 1789 in the Gamtoos Valley, Baartman was a resident of the Cape of South Africa and a member of the Khoekhoe tribe. While employed--or enslaved--by Peter Cesars, a Boer farmer, she became the object of his brother Hendrik's lascivious and entrepreneurial interests. In 1810, Baartman travelled to London for display in the Piccadilly Circus, where her caged performance titillated and enraged audiences, who fixated on the display of her body and on that display's apparent violation of the recent abolition of the slave trade. Because of her supposed affront to anti-slavery law, Baartman's promoters were unsuccessfully tried for keeping her in involuntary servitude, after which the show toured England and relocated to Paris in 1814. There, Baartman drew the attention of Georges Cuvier and the French scientific establishment. Baartman died in 1815, but her public display continued in the form of autopsy reports presented by Henri de Blainville and Cuvier in 1816 and 1817, respectively. Her genitalia and skeleton remained on display at the Musee de I'Homme until the 1980s. In 2002, the French National Assembly agreed to return Baartman to South Africa, where she was buried in the Gamtoos Valley nearly two centuries after her death (Crais and Scully; Holmes).
That Chase-Riboud and Parks have chosen to recreate this narrative comes as little surprise to those familiar with their work. The intersections of race, gender, and national identity have long interested each, though such interest comes in vastly different forms. Chase-Riboud's Hottentot Venus, the latest in a series of historical novels emphasizing the functions of race and gender in the shaping of national identities, differs only slightly from the record of Baartman's experiences. Indeed, Chase-Riboud describes her narratives as "nonfiction novels," rivalling scholarly biographies and historiographies in their presentation of historically verifiable events. She reinforces the purported veracity of her narratives not only through adherence to the historical record and liberal quoting from historical documents but also, and more significantly, through adoption of linear narratives whose simplicity mimics conventional historiography. Thus, while Hottentot Venus presents history as a racially and sexually specific construction, it can only reclaim Baartman from European historiography by adopting the methods and teleological narrative forms complicit in the raced and gendered textualization of her experiences.
Although Parks would certainly agree with Chase-Riboud's diagnosis of Baartman's history as a raced and gendered construction,...
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