Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman

Representation and Black Womanhood 9780230117792_01_prexii.indd i 6/21/2011 8:14:14 PM 9780230117792_01_prexii.indd...

Author: Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

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Representation and Black Womanhood

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Representation and Black Womanhood The Legacy of Sarah Baartman Edited by

Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

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REPRESENTATION AND BLACK WOMANHOOD

Copyright © Natasha Gordon-Chipembere, 2011. All rights reserved. “Six Women of Color.” Permission granted by Angela Hayden. “Nomshado, Queensgate Parktown, 2007.” Permission granted by Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Michael Stevenson, Cape Town. “I’ve come to take you home.” Permission granted by Diana Ferrus. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11779–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Representation and Black womanhood : the legacy of Sarah Baartman / edited by Natasha Gordon-Chipembere. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–11779–2 (hardback) 1. Baartman, Sarah. 2. Baartman, Sarah—Influence. 3. Women, Khoikhoi—Biography. 4. Women, Black—Race identity. 5. Women, Black, in art. 6. Racism in museum exhibits. I. Gordon-Chipembere, Natasha, 1970– DT1768.K56B37 2011 305.48⬘8961—dc22 [B]

2011011006

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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For the reasons my soul smiles, Aminata, Jabulani, and Masauko

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Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is the act of speech, of “talking back,” that is no mere gesture of empty words; that is the expression of our movement from object to subjectthe liberated voice. bell hooks

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Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Prelude: “I’ve come to take you home” by Diana Ferrus

xi

Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman, a Legacy to Grasp Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

1

Part One The Archive: Disrupting the Colonial Narrative One

Two

“Body” of Evidence: Saartjie Baartman and the Archive Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu “My Tongue Softens On That Other Name”: Poetry, People, and Plants in Sarah Bartmann’s Natural World Yvette Abrahams / Khib Omsis

Three “Rude” Performances: Theorizing Agency Hershini Bhana Young Four

Five

17

31 47

Baartman and the Private: How Can We Look at a Figure that Has Been Looked at Too Much? Gabeba Baderoon

65

Placing and Replacing “The Venus Hottentot”: An Archeology of Pornography, Race, and Power Sheila Smith McKoy

85

Part Two Troubling the “Truth”: Corporeal Representations Six

Writing Baartman’s Agency: History, Biography, and the Imbroglios of Truth Desiree Lewis

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Seven

Contents

“I Wanna Love Something Wild”: A Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus Ilaria Oddenino

121

Eight

“Just Ask the Scientists”: Troubling the “Hottentot” and Scientific Racism in Bessie Head’s Maru and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy 137 Z’étoile Imma

Nine

Staging the Body of the (M)other: The “Hottentot Venus” and the “Wild Dancing Bushman” Karlien van der Schyff

147

Under Cuvier’s Microscope: The Dissection of Michelle Obama in the Twenty-First Century Natasha Gordon-Chipembere

165

Ten

Notes on Contributors

181

Bibliography

185

Index

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Acknowledgments This is a work of collaborative, global sisterhood—all premised on honoring the spirit of our ancestor, Sarah Baartman. I humbly thank her as auntie and guardian spirit on this project. I would like to thank all the magnificent contributors in this book: Gabeba, Yvette, Desiree, Sheila, Ilaria, Z’étoile, Hershini, Siphiwe, and Karlien for the integrity of their work and the elegance of their camaraderie. I would be remiss not to begin in the beginning with my dear mentor and doctoral supervisor, Dr. Pam Ryan at UNISA, who guided me through my dissertation in 2006, much of which inspired this project. I would like to thank my steadfast New York writing group for reviewing my chapter on Michele Obama: Natasha Lightfoot-Swain, Vanessa Perez-Rosario, and Hlonipha Mokoena. Thanks also go to the WOC (Women of Color) Academic writing group at the CUNY Grad Center during fall 2010. I was able to do all my final edits during our long Friday working sessions. Part of the introduction was completed with support from a PSCCUNY Grant through which I was able to visit the British and Wellcome Libraries in London for archival materials. I was fortunate to present aspects of this project at the African Studies Association UK conference at Oxford in September 2010. The feedback was provocative and gave me the final push I needed to bring the project to a close. Thanks also go to South African artist, Zanele Muholi for her work and vision and Michael Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town for accommodating my request for images so effortlessly. I thank Diana Ferrus for starting Sarah’s return home with her now famous poem, “I’ve come to take you home” and allowing me to reprint it in its entirety here. I also need to acknowledge the graciousness of Angela Hayden for her cover art, “Six Women of Color.” The first time I saw it, my spirit was humbled and it felt like Auntie Sarah was giving me a silent nod that this visual image should hold the words of this book together. Thanks also to the

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Acknowledgments

wonderful, efficient folks at Palgrave, namely Chris Chappell and Sarah Whalen. I also thank Ethne Clarke for her stellar work on the index. I must acknowledge my sister friends who provided me with laughter, wisdom, and encouragement throughout this project: Sindi Gordon, Kisha Clarke-Morrison, Tonya Hegamin, Maria DeLongoria, Tracey Walters, Selina Okeyo, Megan Jackson, and Bongi Bangeni. Lastly, where would I be without my family? I give thanks to my ancestors from Costa Rica and Panama and to all my family in both places and the United States. I thank my parents, Norma and Vicente, for stepping out of my path when I needed to be in the world. I acknowledge the inspiration that my mother-inlaw, Catherine, has provided me. Thanks to my siblings, Xanthe and Stephen, for being excellent babysitters and sources of laughter. My children, Jabulani and Aminata, thank you for your spirits of beauty. And Masauko, thank you for being so dedicated to the fact that I too have the right to dream, to write, to create. I love you. May Sarah Baartman rest in blissful peace.

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Prelude

“I’ve come to take you home” (Tribute to Sarah Bartmann written in Holland, June 1998) Diana Ferrus I have come to take you home, home! Remember the veld, the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees? The air is cool there and the sun does not burn. I have made your bed at the foot of the hill, your blankets are covered in buchu and mint, the proteas stand in yellow and white and the water in the stream chuckles sing-songs as it hobbles along over little stones. I have come to wrench you away, away from the poking eyes of the man-made monster who lives in the dark with his clutches of imperialism who dissects your body bit by bit, who likens your soul to that of Satan and declares himself the ultimate God! I have come to soothe your heavy heart, I offer my bosom to your weary soul. I will cover your face with the palms of my hands, I will run my lips over the lines in your neck, I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you and I will sing for you, for I have come to bring you peace. I have come to take you home where the ancient mountains shout your name. I have made your bed at the foot of the hill. Your blankets are covered in buchu and mint. The proteas stand in yellow and white—

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Prelude

I have come to take you home where I will sing for you, for you have brought me peace, for you have brought us peace.

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Introduction: Claiming Sarah Baartman, a Legacy to Grasp Natasha Gordon- Chipembere

A Prelude On August 9, 2010, I found myself in Cape Town, South Africa, on National Women’s Day. It happened to be the eighth anniversary of Sarah Baartman’s burial in Hankey, in the Eastern Cape. A month later, I am sitting on the underground in London, when the Tube stops; the conductor is announcing signal problems. I look up, weary from jet lag and the red eye from New York. As if by divine providence the stop is Piccadilly, where Sarah was first exhibited when she arrived in London with Hendrick Cezar in 1810— No. 225 Piccadilly Circus, the space that Sarah had to face daily—on a stage—the eyes of all those who could pay the two shillings to see her body. As I sat in the Tube, all I could say was eish, Sarah, my sister. I think of Diana Ferrus’s now famous poem “I’ve Come to Take You Home” (1998), which set the wheels cranking in France (after eight long years) to have Sarah’s remains repatriated to South Africa. Countless people have been moved by her historical narrative(s), now mythical and iconic, from the cacophony of voices attempting to own a part of Sarah’s story. She has become the landscape upon which multiple narratives of exploitation and suffering within black womanhood have been enacted. However, there are those scholars, womanists, activists, sisters, mothers, and lovers who are not easily seduced by the “victimized woman” or “Mother Africa nationalist icon” status bestowed on Sarah by South African president Thabo Mbeki’s eulogy on August 9. Many South African and diasporic women continue to be disturbed by the implicit (and complicit) silences around questions of Sarah’s personhood: her intimate spaces. Their work creates new possibilities for imagining the private, rather than the public spectacle of the “victimized” plight of the “Hottentot Venus.” These writers maneuver away from the preying eyes and gaping tongues of those

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Natasha Gordon- Chipembere

who build academic and writing careers on producing “authoritative” (and thus finite) biographies on Sarah, works that only made evident the cartographies of their own historical viewpoint; Sarah, the woman, remains invisible. The reason I decided to take on this book project was simple; as a black woman from the Caribbean (Costa Rica and Panama via Jamaica), I have not found a space where the questions about Sarah Baartman I wanted to ask and have answered existed. I have found a core group of women who insist on other truths by butting hard against the “archived” colonial history and contemporary nationalizing of Baartman as the symbol of exploited black womanhood post her 2002 burial. The women included in this collection—Siphiwe Ndlovu, Yvette Abrahams, Hershini Bhana Young, Gabeba Baderoon, Sheila Smith McKoy, Desiree Lewis, Ilaria Oddenino, Karlien van der Schyff, and Z’étoile Imma—are individuals for whom I have the deepest respect. Ironically, I have found their seminal works on Sarah Baartman sitting on isolated corners of the world’s bookshelves. These women—eight from Southern Africa, three from the African Diaspora, and one from Italy—emerging and established scholars alike manifest a range of scholarship that moves beyond rhetoric in Baartman’s narrative. I initiated this edited collection as a place to gather these voices into a dialogue, forging this sisterhood side by side in the pages of excellence so that we can be in each other’s company as we face the hard questions about Sarah Baartman. The task of querying her legacy on representations of our bodies in the twenty-first century informs how we challenge silent spaces and invisibility by asking questions that are not supposed to come out of our mouths in a world that wants to wish us all away, a world that asks us to conform into academic tongues of rigor, straightening our t’s and dotting our i’s; if not, we perish. I wanted this book to be a conversation among these women who each claim Sarah Baartman and learn from her legacy, and a space for South African women writers specifically to be bolstered in this sisterhood that has been forged on these pages. This is not a text monopolized by Western voices but a space for globalized reflection. There are reputable texts by African American writers, artists, and scholars about Sarah Baartman with a few African voices interwoven (see Debra Willis’s Black Venus 2010: And They Called Her Hottentot). I find the Baartman conversations in the North radically different from those in the South, and so this book

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attempts to present a strong voice from the South (with echoes of the far-reaching Diaspora), of women providing linguistic shoulders to lean on, compassionate prayers, and academic expertise around textured questions that have yet to sit side by side with each other. Laura Chrisman notes that much postcolonial study does not have the linguistic capacity to address colonial South African history. Thus, “writing back to the centre, mimicry, or hybridity do not adequately account for the formal, linguistic and ideological textures of some of the literature under study” (Chrisman 2000, 208). In much Baartman scholarship from the North, one finds that she has been coopted into a postcolonial black subject of the African Diaspora and her womanhood has been “read” within the paradigms of the North American slave experience. Carole Boyce Davies notes that one must “identify the exclusionary nature of US constructions of black feminism . . . or it forces black women form other parts of the world to locate their identities with the context of US hegemony” (1994, 31). While in most certainty, Sarah’s narrative can be understood in regard to disaporic or exile studies, it was, in fact, her specific “Khoisan-ness” that precipitated the European interest in her body as an object of curiosity to display. Following the reasoning of Pumla Dineo Gqola, I read and position Sarah Baartman as a slave, rather than as an indentured worker, as regardless of legal definitions within South African historical studies, the Khoisan were exposed to conditions that would clearly be defined as slavery (2010, 15). Slavery in South Africa was a gendered project that erased the lives of female slaves. This book becomes testimony to claiming Sarah’s life as a slave while enabling women to become active agents by facing her legacy. This collection engenders new language that extends the limits of general postcolonial interpretation and insists upon a historically specific Southern African context as the landscape and the time frame in which to access Sarah Baartman. Sarah Baartman died almost 200 years ago, if her 1815/1816 death estimate is correct. Loosely, what we know is that Sarah, a Khoisan woman, came from a community of people; she had a life prior to the European encounter. She was called by a name in her mother tongue, rather than the Dutch and English remnants that continue to embattle the purveyors of her legacy today (i.e., “Saartjie/Sarah/Sara”). We know that her people were decimated by the Dutch commandos in their colonizing of the Cape. We know that she ended up in Cape Town, as a noncitizen, and worked for a

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number of families including the Cezars before she left Cape Town. Slavery was practiced in the Cape between 1658 and 1838 (Gqola 2010, 6). We know she was taken (my emphasis) to London in the spring of 1810 and displayed at 225 Piccadilly Circus. We know that she was involved in a court case that tried to discern her slave status, in November 1810, which was ultimately dismissed. She was baptized in 1811 in Manchester, taken to Paris in 1814 and 1815 ; she died and was dissected by Georges Cuvier. Her remains were thus displayed in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until the late 1970s, when she was put into storage and taken out only in 2002 for her repatriation to South Africa. There is really nothing else, except speculation of her time in the Cape or Europe. Much of the scholarship that exists today on Sarah Baartman is an attempt to fill in the gaps. But much of this filling has insisted on viewing her externally, perceived through an archived, colonial lens that does not bring the reader any closer to the personhood of Sarah Baartman. This imagining of Sarah has confined her to the space of victim, prostitute, and drunkard, labels that have now become synonymous with black womanhood (even those with the best intentions kill her in their texts by having her drown in a bathtub due to her obesity or reduce Sarah to her caricatured “hottentot” features of diseased buttocks and enlarged labia. One can only imagine the agendas of those without, as Siphiwe Ndlovu calls, “an ethic of care”!). We know nothing of Sarah’s thoughts; these we can only imagine. Though there are debates around the presence of some testimonies in Europe, all these I posit are through the voices/written words of her European translators and owners. They remain questionable in regard to agenda and intent. I am not willing to surrender my knowing of Sarah Baartman on these texts. What each individual brings to Sarah’s story depends on how attached one is to the “authenticity” of the colonial archive and the location of one’s politics. This book is not about answers but about asking more provocative questions. This book challenges more privileged voices that sit in the “right places” with enough funding and access to create texts that authenticate their “version” of Sarah’s story. As writers in this collection, we insist on an end to the redundancy of a colonial historiography that never glimpses (or acknowledges) Sarah Baartman, the woman whose name we can call only in English, not in her Khoisan name or her mother’s tongue. This is not a book that includes any

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racist and sexist caricatures of Sarah from old aquatints and British and French newspapers. There are no images of Sarah in this book because we do not know how she would represent herself, and this is most important. We know that the caricatures are not honest with their lenses; these images rendered the monster that was African womanhood in the eyes of the colonial empire. As contributors of this book, we see Sarah’s personhood as sacred, fragile, and fierce, and this is how we each claim Sarah Baartman. This collection also investigates the trajectory from Sarah Baartman’s nineteenth-century narrative to contemporary manifestations of a dominant Euro-American gaze on African and Diasporic women’s bodies. The story of Baartman, with its questionable archived colonial historiography, begins this investigation into how her legacy has impacted current representations of African and Diasporic1 women in the twenty-first century. Within Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but also contemporaneously upon the bodies of black women, focusing predominantly on the “anomaly of their hypersexual” genitals. In the final chapter in this collection, I explore this idea further in a discussion around the “dissection” of Michele Obama during the presidential campaign. Baartman’s story has stimulated international discussions concerning the conflations between gender, race, representation, and selfhood. Her narrative begins with the meditative construction of the South African Khoisan into the “barbaric Hottentots” by the English starting in the early 1600s. Linda E. Merians’s text Envisioning the Worst: Representations of “Hottentots” in Early-Modern England establishes a foundation for the sentiments explored in this collection. Merians maps the historical construction of the Khoisan in the Cape colony through the early 1600s. Most of her research is provided from materials English sailors used to write home (travel narratives, letters, journals, geography books, among others). She notes at the beginning of her book that there has been no other indigenous society that has been described so negatively or appropriated as widely as the Khoisan people, the so- called Hottentots (Merians 2001, 48–49). The deliberate construction of a barbaric, savage people was a method through which the English could displace their own fears and anxieties as a nation in the midst of transforming into an imperial power. Said’s notions of Othering come

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into play here as the Khoisan people were villanized/Othered in a direct attempt by the English to establish themselves as superior, thereby justifying colonization and oppression. 2 The domination of Africans was explained with the aid of science, thereby establishing the Khoisan (“the Hottentots”) as the most ignoble group in the progression of mankind, purported to mate with the orangutan. It is here that Sarah Baartman, placed on exhibit in London and Paris from 1810 to 1815, enters the discourse. Baartman was used as a yardstick by which to judge the stages of Western evolution, by which to discern identity, difference, and progress . . . [She was] relegated to the terrain of the primitive—the lowest exemplum of the human species—while the European . . . always . . . assume[d] the pinnacle of human development. The process of mediating the self, of reflecting the self, through the body of the black female Other begins and rebegins with every regard. (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 23)

First, reinforced throughout this collection is that the persona of the “Hottentot Venus,” infamous for her buttocks and alleged Hottentot Apron (extended labia), is a creation of the European imagination; second, the language used in representing her established a historical, unmediated trajectory of derogatory images about black women’s bodies worldwide. Central to this work is the deconstruction of the idea concerning Baartman’s “mythical Hottentot Apron,” which fixated a Western gaze on her genitals, and has become a fact about her person that has never been proven with physical evidence. Yet, the myth prevails. Culminating with her dissection by Georges Cuvier, Baartman’s genitals were thus unveiled to the European world, where, I suggest, the master text about the black female body was created. It is with this fabrication that an external gaze is sanctioned, querying the African woman’s humanity based upon the nature of her genitals. Alongside this comes the entrenchment of a language of degradation, sexualization, and primitiveness.

Sarah Baartman According to Cecil le Fleur, chairman of the National Khoisan Consultative Council, Sarah Baartman was born around 1789 in the Eastern Cape in South Africa (McGreal 2002, 2). She was

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from the Quena people. Baartman was forced, as a noncitizen, to go Cape Town as a laborer for a Dutch family (Abrahams 1997, 34–48). According to European reports, Baartman was brought to London in 1810 by Hendrik Cezar, the brother of her Dutch master, and his traveling companion, Alexander Dunlop, an Englishman. For two shillings, the British public could view the “Hottentot Venus” at no. 225 Piccadilly Circus, advertised as a human curiosity, exhibited “on a stage two feet high, along which she was led by her keeper, and exhibited like a wild beast; being obliged to walk, stand, or sit as he ordered” (Qureshi 2004, 236). In her book Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, Janell Hobson dedicates her thesis to the symbolic appropriation by the West of Baartman’s blackness, female body, and sexuality and to contemporary perceptions of black women’s bodies worldwide. Hobson’s premise is that Baartman, as defined by Georges Cuvier, Napoleon’s surgeon who dissected her remains, became the prototype of “an anomaly, a freak, oversexed and subhuman” (2005, 6). Her buttocks coupled with her perceived hypersexuality created a Western historical trajectory of sociocultural images/imaginings of Africa and the black female body as inherently inferior, and thus a site to be plundered. As the medical and anthropological discourses that codified racial difference gained strength in the nineteenth century, new categories were constructed in which one’s morality and humanity were linked with one’s biological makeup. Baartman’s case was even more extenuating as English and French scientists and doctors were most fascinated with her sexuality. Signified by her genitalia, her sexuality was classed as abnormal, excessive, and debauched as opposed to normative European self-representations. African women’s sexuality became aligned with all things deviant (Wiss 1994, 11). The grotesque body, in this case Baartman’s, was designated to the margins, a nightmarish construction external to the “normal” European form. Baartman’s Otherness fixed firm the European positionality of normal, beautiful, moral, and superior. Baartman’s story is not exceptional in that she became instantly a hit in both London and Paris during the early nineteenth century. According to Zine Magubane, Baartman was one of thousands of people exhibited and transformed into medical spectacles during the course of the nineteenth

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Natasha Gordon- Chipembere century . . . however; none of these . . . have been made to stand as “icons” of racial or sexual difference. (Magubane 2001, 830)

Hobson concurs with Magubane when she notes that Baartman becomes the “preeminent example of racial and sexual alterity because of her ridiculed and pathologized buttocks” (2005, 57). Most curious is the contemporary desire to continually reentrench Baartman within the paradigms of the Euro-master narrative, as European scientific history held absolute authority over the labeling, measuring, and identifying of the African persona. Here South African historian Yvette Abrahams’s work on Baartman is highlighted for several reasons. Her doctoral dissertation is the first comprehensive historiography on Baartman written by an African woman, anywhere, in any language. Also, Abrahams’s political orientation toward “reading” Baartman’s narrative within an African womanist framework lends credence to the work in this collection that addresses Baartman’s genital encounter with Europe in the nineteenth century. Lastly, Abrahams maintains that the Khoisan has never had a history of labia lengthening or manipulation, for which Baartman became infamous in Europe. Sarah Baartman’s person demands a private, interior respectful space; this premise becomes the lens through which much of the scholarship here is invested. Informed by aspects of this premise, I turn to my own investigation of the Western obsessive fascination with African women’s genitals. Most curious is the current propensity for representations of Baartman (from North and South) to collude with the master narrative. For example, after Baartman’s burial in 2002, there were a number of celebrated African American women writers, such as Barbara Chase-Riboud and Suzan- Lori Parks, who took on Baartman’s story as a way of claiming Diasporic sisterhood. Ultimately, their literary productions have been critiqued as producing a Baartman who is a self- destructive, sexually excessive, drunken stereotype, echoing Cuvier. The European historical fabrication of the “apron” renders Baartman’s story even more powerful as it confirms the Western ability to construct, as fact, that which they cannot fully understand or ascertain. Baartman was never seen as a person with feelings; rather, it was her body through which her narrative was shared. The ensuing mythology provided a one- dimensional lens to witness her body as the epitome of African savagery, worthy of degradation.

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Many scholars3 suggest that Baartman’s story became famous, not because of her exhibition, as there were many like her, but because her case was brought before the English judiciary system in November 1810. Although slavery was abolished in England in 1807, it was not abolished in the British Empire until 1833 (Qureshi 2004, 224). Under the pretense of moral outrage, the African Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa brought Baartman’s case to court, charging her Dutch owner, Cezar, with enslavement and indecency. Cezar appealed that Baartman was under a consensually signed contract for her personal exhibition in England and that she would return to her native South Africa within two years. The real issue for the court was not the immorality of exhibiting a live, African woman in a cage like an animal, miles away from home, but the indecent exposure of her body before a civilized, moral English public. There was little to no discussion on how Baartman was brought to England, though it insinuated that she came as a slave and remained so under Cezar’s care (The London Times 1810). Numerous English papers4 reported on this case. However, Baartman’s own voice is silent. Through the voices of European male translators, Baartman is on record as a witness stating she willingly exhibited herself, though historians debate whether she was primed by Cezar to make such responses. Baartman, who remained unnamed throughout the entire court case, was perceived as illiterate, though in 1817 Cuvier reported that Baartman spoke Dutch, some English, and French (one also infers that she spoke her mother tongues). During the entire court case, communication and debate took place between and among Baartman’s colonizers. Her “voice” is only present through a European translator. In the end, accountable for her predicament, Baartman is charged with her own enslavement to gain financial profit. The case was dismissed on the grounds that Baartman was a willing participant. After the trial, it was speculated that she was exhibited throughout the English countryside in a number of small sideshows and private viewings. She briefly reappeared in December 1811 in Manchester where she was baptized. Baartman’s show finally resurfaced in Paris in 1814, where she was owned and exhibited daily by animal trainer, S. Reaux (Wiss 1994, 23). Her show caused an instant fervor in Paris, inspiring a number of creative productions, including

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caricatures and a one-act vaudeville show, entitled “The Hottentot Venus or the Hatred of the French Woman” (Wiss 1994, 26). On or about December 29, 1815, five years after her arrival in Europe, Baartman died in Paris in the house of her owner, S. Reaux, the animal trainer. Georges Cuvier held a key interest in Baartman and had followed her exhibitions in London and Paris. A team of zoologists, anatomists, and naturalists, which was lead by Cuvier and included Henri de Blainville and Geoffrey St. Hillarie, subjected Baartman to a three- day examination in March 1815 in the Jardin du Roi, Paris. During this time, they sketched her nude although Cuvier reported that she refused to uncover her genital area. Cuvier was given Baartman’s body upon her death. His monograph on her autopsy formed the basis for much of the nineteenth-century debates on European racial categories of difference. Cuvier meticulously cut and measured Baartman’s gentialia, to which he could not get access while she was alive. He made a plaster cast of her body and placed her brains and genitals in jars of formaldehyde (Hobson 3005, 45). The “Hottentot Venus” is a construction of a masculinist, colonial discourse on female sexuality that has a prevailing impact on the way that Africa and Diasporic women are represented in the twenty-first century. Abrahams notes: Upon Sara Baartman’s body a superstructure of scientific racism was built which supported the continued enslavement of Africans in the Americas and the “civilizing” mission in Africa. (1997, 18)

Baartman’s skeleton and body cast were displayed within the halls of the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle until 1827, when her remains were moved to the Musée de l’Homme, situated in case no. 33 until the late 1970s. She was removed into storage until her return to South Africa in 2002. In 1995, a South African campaign gained ground for the immediate return of Baartman. France was worried that her return would open a Pandora’s box of having to repatriate hundreds of thousands of skeletons and other body parts of non-Europeans used as “scientific” data during the nineteenth century. Initially, the French refused her return. Nelson Mandela took up the case, though it took eight years to fulfill this request. Baartman’s skeleton and preserved organs were finally returned to South Africa

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Introduction

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in April 2002. The state buried her remains on National Women’s Day on August 9, 2002 (Qureshi 2004, 246). She was laid to rest in the town of Hankey, near the Gamtoos Valley, where she is believed to have been born.

The Modern Day “Hottietot”: Representing Contemporary Black Women The legacy of pernicious, demeaning Western representations of black women’s bodies continues well into the twenty-first century. I suggest that one of the most apparent vestiges to employ Cuvieresque philosophy about black women’s bodies and their exhibition can be found in contemporary American hip-hop music videos. Though many black women identify with the spiritual, ancestral figure of Sarah Baartman, questions about the beauty potential of the black female body remain. Today, black female bodies are continually excluded from Western discourses on beauty and femininity. Black female images are most visible in marginalized, sexualized forums, namely American hip-hop music videos and African American male magazines, which are semipornographic in nature. The stagnant images and perceptions of black women’s bodies and their sexuality are thoroughly encoded in the dominant popular culture. Sadly, the dissemination of these images has now infused the production of these videos throughout Africa; one can find virtually the same images on Ugandan or South African television screens, readily consumed by urban African youth. Rural South African women maintain some of the highest numbers of eating disorders in the country, while college students in Malawi save their money for “body potions” that they can purchase to improve their shapes by whittling their waists and bums. Mark Reynolds’s provocative article “Negritude 2.0: Modern Day Hottietots” draws implicit connections between contemporary black women with ample buttocks in the modeling/entertainment industry with Sarah Baartman. Mark Reynolds queries the exact distance between Sarah Baartman’s buttocks being prodded and displayed in cages in both London and Paris in the nineteenth century, and modern “Hottietots,” black women who dance in music videos where their buttocks are displayed in full prominence.

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Buffie the Body, made famous by her appearance in a number of big-name rap videos, has declared that she will strip for Playboy for no less than 1 million dollars. Two shillings (as in the price to see Baartman at Piccadilly Circus) or 1 million dollars: the amount is irrelevant as the black woman’s body remains fixed on the commodity market with a price tag, a body which can be bought, displayed, and disrespected (Reynolds 2006). ***

The contradictions of Sarah Baartman’s legacy are tremendous. Sarah Baartman died in the nineteenth century and endured Cuvier’s knife. This book does not seek to pull together archival pictures, shuffle through newspapers in the British Library, or speculate on the entertainment interests of 1815 in Paris. This book aims at grasping Sarah’s legacy by learning the lessons of it. It also aims at acknowledging her humanity. Sarah Baartman has been the object of an external gaze (in body and text) for 200 years. Sarah’s interior spaces are addressed in this collection. Who envisions what she saw and felt as she looked out at the gaping British faces, from the stage in which she walked, sang, or sat during that fall at Piccadilly in 1810? Where are the aquatints of Baartman looking at Cuvier’s face during the three days she was drawn at the Jardin du Roi in Paris in 1815? The fact that these questions initiate a radical switch of perspective is exactly what inspires each of the contributors in this book. This collection is divided into two major thematic areas, though the undercurrent of the entire book layers them rather than seeing them as disparate parts. One section informs the other in conversation that exists fluidly and dialogically throughout. The first section addresses the task of disrupting the colonial archive by engaging Sarah’s interiority and personhood. The second section focuses on troubling corporeal representations—in literature and contemporary media—of Sarah Baartman and her impact on black womanhood in the twenty-first century. Siphiwe Ndlovu opens the book with her insistence that though seductive, the colonial archive must be breached if one wants to begin another reclaiming of Sarah’s historiography. She suggests alternate spaces of memory and wisdom in “old, other ways of knowing and remembering in order to practice an ethic of care”

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(2011, 32) around Sarah Baartman’s personhood. Yvette Abrahams radically positions the reader in the Khoisan world of Sarah’s beginnings through her recollections of planning the Khoisan traditional garden, an integral aspect of the new Sarah Baartman Remembrance Center in South Africa. She insists that for Sarah to be understood as a Khoisan woman, the reader must walk along the plants, colors, and scents that were indigenous to the setting that Sarah would have grown up in. Hershini Bhana Young takes on the difficult task of discussing slavery in South Africa, encouraging an alternative interpretation of acts of agency on the part of slaves and Sarah Baartman. Gabeba Baderoon creates new language around notions of private and intimate spaces not only for Sarah Baartman but also for black women who face the historical legacy of slavery and oppression. Sheila Smith McKoy ends the section with a provocative look at pornography and the infusion of erotic desire in how the Baartman narrative has been constructed over time. Desiree Lewis and Ilaria Oddenino engage in a conversation over the readings of various nonfictional and fictional texts (namely Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks) providing a provocative way of constructing language around agency, personhood, and authority. Z’étoile Imma applies new understandings of Sarah’s historiography through the investigation of scientific racism applied to the Khoisan people in Bessie Head’s Maru and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy. Imma produces an informed, critical look at how Sarah’s life has been incorporated into various narratives of African womanhood. Karlien van der Schyff discusses the gender disparity in the European “freak” show exhibitions of the nineteenth century through a textured discussion on Sarah Baartman and Clicko, the “Wild Dancing Bushman.” She concludes that though African personhood was a commodity that was readily accessible for exhibition and entertainment in Europe, the manner in which these two people from South Africa were advertised, treated, and exhibited rested solely on their gender. Lastly, I close the collection with a discussion around the media images and blog spaces that “dissected” Michele Obama during the Obama presidential campaign. The essays here are wide ranging in how each contributor selects to spell Sarah’s name, in how they address the various literary texts, and in how they position themselves in the face of the archives and “authenticity.” The link is the fact that at all times there is in an

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insistence on seeing Sarah’s humanity as private and sacred and on asking questions of those who will not see her humanity. It is this quest for a liberatory discourse on African and Diasporic women’s bodies that this book seeks to address. Culminating with Sarah Baartman’s exploitation in nineteenth-century Europe, English and French scientists (especially Cuvier) solidified dehumanizing concepts about African womanhood. Placed on a stage, Baartman became for many the representation of all black women: deviant, hypersexualized, and lacking. Upon her death in Paris, Cuvier’s monograph established a language of racism and sexism that would be used in the descriptions of black women’s bodies for 200 years. The story of Sarah Baartman is that of black women across land and time. No one can speak for Sarah Baartman. However, today African and Diasporic women can apply the knowledge of her story as active agents in how they participate in the exhibition and representation of their bodies in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1. I am speaking specifically about African and Diasporic women here. 2. In Orientalism, Edward Said contends that Orientalism “has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ [Western] world” (1978, 12). In creating this exotic/different “Other,” this approach is a mental and social process used to gain knowledge—and thereby power—over the Orient. Essentially, Said’s polemic regarding Orientalism is the recognition of the fact that “to have . . . knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it” (1978, 32) to the extent that Occidental “knowledge” of the Orient becomes the Orient. Additionally, this body of knowledge, or discourse, “is best grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitation of thought [rather] than . . . a positive doctrine” (1978, 42), which eventually limits personal experience and any development toward a “genuine” understanding of other cultures outside of the metropole. Othering, according to Said, is a psychological activity expressed in the knowledge/power relationship insofar as knowledge is based on observation of contrast and is expressed through a syntax demanding exclusivity, which intrinsically constructs an “Other,” through which to define difference.” (www.clcwebjounral.lib.purdue.edu). 3. See Yvette Abrahams, “The Great Long National Insult: Science, Sexuality and the Khoisan in the 18th and 19th Century,” Agenda 32 (1997): 34–48; Yvette Abrahams, “Colonialism, Dysfunction and Dysjuncture: Sarah Baartman’s Resistance (remix),” Agenda 58 (2000). 4. See The London Times, November 24–26, 1810, The Morning Chronicle, The Examiner, and The Spectator November 1810 for similar reports.

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Part One The Archive: Disrupting the Colonial Narrative

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Chapter One “Body” of Evidence: Saartjie Baartman and the Archive Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

I live to tell the story of your futile efforts to silence me. Diana Ferrus, The Neverending Story, 1810–2002 Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

When I first saw her I thought that she was beautiful. No. That is understating it. I thought she was the ideal—ample hips, a generous bosom—the kind of woman I had wanted to be when I was five years old. I saw women like that everywhere: carrying babies on their backs; crossing the street with loads on their heads; sitting in chairs on their verandahs watching the world pass by; laughing at the corner of a dusty road; arguing with husbands at the store— all this while never looking harried or hurried. When I grow up, I thought to myself, I will look like these women and just like them I will be happy in the world. I too will stand under the shade of a jacaranda tree my left arm akimbo, a stick of grass in my mouth, my right hand gesturing to shoo a fly—mistress of all I surveyed. Nothing would make me happier, the five-year-old me thought, than to one day be a woman with ample hips and a generous bosom. To be beautiful. To be a sight to behold. But when I did grow into the woman I had idealized as a child I was sorely disappointed. What had once been ample and generous was now just “fat.” What I thought was ideal was now a tall

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Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu

and thin woman with nothing ample or generous about her. My savannah-raised body had become something I could not come to terms with. I had forgotten about all those women I had idolized as a child. And then one day I turned the page of a book and there she was—Saartjie Baartman1—and before I could even think otherwise I thought she was beautiful. She was beautiful just like those women of my childhood, the women who were there long before I encountered the women in Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and Glamour. Yes, I admit it, when I first saw Saartjie Baartman—naked, looking directly at me—I saw a woman full of grace. It was only when I started reading the text beneath the image that I realized the picture pointed to a body in pain, a body shamed, and a body violated. Horrible and unspeakable things had happened to this body before and after the image had been painted. It turned out that the scene I encountered was not a thing of beauty after all. The more I read (and there was a lot to read about Saartjie Baartman), the woman that I had encountered gradually left the scene and all that remained was a body, a body of evidence. Here was a body, which although subaltern, seemed to speak not only for itself, but for women, especially brown women, everywhere. Saartjie Baartman’s body told the story of how brown women had for centuries suffered emotional, physical, and epistemic violence at the hands of white men, history, and science. As I read what others had to say about Saartjie Baartman’s body and its legacy I found myself asking: but is this the only way to encounter this body—as a marker of something negative? Why did we have to see her body only in response to the way the Europeans of the nineteenth century who had peered, jeered, humiliated, and violated and later dissected her had? What about other ways of seeing her? For example, what about the way I had seen her as an ideal when I first encountered her? Could we not start there, with something positive? If not necessarily as an ideal, which is in itself a problematic concept, then at least start with seeing her body as something beautiful and full of grace. However, I cannot ignore the problem that even this positive approach occasions—and that is the primacy of the body. I realize that I too had encountered her as a body—focusing on her ample hips and her generous bosom— not as a woman, not as a person. What about the woman? Why is she so elusive? Why does she seem to disappear as her body

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“Body” of Evidence

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takes center stage yet again? Is it possible to recuperate Saartjie Baartman the person, or is she forever lost in the many performances that her body enters? Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais2 do well to remind us that there is a difference between the woman they call Sara Baartman and her bodily performance, The “Hottentot Venus.” However, it is also worth remembering that it was Saartjie Baartman who performed The Hottentot Venus—that there was a woman behind the body. Saartjie Baartman did not become The Hottentot Venus; she simply performed The Hottentot Venus. It is this performance that makes the continued elusiveness of this woman something worth thinking about. Scully and Crais make a worthy effort of retrieving Sara Baartman, trying to find in the archives a woman who lived, loved, and suffered before becoming The Hottentot Venus. However, this Sara Baartman seems too shaped by the archive, and by extension (Euro) history. I strongly suspect that before there was a Saartjie Baartman, or a Sara Baartman, there was a woman with a past, that is, a woman who had lived through events that shaped her life, some of which were written down and entered in the archive, but most of which simply happened and in time were forgotten. It is this woman with a past who remains elusive. It is of this woman that I wonder what, if anything, should, or can, be done with her. Recent scholarship on Saartjie Baartman (and here I will be looking particularly at the work of Yvette Abrahams, 3 Zine Magubane,4 and Sadiah Qureshi5) has called for a better contextualization of her story, criticizing earlier scholarship, particularly the work done by Richard Altick6 and Sander Gilman,7 for doing with words and images what Georges Cuvier had done with a knife: dis(re)member8 Saartjie Baartman. Many earlier scholars and artists, even those with the best intentions, tended to overdetermine and overemphasize Baartman’s assumed sexual and racial alterity because they used the politics of their own time as a lens through which to read her body. As a result, her body became the site of much contestation and negotiation over twentiethcentury issues about race and sexuality. According to Abrahams, Magubane, and Qureshi, this dis(re)membering effectively removed Baartman from history and treated her as an ahistorical object upon which and through which questions, arguments, and theories of racial and gender difference could be (de)posited.

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Laura Callahan9 visually represents this scholastic violence when she writes Baartman’s name (itself a site of much contestation) as Sara(h) Ba(a)rtman(n) and in this way makes visible the continued dis(re)membering of Baartman’s body that takes place in the scholarly attempts to re-member her. All of this begs the question of how and why it came to a pass that a scholarship dedicated to righting/writing the wrongs done to Baartman’s body itself came to commit these wrongs? Zine Magubane cites Sander Gilman’s “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth- Century Art, Medicine, and Literature” as the genesis for a theoretical treatment of Baartman that focuses “obsessively on [her] body and its difference” (2001, 817). Magubane suggests that even as these scholars argue that race is socially constructed, “they valorize the very ground of biological essentialism they purport to deconstruct” (2001, 817). By failing to problematize and contextualize the very idea of “blackness” and interrogate “what social relations determined which people counted as Black, and for which people did Blacks become icons of sexual difference and why” (2001, 817), these scholars, according to Magubane, fail to realize that “Hottentots” were not even considered black in the nineteenth century and therefore tend to create a genealogy of “othering” the black female body in which Baartman is the progenitor. For Magubane, this “othering” effectively removes Baartman from the historical moment in which she lived, where her body may not have been seen as black. In a similar vein, Sadiah Qureshi criticizes earlier scholarship for ahistoricizing Baartman by treating her exhibition as though it was a unique occurrence, when in reality Baartman was just one of the many humans, animals, and plants that were trafficked to Europe for display of their singular qualities. Qureshi points out that “Baartman’s value lay in her perceived uniqueness as a rare live specimen of the exotic” (2004, 235), and that her exhibition and commodification were more analogous to animal importation than to the transatlantic slave trade. Therefore, scholars who do not focus “upon the material processes involved in Baartman’s objectification, exhibition, and politicization” (2004, 233), and choose instead to focus on her race for the sake of twentiethcentury identity politics, run the risk of treating blackness as historically timeless. Qureshi argues that since Regency London

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was populated by black people, it was not Baartman’s blackness that marked her as different but, rather, her Khoikhoi ethnicity. Qureshi believes that if the only way we understand Baartman’s exhibition is as the beginning of the process that inscribes “black” as different, ugly, and sexually deviant, we lose sight of the material practices that determined what qualified as exceptional, odd, or uncommon enough to be part of imperial collections and public performance. In other words if “blackness” was the attraction then there would have been no need to look to far and distant lands for specimens and performers of blackness since London already had a significant number of blacks. Therefore, there must have been more to Baartman’s exhibition than the color of her skin. According to Qureshi, it was the abolitionists who objected to Baartman’s exhibition then and it is scholars now who made Baartman’s tale political and different. Both Qureshi and Magubane believe that it is this failure of scholarship to contextualize Baartman that has led to her stature as “a modern cultural icon” (Qureshi 2004, 234). As Magubane puts it, “Thus, in the final analysis, the theoretical lapses of contemporary social scientists, rather than the actions of nineteenth-century pseudoscientists, are the ones that threaten to finally succeed in transforming ‘the Hottentot Venus’ into the central nineteenth-century icon for racial and sexual difference between the European and the Black” (2001, 832). Both Magubane and Qureshi argue that placing Baartman within her proper historical context will effectively de- center race, sexuality, and difference in studies about her life. When one considers that until very recently most accounts of Baartman’s story began in 1810, when she left what was then the Cape Colony and arrived in England, it is not surprising that very little, if anything, was mentioned about Baartman’s life prior to 1810, that is, her life in the Cape Colony where, presumably, she was seen largely as “same” and not sexually or racially different. The reason often given for these lacunae in earlier accounts is lack of written evidence. Most scholars lamented that since there were no written records of Baartman’s life prior to her encounter with Europe, nothing can be known about her life in Africa. However, some scholars have not let the sparseness of written documents deter them from tracing out Baartman’s earlier, pre1810 life.10 Yvette Abrahams strives to place Baartman within

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her (proper) historical context. In her analysis of the abolitionists’ trial against Hendrik Cezar, The Hottentot Venus’s show manager, Abrahams paints a picture of Baartman as a Khoikhoi woman being questioned by European men and responding to them the only way she knew how, that is, through the lens of Khoisan-European relations in the Cape Colony. Instead of taking Baartman’s “testimony” at face value, Abrahams recontextualizes the question of Baartman’s agency by analyzing how Khoisan-European relations in the Cape Colony might have had something to do with the puzzling and ambiguous ways in which Baartman responded to questions put forward to her regarding her free will and independence during the trial. When framed thus by Abrahams, it is easy to appreciate that Baartman might not have understood that her questioners wanted her “real” opinion, she might have thought they wanted her to say what they wanted to hear. According to Abrahams if we fail to see how Baartman’s life in the Cape Colony influenced her experiences in Europe then we run the risk of “using and abusing the history of Sara Bartman, much as her body was abused [in the] last century” (1996, 98). Abrahams suggests that scholarship regarding Baartman should always be cognizant of the social and political milieu of the Cape Colony in which Baartman lived before becoming a European sensation. Like Abrahams, Magubane, and Qureshi, Laura Callahan calls for a better handling of Baartman and worries that if scholars are not careful, they will simply continue the tradition begun by Georges Cuvier and other pseudoscientists of “searching for truth in the dismembered minutiae of discourses, bodies, and ideas” (2006, 152). Callahan calls for scholarship “to remove the image of the racial other from the realm of the aesthetic and return to it the dignity and respect accorded to all human beings” (2006, 12). Citing Diana Ferrus’s poem “I’ve Come to Take You Home,” Callahan suggests that all artists and scholars should emulate the poem’s “ethic of care [which] disrupts a racist ideology predicated on ideals of rational observation and examination by focusing on the ideals of empathy rather than of rationalist knowledge” (2006, 144): I have come to wrench you away, away from the poking eyes of the man-made monster who lives in the dark with his clutches of imperialism

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who dissects your body bit by bit, who likens your soul to that of Satan and declares himself the ultimate God! I have come to soothe your heavy heart, I offer my bosom to your weary soul. I will cover your face with the palms of my hands, I will run my lips over the lines in your neck, I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you and I will sing for you, for I have come to bring you peace.

According to Callahan, “Only in respecting the boundaries of the body and dealing with it by respecting its integrity and understanding its ‘opaqueness’ can we begin to see that the source of the knowledge we seek is in the culture and the ethics of exploitation developed by a system of positivist racial exploration” (2006, 154– 155). The work done by Abrahams, Magubane, and Qureshi to better contextualize Baartman’s story problematizes our eagerness to identify “with Baartman as an ancestral self and [to see] her treatment as representative of the negativity of modern depictions of black sexuality” (Qureshi 2004, 250), and therefore makes us begin to respect the “opaqueness” of her body. As provocative as their critiques are, neither Abrahams, Magubane, nor Qureshi interrogate this phenomenon of re-essentializing Baartman beyond stating that it is the product of contemporary identity politics. Therefore, it is not altogether clear how a better contextualization of Baartman that uses the same archive that was invested in “othering” her will be able to help us practice an “ethic of care.” By focusing on the archive, we begin to see how and why it is that a scholarship dedicated to righting/writing the wrongs done to Baartman’s body came to commit these wrongs itself. As much as I agree that Baartman’s story has to be better contextualized, I believe this contextualization, as it has been mapped out thus far, relies too heavily on, and is therefore limited by, the archive: that collection of written records that are selected, classified, catalogued, recorded, and stored. The reason why most scholars begin Baartman’s story in 1810 has already been stated above but begs repeating here; it is because this is when the most substantial archive regarding her body begins—Dutch Cape Colony records, advertisements for The Hottentot Venus

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show, court transcripts and Cuvier’s published scientific findings. It is, therefore, tempting to think that perhaps the racial focus on Baartman that Abrahams, Magubane, and Qureshi point to as being limiting and limited is such because the archive itself is limiting and limited. After all, the archive we use to contextualize Baartmann is an archive that was “developed by a system of positivist racial exploration” (Callahan 2006, 155). Therefore, concentration on the archive not only limits the scope of our analysis of the Baartman phenomenon because it does not allow us to entertain the possibility of other ways of knowing and coming to knowledge of the past, but it also hampers our attempts to practice an “ethic of care.” We become so absorbed in/with the archive that we begin to think only in its terms. As such, we leave many questions unasked and unanswered. We are implicated within the archive’s system and that is why it is imperative that we interrogate the archive and our own relationship to it. Without this interrogation of the archive it is not possible to practice an “ethic of care” because the lens through which we are looking is always already an “othering” lens. Without critically interrogating the archive itself, we run the risk of arresting our own development, we are trapped in a moment of response, that is, we are always responding to what is in the archive and never allowing ourselves to think “outside,” “around,” and “through” it. So that even as we speak of how the archive violated Baartman’s body and by extension black female bodies in general, in that same breath we say of Baartman, as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting11 does, that she was “weighed down by her abundant buttocks” (1999, 18) and went about “literally carrying her fortune behind her” (1999, 18). We violate Baartman all over again. Barbara Chase-Riboud even goes so far as to speculate that perhaps Baartman’s death was caused by her being trapped by her huge hips in a bathtub. Moments like these cannot help but evoke the provocative question that Audre Lorde poses in her essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”: “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” Lorde’s response to this question is one we should always keep in mind: “It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable” (1984, 110–111). It is for this reason that we need to escape the confines of the archive.

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Escaping the archive is not as simple as it sounds. The archive is alluring; it beckons scholars and artists with its presence; its “proofs,” its tangibility, and its matter. It seems to be always already there. It gives us a sense of security. It is precisely because of its charismatic nature that we need to interrogate, not only the archive itself, but also our own involvement with it. It is because of its seemingly all-encompassing power that we need to test the limits of the archive. We can start by asking, as Magubane does, “why this woman has been made to function in contemporary academic debates as the preeminent example of racial and sexual alterity” (2001, 830). Qureshi answers this question by stating that “enough is known about Baartman to individualize her—she is far from being an anonymous skeleton whose plight we might pity. Instead she is a named person, and this facilitates a sense of identification with her as an ancestor, or empathy with her treatment as a human” (2004, 249). However, the reason why Baartman holds the position she does in the scholarly and artistic imagination is not only because of the substantial archive prompted by her body after her encounter with Europe but also because of what the scholars and artists themselves bring to the archive. Achille Mbembe informs us that “through archived documents, we are presented with pieces of time to be assembled, fragments of life to be placed in order, one after the other, in an attempt to formulate a story that acquires its coherence through the ability to craft links between the beginning and the end. A montage of fragments thus creates an illusion of totality and continuity” (2002, 20). The archive is merely a product of our composition; thus the Baartman we encounter within the archive is our creation just as much as she is a product of Cuvier. And this is why most scholars and artists, not quite able to escape the legacy of an archive built on the “ethics of exploitation” and their own contemporary race and gender politics, write Baartman as somehow same and somehow different. Not only do we read Baartman as always already different, we also think that she is “speaking” her difference, exhibiting her “otherness” so that even as we seek to right/write the wrongs we feel were done to her body, we are anchored in its alterity. This is why most earlier and some recent scholarship seems to be telling the same story, only from different angles; the story of how Saartjie Baartman’s body came to be an example of sexual and racial difference. However, this concern with alterity had virtually

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nothing to do with Saartjie Baartman the person, and everything to do with those who saw her body as different. The fact that even the best and most well-intentioned scholarship cannot seem to see past this difference speaks to how the “master’s concerns” have become our concerns. Mbembe sees this as having something to do with the archive that creates “the community of time, the feeling according to which we would all be heirs to a time over which we might exercise the rights of collective ownership” (2002, 21). This imagined co-ownership of time requires the death of the author. The selected work in being archived is dispossessed of its author, which brings the work into the public domain where it can be consulted. The original author haunts the archive to be sure, as Georges Cuvier does, but he is silenced by the historian, artist, and scholar who speak through him in order to establish their authority. In this way the original author’s concerns continue to be our concerns, thereby we continue to focus on the “othering” narrative. This “othering” narrative is so appealing because as Mbembe points out, “The final destination of the archive is . . . always situated outside its own materiality, in the story that it makes possible” (2002, 21). It is not that the archive has no limits because as Mbembe states the archives “have no meaning outside the subjective experience of those who come to use them” (2002, 23). The power of the archive is contingent upon who owns them, who puts them together, who is allowed to access them, who reads and interprets them, and who makes what is found in them public. This subjective experience, according to Mbembe, reveals the limits of the archives, which are useless and superfluous in and of themselves. Therefore, the fault is not in the archive, but in ourselves because we do not realize that we give the archive its limitless power. The “othering” narrative persists only because we want to tell the story of our own encounter with a positivist and racist episteme, archive, and history that “others” us. The reason why Baartman’s “othering” narrative is appealing is because it makes the scholars’ and artists’ own “othering” stories possible to tell; this is how we have chosen to “empathize” with Baartman’s story. The problem with empathy as practiced within the racist and positivist archive designed around Baartman’s body is that instead of empathizing with Baartman’s experience and suffering (if such a thing is indeed possible), we, in keeping with the

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archive’s “ethics of exploitation,” use Baartman’s story to tell us about our own present. Janell Hobson says of her first encounter with the image of Baartman’s “disembodied and dissected genitalia—preserved in a jar filled with formaldehyde fluid” (2005, 4) that “there was no effective language to emote or even intellectualize the body politic, as it relates to Baartman’s legacy” (2005, 4). And yet most of us, after we first come across images of Baartman’s body, struggle to tell its story, to contextualize it not only so that we can better understand how such a thing could even happen but also to try to understand how it continues to happen in more subtle, but no less real, ways today. In other words, we use what happened to Baartman’s body to try and understand what happened and is continuing to happen to our own bodies. Baartman’s story allows us to speak the unspeakable. When it comes to Baartman not only do we make the subaltern speak, we make her speak on our behalf and this is a violence that is more than just epistemic. So for example, when I encountered Baartman’s image that first time and reduced her to hips that I thought were ample and breasts that I thought were generous, what I was really seeing was what mattered to me, what told my story, what made me remember my encounter with those images in Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and Glamour that told me that I was not beautiful. I did not see Saartjie Baartman at all. Since the limit and the power of the archive rest in those who use it, we need to move past the moment of encounter, we need to remember outside the limits of the archive, we need to think beyond a positivist and often racist episteme, and in short, we need to tell our stories in old ways made new. We can start by reclaiming who we were before our own encounter with the system that “othered” us. What did we know then? How can we make it matter now? For instance, I can remember that once “beautiful” to me were those women standing with arms akimbo under the jacaranda trees. This type of re-membering calls for a more personal, indeed subjective, way of knowing and that is exactly what is needed. A way of knowing that does not require proofs, a way of knowing that respects the “opaqueness” of the body, a way of knowing that is comfortable with the unknown, the forgotten, and the silenced: a way of knowing that allows us to realize the limits of the archive. For, as Audre Lorde reminds

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us, “We have built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions that are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (1984, 123). The problem of course, as Lorde is well aware, is that adopting the master’s concerns (by adopting his archive) has made us think only of dismantling his house (deconstructing the archive). What we need is to build new houses that are built upon different ways of knowing and coming to knowledge and different ways of thinking about and remembering the past. Our old, other ways of knowing and remembering continue to exist alongside the archive; our pasts have always existed alongside history. To pretend otherwise is to not only write ourselves into an intellectual cul-de-sac, it is also to do ourselves, our pasts, and our futures a violent disservice. As we look back at the past and try to come to terms with the silence of those made subaltern by the systems of slavery, colonization, capitalism, and patriarchy, it is imperative to always remember that these systems were systems, to borrow a most provocative phrase from Ranajit Guha, of “dominance without hegemony.” We have always known something “otherwise,” something “different,” something that “problematizes,” hence our always having been perceived as threat, as killjoy. If instead of asking, as most scholars do, what Saartjie Baartman’s body can “tell us about our own positions of racial and sexual disadvantage (or privilege) in a world shaped by global white masculinist imperialism” (Hobson 2005, 24) we instead recuperate (these) other ways of remembering and knowing that are not limited by the archive then we take a small, but giant leap toward practicing an “ethic of care.” For example, when I encounter Saartjie Baartman in the archive I can remember those older ways of knowing what was beautiful and use that as my starting point. You may very well wonder now that I have reached the end of my tale if there is any way we can rescue Saartjie Baartman from the archive. The answer is no. To say her name is already to speak about the woman in the archive, because this is her first recorded name. Saartjie Baartman is already a woman with a history. What is important to stress in Saartjie Baartman’s case is the fact that what we have is not a “person” as such but, rather, the imagined totality of a person pieced together from

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dis(re)membered parts in order to be re-membered. We tend to think that the archive points to the “presence” of a woman, a person, when in fact what it points to is her absence. The woman we are seeking is disappeared by her many performances—on stage, on trial, on the receiving end of a knife—and what appears are her “performance remains” (Young 2005, 57)—the advertisements, the pamphlets, the testimony from the court case, the mutilated and preserved body on display in the museum. We mistakenly treat the traces that make up the archive as having been left behind by this woman even as we mention that they were left behind by European men who were invested in writing her off as “other” and “different.” The woman with a past, the woman whose original name we do not know, the woman whose life’s events we do not know because they were never recorded and have been forgotten, the woman I suspect we all want to behold when we encounter Saartjie Baartman in the archive will always, thankfully, elude us. Even as scholars work hard to find out more about this woman with a past and turn her into Saartjie Baartman, Sarah Bartmann, Sara Bartman, or whatever other name suits, as they place her in the archive, I trust and hope that there will always be something of this woman with a past that remains . . . always just out of reach. For what I think becomes apparent when we practice an ethic of care is that not everything is knowable, nor should we want it to be.

Notes 1. I use the name Saartjie Baartman because, to the best of my knowledge, this is the name that she enters the historical record with. However, whenever I mention what others have written about her I will respectfully keep their choice of how to address her. I am aware that this will be confusing, but it is a confusion that goes to the heart of the chapter’s argument as I hope will become clear. 2. Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 3. Yvette Abraham, “Disempowered to Consent,” South African Historical Journal 35 (1996). 4. Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the Hottentot Venus,” Gender and Society 15:6 (2001).

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5. Sadiah Qureshi, “Displaying Sara Baartman, The Hottentot Venus,” Science History 17 (2004). 6. Richard Altick is often credited with having brought Saartjie Baartman to the attention of twentiethcentury scholars, theorists, and writers in his book The Shows of London. In the book he starts out by stating that when the shows of London began there was no “causal connection between putative country of origin and a freak’s freakishness”; the link was created by the showmen who capitalized on selling the “freakishness” of individuals as the “freakishness” of the entire race they belonged to. Therefore, when Saartjie Baartman entered this world and was re- created as a “freak” so too were all the Hottentots that she synechdochally represented re- created as freaks in the social imaginary of London. Altick is often charged with taking these nineteenth- century actions and opinions at face value and not critiquing or challenging them. 7. Gilman traces the link in the nineteenth- century artwork and literature between “the icon of the Hottentot and the icon of the prostitute” and finds that different tropes were used to sexualize the white female prostitute, and that most of these, like the black servant in Edouard Manet’s Olympia, were tied to the idea of an inherent black female hypersexuality. When Saartjie Baartman became a sensation in London she was seen as already hypersexual. It did not help matters that traveler’s accounts had for the longest time told of highly oversexed “Hottentots” that even copulated with apes. And so it was that Saartjie Baartman, The “Hottentot Venus,” came to represent black female sexuality in general, and because her sexuality was seen as abnormal she represented pathological sexuality as well. As such the body of Saartjie Baartman as The “Hottentot Venus” came to “write” prostitution and sexuality on the white female body. 8. Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1990). 9. Laura Callahan, Deciphering Race (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 10. In addition to Yvette Abrahams, some South African researchers and scholars such as Sharad Master and Mansell Upham have mined the archives for evidence of Baartman’s life and history in the Cape Colony. Outside South Africa, the recent collaborative work of Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais has attempted to do the same. 11. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

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Chapter Two “My Tongue Softens On That Other Name”: Poetry, People, and Plants in Sarah Bartmann’s Natural World Yvette Abrahams / Khib Omsis

Let us go through it the way we feel comfortable Let us deal with our pain the way we ought to According to us . . . (Primrose 2003, 44–45)

Introduction In order to be safe, I think I had best give what I am doing its own name. Let me, like Audre Lorde did in Zami, call this a biomythography. Like Lorde, I am doing it for the same purpose. I wish to uncover from racist patriarchal myths a story of wholeness: Woman forever. My body a living representation of other life older longer wiser. The mountains and valleys, trees, rocks. Sand and flowers and water and stone. Made in earth. (Lorde 1982, xvi)

Lorde was quite clear why a new genre was necessary. She spoke the exile experience when she said: Once home was a far way off, a place I had never been to but knew well out of my mother’s mouth . . . This now, here, was a space, some temporary abode, never to be considered forever nor totally binding nor defining, no matter how much it commanded in energy and attention. For if we lived correctly and with frugality, looked both ways before crossing the street, and then someday we would arrive back in the sweet place, back home. (1982, 4–5)

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Yvette Abrahams / Khib Omsis

Exile is not just a physical experience. It can be of many dimensions; spiritual, social, intellectual, etc. I have suggested elsewhere that those of us who have been enslaved, almost exterminated, colonized, and hated are all in a sense exiled (Abrahams 2000, 275– 276). I would suggest further that academic analysis, grounded as it is in the colonizing epistemology known, ironically as the “Enlightenment” is itself a perilous place to be. A liberatory history, then, to be truly revolutionary has to in some sense lead us back home. It has to be a map. Jewelle Gomez testified to the extraordinary liberatory power of what Lorde was doing: In labeling Zami a “biomythography” Audre emphasizes the connection to storytelling—the act in which the story and its teller, the performer, become part of the story, not just the conveyance. And the tale, no matter its actual scale, can become larger than life. The rhythms of Zami deliberately evoke the energy of a legend related aloud, in an intimate setting, like her mother’s kitchen. (Quoted in Lorde 1982, x)

Now, I am all for black women taking over the entire house, garden, and street. But I think that in order to do that, we need to start where we feel comfortable. We need to feel at home. And the kitchen is where history has placed us. I need to say a bit more about this metaphorical kitchen, though. See, it really exists. As Alexis De Veaux warned: The fact that Lorde called the work a “biomythography,” speaking publicly to its blending of truth, mythmaking, and social history, seems to get lost in her reader’s desires for an iconic Lorde. (2006, 412)

Like Lorde, the map I seek has to reflect the true way, otherwise we shall lose. Again like Lorde, I believe that this emotional truth is part of the real-world reflection. The worldview Lorde’s genre reflects is that we, the storytellers, the performers who are part of the story, have to embody the story and make it real. This does not make us perfect. In fact, this process of keeping it real makes us singularly scarred and weather-beaten candidates for guruhood. Because, as has often been said about Lorde: Each part of the self she constructs is based on a sense of corporeal materiality that she attempts to render in both her prose and poetry . . . As a writer, Lorde is acutely aware of this indissolubility: She

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perceives her body as a text and is conscious of her texts as emerging from her body . . . Although embodying oneself and naming one’s subject positions are not perfectly synonymous, they overlap in Lorde’s writing because of her awareness of her presence in Western society as both experience and sign. (Morris 2002, 1)

I would add though that this position of the body as sign is not purely a reflection of our position as colonized beings, but as Gomez explains, it a re- connection to a very ancient story. It is not just an antithesis but also a positive move rooted in an authentic tradition.1 We can draw the map home because it is a place we already know how to get to. The compass is within us. Though we know the way, we are not there yet. As with wisdom and honesty Khosi Xaba desires to write a poem for Sarah Baartman: This poem will sing of the Gamtoos Valley holding imprint of her baby steps It will contain rhymes of her friends, her family, her community ... Conjuring up her wholeness, her voice, her dreams, emotions and thoughts. (2008, 25–27)

I am starting to believe that perhaps we are not the generation who shall write the definitive histories of our foremothers. Perhaps, is it our task instead to prepare the way. At this point, is it not most important to write the history that is emotionally true? To tell the story that heals? So I propose a biomythography as an approach to free up cluttered minds and center confused hearts in preparation for the history that shall come.

Telling the Story In her poem My Tongue Softens on the Other Name, Gabeba Baderoon brilliantly brings alive the tradition of speaking through plants. As she says: In my mother’s back yard washing snaps above chillies and wild rosemary Kapokbos, cottonwool bush, my tongue softens on the rosemary’s other name

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Yvette Abrahams / Khib Omsis Brinjal, red peppers and pawpaw grow in the narrow channel between the kitchen and the wall that divides our house from the Severo’s. At the edge of the grass by the bedrooms, a witolyf reaches ecstatically for the power lines. (2005, 31)

Baderoon reestablishes a long history of female poets evoking the familiar, the home, as the place where we root and find rest. From this, she has taken the story elsewhere, to food and cuisine as stories of culture that trace our slave and indigenous female ancestry through paths that the written hetero-patriarchal, white supremacist records have thought were silenced. Baderoon rediscovers authenticity, a sense of identity that we have never lost, at home washing the beans, but that we in many ways have to yet to fully establish in the academic world. Under capitalism we have to find our way to this identity through the soft commonplace speech of the garden, in the narrow channel between the kitchen and the wall. It is a good place to start. It has escaped the notice of hegemonic historians precisely because it falls beneath the radar. It is too lowly to notice; it partakes in the nature of the everyday, the daytime life of the kitchen maid in which the master was emphatically not interested. Starting here, with Baderoon’s other names, I want to take this story in another direction. I want to keep the language of the slaves and indigenes, the speaking through allegory and innuendo, with plenty of space between the lines for the reader. In fact, like kapokbos leads us back to the plant and from there brings us to that which is simple, unquestioned, and healthy for body and soul, I would like this poetry to take me beyond words, to the world of plants where no words are necessary. In this I seek to exemplify balance. I walk away from the academic fashion that preaches that there is no reality beyond the language to say in womanist fashion that we can have both, that as our tongues soften on the other name we don’t have to wonder who we are, or, therefore, how to understand the pain we have been through. The flowers of kapokbos were used to stuff pillows, and there we can lie, in the reality without which language could not exist. Both must exist for the other to exist, the one without the other is imbalance, disharmony, and pretty unrealistic too. As every gardener knows, nature just is, and will defeat you if you do not accept her ways. Fighting with

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plants gets you nowhere because they will not listen to you however much you shout at them. So I seek a soft tongue instead—I read poetry to them about them that they will appreciate and hopefully grow sweeter because of it. Through this philosophy I seek the other Sarah Bartmann, the one who like the plants lives beyond words, who just is, who will not be wooed through megalomania (“you cannot exist except through my language”) or harsh words, but who may perhaps be seduced to appear (as respectfully one may seduce such a venerable ancestor) through soft words and poetry. In this I pay homage to the way she would have seen the world, not as a place dominated by one species but as a place fully populated by KhoeKhoe (in its original sense of “people of people”), animal people, and plant people. Not all of these people had words, yet they communicated through a rich and full language clearly understood by the KhoeSan. I will now bring you to a translation. Auntie Sarah may yet come, because she has a home already. As Diana Ferrus says in what has become perhaps the most famous contemporary South African poem: I’ve come to take you home— home, remember the veld? the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees the air is cool there and the sun does not burn. I have made your bed at the foot of the hill, your blankets are covered in buchu and mint, the proteas stand in yellow and white and the water in the stream chuckle sing-songs as it hobbles along over little stones. (1998)

Ferrus brings to Auntie Sarah the sense of crossing waters—the oak tree is an exotic plant—but also the feeling of ancient peace that one has to lie under an oak tree to feel. The poem invites the oak tree to become part of home, thus doing honor to Auntie Sarah’s life as a crosser of waters. She brings us home; it is home because the tongue softens on that other name. It is home because it smells of home. Buchu, protea, and mint are all plants of home, although this time not a narrow passage in the city but a broad landscape of endless views, and of course the water in the stream chuckling sing-songs. The word buchu indeed is so ancient it has survived in its autochthonous state for centuries, remaining throughout

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colonialism an unaltered KhoeSan word. The plant is a centrality of indigenous cultures, its very meaning is medicine, and as such the plant has given its name to the generic term for healing. Many plants are buchus that are not, strictly speaking, related, but we can always distinguish the mother-buchu, so to speak, by its smell, which is unmistakable. Our children know this smell because a cupful of it taken every night is said to ward off colds and flu and keep a child healthy throughout our long, wet Cape winters. If I offer you buchu; I offer you what Auntie Sarah smelt, you can sit in her nose and begin to know her, and thus her history, and thus her pain, and thus her salvation: all through that one sniff, buchu. Ferrus reaches back through tradition and speaks through plants, as I aspire to worshipfully do. Ferrus respectfully begs our ancestor through poetry to come home to us, to show her face, to rest on the bed she has made. I think it will be more successful than dissection in finding Auntie Sarah’s true self. And this is what I mean: that there is a true self, that beyond our stories and the stories that we tell about our ancestors. They live their own lives, hopefully untroubled by us the descendants who sift through their lives in search for truth. There is a reality beyond language, or should I say language exists in balance with the reality it describes, and this reality is not our slave. All we can do is ask nicely, with soft tongues, to see there for a moment. In order to do that we have to have eyes to see with, we have to have a self, a person who can access beyond words but also beyond suffering. Sometimes to tell a story is just to be, as do the plants. Like them, we have to have an “I” (or is it “we”), which just is. When we have lost this identity and despair of finding it, the temptation is to deny that it exists. It is not always possible to be there. Still, the impossibility of being there is no excuse to pretend that this state does not exist. There is a reality beyond these restless words. One could make it manifest by simply planting a garden of the plants in Ferrus’s poem. The poetry would be plants telling us about a person. I found myself firmly in this tradition of truth through plants in the poem I wrote a decade ago: Moon wind water rocks speak truth Air rises buchu scent mid growing trees: Rose, jasmine, chamomile, mint and KhoeSangoed.

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Rose for heart’s ease Jasmine for rest Chamomile for tranquility Mint-which both warms and cools—for oneness KhoeSangoed for home and buchu for spirit: All speak peace to the girl by the waterside being braided. (2000, 264)

This poem can be manifested. Have a good sniff. History without words. Smells are the most evocative thing ever. It is said that a smell can bring back memory in a way that none other of our senses do. Put like that, it is strange that we have for so long tried to write history without it. So smell the spell by which I evoked the young Sarah! Perhaps it shall help you understand her true self. Perhaps this is a spiritual point. Try to understand a religion that worshipped all that lives as expression of our Great Creator, who was lonely and so made Creation to keep her company. So happy were we to be Created that we could not do other than sing praises, glory, glory all day long, chopping on rocks, painting walls, planting, weeding, and feeding other creatures to bring greater happiness to Creator, our Mother. We lived, we ate them; we died, they ate us. It is the original meaning of communion. What greater ambition could a KhoeSan have than to become good compost? Imagine the space in between creation and compost-life-as-a-time to create poetry. Try to understand Auntie Sarah with those beliefs, those ambitions, performing the ritual of passing under water to become a Christian in order to understand this strange new world we slaves and indigenes found ourselves in. It was a condition of the !nau that you must have someone who has already been on the other side to lead you through. Now she leads us, those who grapple with growth and change. Try to understand a Creator so generous, she even gave us free will, even the power to do wrong. Introducing chaos into the equation, so confident in us, her children, that unpredictability was not a problem, but a solution: creativity. Does it cast new light on the forever silenced part of our ancestor’s history: her art, her music, her dancing? What else could we possibly wish to know about her, those of us who seek her true self in the world beyond words? Well, her art may well be lost to us, but her life is here. Her story says that this space called life is for creation. We have buried her bones, she is becoming good compost, and all that is left to do is to

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make poetry. The young Sarah would not understand the anguish with which her history is treated. The elders would not approve the battleground which some historians seek to make of her life. In her culture an olfactory poem could say what needed to be said. The colonialists sought to enslave her, but in her culture, she walked through Paris, smelling the stories of these !Urisan2 who stayed talking, talking, talking all the time, as if they were masters of the universe and words, the only reality. Then you will understand that one can grow a garden to make poetry manifest. I could put a rose geranium (Pelargonium graveolens), a jasmine (Jasminum multipartum), and a few buchu (Agathosma crenulata) bushes by a pool with chamomile (Matricaria zuurbergensis) at their feet, below some mint (Mentha longifolia)3 hugging the waterside and placing above some KhoeSangoed (Helichrysum petiolare) to drape artistically down the bank—as it loves to do. If I did this, would you understand that I wished to say something about Auntie Sarah, that I sought to recall her to you as a young girl, and that I expressed qualities, life experiences that it is important that we call to our remembering? Would you understand this as history? Then suddenly you would be thinking like the KhoeSan. Then there might be a chance that you would be able to truly know Auntie Sarah. I say this because I have promised for a decade that I would write a book about Auntie Sarah. I said I would write a biography, but I also said it would be a history written with something of the way she would have understood the concept of history. I wanted this book to see the world through Auntie Sarah’s eyes. So I asked her. I sought her true self and said “Auntie whom I dearly love, grant me please a dream, a vision of the way you saw your life.” Well, here I am; I am busy developing the biography—except it is not a book at all. It is a garden. See, Auntie Sarah would have thought of nature a little as we think of the grocery store. It is a place to get food. Except that where we worry about having enough money to eat she would have thought in terms of abundance, a gift from our Great Creator for the edification of her children. So a grocery store, which was a temple, which was also a place of beauty and great symbolism. Auntie Sarah would not know hunger, either physical or spiritual, until she came into contact with colonialism. Auntie Sarah would have walked in a landscape that said “history” to her. As her people walked from coast to inland and

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inland back to coast, following the change of seasons and leaving the onset of rain behind each time, each name of a place, a rock, a stone would have spoken to her. Gamtoos, the river of her birth, was named after her people because it was their heartland. Touw’s River, the River of Women, was changed to commemorate a battle of KhoeSan women against the onslaught of colonialists. Tratradouws Pass, the Women’s Door, was called by this name because it was too narrow for the large stock and so the men walked round the coastal road with the cattle while the women crossed the high mountain with the small stock—each journey a river through mountains of (his)tories. This place would have been famous for the excellence of its thatching reed for huts, the other place for the exceptionally good quality of its soap bush. At a third place she would have been warned (every year with regularity) that the wild garlic (Tulbaghia violacea) grew exceptionally strong here and so should never be harvested too far out of the rainy season. In this we learn something about Auntie Sarah’s understanding: that she valued connectedness. We also learn something about her epistemology. For in Khoe pharmacology there is no “magic bullet.” Instead they thought of medicine as part of what we nowadays would call a holistic health care approach. The herbs they used for healing worked in the context of a healthy lifestyle and a peaceful mind playing “glory” with the cosmos. (This is a fact that is often forgotten when our plants are ripped out of their environment in the service of this or that miracle cure.) As with other indigenous knowledge systems, the KhoeSan would consider the problem of ill health as a matter of immune system boosting and promoting balance between body, mind, and society. That is why today some of our most famous herbs, like cancer bush (Lessertia frutescens) are called by Western science adaptogenic; they do not contain one substance that acts against one disease, but a multitude of substances that together act so as to boost the body’s ability to deal with stress. In our language, we would say they assist the body to perform a !nau. When it is done the body has learnt and will not fall sick from the same disease again. Plants and humans tell the same story about growth and change through balance. What this tells us about the way Auntie Sarah thought is that she would not be likely to consider one solution to one problem. She would think holistically, looking for root causes of problems and seeking solutions that would promote system change in the

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direction of total balance: change balanced by that which is constant, order balanced by chaos/creativity, structure balanced by fluidity. Her mind would seek patterns, not categories. So that would be the kind of history I would like to bring to life. Auntie Sarah would have viewed this landscape as a beauty salon and also as truth, for she thought of certain trees and plants as soap, as body oils, as perfumes, and also the embodiment of certain qualities that spoke as poetry. For instance, one could speak of the yellowwood (Podocarpus spp.), the elephant and the whale as the most long-lived of creatures, but then also they become symbols of wisdom. For long life, when carefully cherished, brings experience and with it growth and change well changed (that is the only way I can describe the concept of !nau). The being that goes through it and is changed is the true self. For Auntie Sarah that triple combination of tree, land mammal, and sea mammal in itself or when applied to the life of a human would have spoken volumes in allegory, poetry, and the act of memory we call history. It would have said “a life well lived.” It would have said “whole.” The point I am trying to make is that I understand the craft of telling history through Auntie Sarah’s eyes as not fully distinguishable from gardening the world she lived in. It could not be. She would have understood the two as married crafts, the way we even today understand the relationship between poetry and rhythm. This garden that I am going to plant would speak to her. When it is done (or as close as a garden ever gets to being done) I will not feel the need for a book.

Making it Real I should say that since her funeral in 2002, we have been working on a project together with the South African Department of Arts and Culture to build a Center for Remembrance4 next to her gravesite in Hankie, Eastern Cape. The Sarah Baartman Legacy Project Memorial Garden to give it its full name is to lie adjacent to the buildings and walking route that together form the center. It pleases me to be able to report that this project has come so far (through three presidents, not to mention three ministers of arts and culture) that there is a R40 million budget set aside in the Department of Public Works to build it and the architectural plans

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have at last been approved. Those of you who spend time in the bureaucratic guerilla struggles will know that is great progress. The Kouga Municipality, of Cacadu District Municipality, Eastern Cape Province, has very kindly donated the 87-hectare farm surrounding the gravesite to the project. It is by a stroke of great good fortune to find a piece of land that has been left largely untouched since Auntie Sarah’s time. It probably was, during most of the nineteenth century, a mission station bought by the resident KhoeSan, but the land was bit by bit—taken in taxes—and that is how it came to pass into the ownership of the municipality. The local KhoeSan have kindly not laid any claim to restitution, although the farm itself will continue to remain open to the traditional healers who for centuries have gathered herbs there. The Center will occupy part of the land. Some of it will be farmed but most of it will be left for the people to roam and wander as the KhoeSan did of old. We hope to introduce some stock too, to be herded, so that the plants can once again thrive like they should. It is presently sadly undergrazed in places and overgrazed in others, so the land needs to be taken care of and restored to its ancient balance of human people, plant people, and animal people. This will not be easy to manage on such a small piece of ground, but it is a pleasure to meet such a challenge. The Legacy Project as a whole is there to pay respect to Auntie Sarah’s memory, yet an integral part of its design is that it will also serve as a site for learning and research on indigenous knowledge systems, arts, and crafts. It will create jobs. This aspect is important because the people of Hankey, a small farming town, are poor and mostly unemployed. They work seasonally on the surrounding citrus farms, and it is said of their lives, like so many South African rural lives, that when you work you are poor and when you don’t you starve. By creating jobs and opportunities for skill training in a culture they already know, we are hoping to place the knowledge of the past in the service of creating better lives today. In particular, it is important that women gain access to the opportunity to live and work in a way that empowers them to protect themselves from violent relationships. Hankey, like the rest of South Africa, has extremely high rates of substance abuse and gender-based violence. So the role of the Center in healing the wounds of the past and giving us hope for the future has had to go beyond what one normally expects of museums.

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This land of the Center is divided into three parts. The memorial garden is deeply symbolic and meant to be accessible to all. It is distinctly hedged, thus introducing the notion of boundaries, of shifting understandings of “inside” and “out” to accommodate human ecology. The productive garden will be designed around the harmony of the economics of production and convenience for the species that live in it, merging gradually into the veld beyond. The latter two elements can be open to the public, but are not necessarily inviting, as opposed to the memorial garden that is specifically designed around the needs of humans. This approach divides the space ecologically into three distinct zones of high, medium, and low human impact, as well as horticulturally into high, medium, and low water zones. With experience, it will be possible to make such a system sustainable. The overall design of the memorial garden seeks to represent the different phases of the Moon. Following Witbooi, [I]t may be concluded that the Khoikhoi worshipped the moon. A legend was told that the moon sent a louse to the Khoikhoi with the message: “Go to Men, and tell them, as I die and dying live, so you shall also die and dying live.” The Moon was therefore associated with the promise of immortality. Every night when it was full moon or new moon, the Khoikhoi would sing and dance in worship. (1983, 8)

The circle as the symbol of the full moon had profound religious and aesthetic significance for the KhoeSan (Abrahams 2000). Thus the design of the garden is based on this principle, and allows us to speak of the meaning of circular thinking. The design of the inner part (the memorial garden) is a circle, bisected by a stream that forms a semicircle, thus reflecting the moon in its waxing and waning phases. The stream empties into a circular pool, again reflecting the full moon. This directs us to think of the three in one (aspects of the moon as symbol of everlasting life). The concept of the three-in-one allows us to speak of the underlying philosophy that has consistently underpinned this legacy project, namely that it seeks to celebrate Sarah Bartmann’s life as an individual, in the context of her people, within a broader (if uneven) history of South African communities building nationhood. The notion of circularity is also reflected in the design of the integrated water management system for the productive garden. No input of additional water is required to irrigate the garden, the inlet tank and

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stream also provides a cleansing system and no dirty water exits the garden. It is a completely sustainable system. The introduction of open water in the garden also allows us to reflect a fundamental aspect of KhoeSan life and spirituality, namely continuity and change. As water is always itself, it is constant in the same way that our Great Creator is constant in her/his promise to us.5 As it is part of every living thing, it represents the way the spirit of the Divine is present in each of us. Yet as water is part of every living process, it is also constantly changing. Change, transition, !nau was a central concept of KhoeSan life and spirituality, expressed in many ceremonies and traditions. Naturally, a culture that can rightfully claim to be the oldest culture in the world has accumulated untold expertise in the fine art of balancing continuity and change. Essentially, the concept of !nau saw change as a positive thing, provided that it was done according to custom and true to our history. In other words, KhoeSan tradition was never frozen in time but embraced change. The issue was never what we did, but how we did it. To change according to the principles of !nau was to do so in a culturally acceptable way. Witbooi observes: A central concept which must be dealt with is !nau. All the Khoikhoi in a transitional stage experience !nau . . . The !nau person had to be initiated before he/she accepted into the new group. Only very old men and old women past the age of childbearing could come into contact with the !nau person. But even here the precondition had to be met. Only a person who had experienced the stage of !nau could come into contact with a !nau person. (1983, 104)

Water, as a symbol of both constancy and change, was a critical part of !nau rituals (Witbooi 1983, 104–108). Therefore this garden holds the three key elements of a successful !nau: the moon, as symbol of the Divine Promise; the memory of Auntie Sarah, a spirit who has successfully (and triumphantly) transited into the new world and thus may lead us, the liminarians, into a successful transition; and lastly water, as a cleansing and healing element that can also lead us by example. Water shows that we can change and yet be ourselves. In fact, it may be argued that one of the greatest problems afflicting the KhoeSan today, leading to depression, conflict, and other symptoms of collective post-traumatic stress disorder, has been that colonialism, and attempted genocide interfered with our ability to accomplish a successful !nau. The Legacy

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Project, through its element of redress in this garden, seeks to provide the elements necessary for a successful !nau, thus contributing to its stated aim of healing. In the garden, the stream is bordered on the left hand side by a path and on the right-hand side by gannabos (Salsola aphylla) and other economic waterside plants. The path crosses the stream by a bridge and continues along the boundary of the indigenous lawn until it reaches the pool. To the left-hand side of the stream it is proposed that the land be planted up with species native to the Hankey area, while as one crosses the right hand side the vegetation changes to indigenous vegetation of the western Cape and lastly, to exotic plants characteristic of Cape Town and environs in the early nineteenth century. A special feature here will be a collection of the old roses which grew in the Cape during Sarah Bartmann’s time, and I look forward to replicating their uses for perfume, cosmetics, and eye washes. A walk around the garden from left to right thus provides a journey through Sarah Bartmann’s natural world from birth through childhood, teens, and adulthood until her departure for Britain in 1810. It enables the viewer to see the world through her eyes. This symbolizes change. Constancy is provided through olives on the left and sweet thorn on the right, which both cover all the climactic zones and ecological niches contained in the garden. The Memorial Garden will contain mainly cosmetic and medicinal plants, which is, for the production of soaps and oils, and the elimination of germs and bacteria. This in the garden’s aspect of redress, healing, and celebration of the dignity of womanhood. Bearing in mind the KhoeSan philosophy of holistic health, the choice of plants symbolizes the necessity for spiritual and emotional health as an important part of physical well-being. Thus the garden is designed to be beautiful to the eye as well as pleasing to the nose, again as a compliment to Auntie Sarah. Nutrition is an essential element of health, but only a few edible plants are included, the bulk being grown in the productive garden where their needs can be easier accommodated.

Conclusion I will end just by talking more to you about one tree, the sweet thorn tree (Acacia karoo). It is a pioneer plant that is fast-growing

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and will protect the other trees as they grow. Another way of putting it is that the sweet thorn is a leader. It is strong, rugged, and giving, in fact it is the nature of this tree that it cannot stop itself from giving. It is a leguminous (pod-bearing) tree, meaning it draws nitrogen from the air and puts it into the ground. Nitrogen is an important plant nutrient that is what I mean by the giving nature of the sweet thorn. It has been estimated that a hectare of sweet thorn trees will fix up to 250 kg of nitrogen in the ground per year. This is the equivalent of 2.5 tons of fertilizer that the farmer usually gets from petroleum mined from the ground (Johnson 1998, 70). In other words, sweet thorn cleans the air, fertilizes the soil, stores carbon, and leaves the world a better place than she found it. She leaves the gift by creating an economy of abundance. Not surprisingly, sweet thorn grows over all of South Africa, but it is a strong feature of dry regions where little else will grow. I believe the KhoeSan were fond of planting it wherever they went, and while it is lovely everywhere it is appreciated best, I feel, against the majestic landscape of the semidesert Karoo. There, sweet thorn lines all the river beds, its roots binding the soil, preventing erosion. Sweet thorn is an extremely palatable tree; the leaves are good fodder for both large and small stock. Obviously because it is leguminous the grass grows extra green under it. The flowers feed bees. The sweet thorn pods can be gathered for stock and is said to be good feed for chickens since it is high in protein. Humans can also eat them. The KhoeSan used to make coffee with the beans but they say it is an acquired taste. You can tap the sap from the sweet thorn once a year just like maple syrup and the children used to love it because they could chew it like gum. You can ferment it and distil the alcohol, to mix with various fruit juices. The sweet thorn like a true pioneer tree grows quickly, about a meter per year, although this means it does not live long as trees go. It is a tough tree, easily withstanding gale force winds, and is often the first tree to be found growing on the windward side of the beach. Its leaves are fine and far apart, meaning it casts a light and dappled shade, so altogether the sweet thorn provides ideal conditions for slower-growing trees to germinate and grow beneath its branches. But having said all of this about the sweet thorn, I want you to know that all her qualities are cast in such a fine outer casing, she is one of the most beautiful of trees. Her flowers, bright yellow, will cheer anybody out of depression, they

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smell, as her name says, sweet. They feed bees who surround the tree drunk with pleasure during flowering time. The perfume from the flowers will help you understand in its essence the nature of this kind tree. Then you will grasp fully the nature of the person, Auntie Sarah, for whose history the sweet thorn is a metaphor, a monument, a memorial, and a life made manifest.

Notes 1. I know some readers will have a heart attack at any notion of “authenticity.” All I can say is think “food.” 2. KhoeKhoegewaab word referring to white people. 3. Yes, I am aware of the irony of using Linneaus’s system of classification to identify plants, since he classified us as monstrosities, but the purpose of this work is not to recriminate, but to communicate. 4. You can read more about it at www.sarahbartmanncompetition.co.za 5. Strictly speaking, the Great Creator is above gender, having created the species that have one gender, the species that have two, and the species that have three. However, in our human limitation we often approach our Great Creator in a gendered way, as Witbooi will use the pronoun “he” and I will use the word “she.” However, it is recognized that this is our human limitation and not a statement about the nature of the One.

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Chapter Three “Rude” Performances: Theorizing Agency Hershini Bhana Young

Sometimes in the interests of critical liberatory agendas, power can be depicted as seamless and totalizing, resulting in a landscape peopled by the binary opposites of the empowered and the victims. In order to see more than the brutalizing effects of coercive systems that render the black body always as spectacle, it is necessary to theorize the elusive agency of Sarah Baartman, a difficult task given the invisibility of her thoughts and feelings within the traditional archive. To imaginatively approximate something close to her agency, I map the uneven discursive terrain that exists between a specific ethnographic spectacle, that of Sarah Baartman, derogatively known as the “Hottentot Venus” and slaves for sale. I stage the confrontation of two kinds of spectacles: that of the individualized ethnic African on display on stage for money with the display of stolen enslaved Africans carefully stripped of individuality for purposes of sale. I do so to offer a “more critically and historically embedded understanding of the freedom celebrated in literary and cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism” (Wong 2009, 6). Too often the story of freedom is narrated as a finished event with slavery and freedom clearly demarcated from one another temporarily, geographically, and culturally. However, my comparison of Sarah Baartman to slaves for sale demonstrates that slavery and freedom were less distinct than historians have traditionally constructed. Slavery and its interpretative crises haunt freedom, necessitating not only an examination of the vulnerability of freedom itself but also of its possessive individualism that revolves around notions of will, agency, and consent. In April 2002, the remains of the Khoikhoi1 Sara Baartman were finally returned to South Africa after an eight-year campaign.

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Hershini Bhana Young

The repatriation of Sara Baartman and her burial on National Women’s Day in the town of Hankey, approximately 500 miles east of Cape Town provided a moving testimony to the resiliency of peoples dealing with the legacy of imperialism and apartheid. While much has been written about Baartman, very little is known about her prior to her arrival in London. We do not even know her original name. Presumably born in early 1790s (Abrahams 1996, 89–114), she was brought to the Cape by Dutch farmers after the death of her father where she worked as a “servant” for Peter Cezar. Alexander Dunlop (a ship’s doctor and a procurer of museum specimens) expressed an interest in procuring Baartman as a curiosity based on her putative steatopygia (the disease of large buttocks), labial apron and her degenerative, female hottentotness. Baartman became part of a circuit of material goods that moved merchandise from various parts of Africa and its diaspora to England. Flora, fauna, animals, and people were commodified and shipped to England to represent and justify colonial expansion and to entertain the British via displays of exotica. Baartman arrived in London in 1810, accompanied by Alexander and her exhibitor, Henrik Cezar, where she was displayed as the “Hottentot Venus,” a crude and terrible joke about her supposed ugliness and deformity.2 It is no coincidence, given the implicit equivalency between animals and humans as exotic commodities that Dunlop attempted to sell her to a museum entrepreneur, a William Bullock of Piccadilly, together with a “Camel-opard [sic] [giraffe] skin of great beauty and considerable value” (Strother 1999, 47). Bullock later expressed regret at not purchasing both, given the lucrative exhibit. Later that year abolitionists brought a suit against Baartman’s exhibitors, asserting that she was being exhibited against her will. Slavery was abolished in Britain in 1807 and only abolished in the British Empire in 1833. Abolitionists at this time were organizing and publicizing their concerns. Baartman proved to be the perfect test case. Ultimately the court found in favor of the defendant Cezar.3 Soon after, Baartman all but disappears from the historical records until 1814.4 Baartman begins the second, perhaps better known chapter of her life in 1814 when she was exhibited for fifteen months by an animal trainer, S. Reaux. In Paris she became the object of fascination of scientists, most significantly George Cuvier (1769–1832), “one of the ‘fathers’ of modern biology” and scientific racism

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(Fausto-Sterling 1995, 20). Baartman died in December 1815,5 allowing for Cuvier’s infamous autopsy where he was finally able to examine Baartman’s genitalia, something it is said she resisted when alive. Cuvier made several body casts of her, and preserved her brain, skeleton, and dissected genitalia. Baartman’s remains continued to be on display in the Musée de l’Homme intermittently in different exhibitions until her repatriation in 2002. Rather than dwelling on Baartman in Paris, my chapter focuses on her initial exhibition in London, specifically around the conditions of her staging and her politicization as a symbol of unfree and free labor that arose around blacks. In this way I do not repeat the “historical focus on Sara Bartman’s anatomy rather than her conditions of labor” (Abrahams 1996, 98). Nor do I accept uncritically Sander Gilman’s much cited core argument around Baartman: that the sexuality of male and female blacks became the symbol for deviant sexuality of all kinds by the eighteenth century. Gilman’s insistence on Baartman’s importance as a “collection of sexual parts” leads him to read the 1810 lawsuit as concerned with sexual lewdness as much as abolitionism (1986, 87–88). His failure to address issues of slavery and free labor in the interests of his theory about the iconographic status of black sexuality requires that I place Baartman back into African history, “restoring the Khoisan to chronicity” (Abrahams 1996, 99) and paying attention to “what social relations determined which people counted as Black . . . [and] the important differences that marked how social actors in different structural locations saw and experienced Baartman” (Magubane 2001, 817–818). This chapter traces the problematic equivalency that functioned to erase Baartman’s agency by linking her to the ultimate symbol of powerlessness for abolitionists, the slave. One year before Baartman’s appearance in London in 1810, the British government accused the Dutch of being unworthy to colonize the Cape due to their failure to “civilize” the native population. In response, the British government colonized the Cape. Under Lord Caledon, governor of the Cape, the British ushered in their new role as protectors of the mistreated natives via the proclamation of the “Hottentot Code” of 1809. Baartman’s arrival in London a year later with a Dutch “keeper” therefore could not go unnoticed. Indeed, her body became the battleground for larger questions of Cape colonization, questions about the competence of Lord Caledon, and imperial

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native policy (Abrahams 1996, 99–101). As Abrahams insists, this “was not a case about a nameless woman from a far flung place. The Sara Baartman case was located in the heart of British and colonial politics” (1996, 102). The African Association, a precursor to the Royal Geographical Society, brought a suit against Cezar and Dunlop soon after Baartman’s arrival. The African Association had “every reason to believe, that the unfortunate female in question was brought away from her own country without her consent, was kept here for exhibition without her consent, and that the appearance of compliance which she evinced was the result of menaces of ill-treatment” (Wiss 1994, 16). The repetition of the phrase “without her consent” is significant as the case pivots around the notion of coercion versus consent and enslavement versus the contractual obligation of the “free” market.6 The African Association sued Henrik Cezar, Baartman’s “captor” in order to demonstrate that she did not own her own labor and body, thereby forcing the cessation of her performance in England. As stated in Macauley’s affidavit, he was “desirous if possible of learning under what circumstances she came to England and whether she was made a public spectacle with her own free will and consent or whether she was compelled to exhibit herself and was desirous of returning to her own country” (Strother 1999, 43). Had Cezar in fact followed the provisions of Caledon’s Hottentot Code—was Baartman legally indentured or was she enslaved? The discussion of Baartman’s performance during the court case revolved around the ways in which her performance reiterated the performances of slaves as injured spectacles/commodities on the auction block—compelled to exhibit themselves and longing to go home to their own country. What the members of the African Association noticed was the similarity between the slave pens with barred windows and doors that locked on the outside with Baartman’s cage at the end of the stage. They drew attention to the link between the slave show rooms and auction blocks and the confined space of Baartman’s tiny stage. They heard in Baartman’s “exhibitor” asking her to turn around for the public in order for them to get their money’s worth, an echo of the voice of the slave trader calling a particular slave to display herself as commodity to potential buyers. The African Association attempted to draw a direct connection between the spectacular nature of enslavement and the spectacle

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of Baartman, ordered about by her “exhibitor.” They felt that Baartman’s alienation from her body, a body that served the interests of her “master,” resembled the slave’s alienation from her body rendered as commodity and beast of burden, in order to further the interests of her master. Rather than seeing the kinds of exploitation that can occur under the guise of “free” labor, the African Association attacked Baartman’s performance by attacking the institution of slavery and thereby actively defending a capitalist colonial order “based on the ‘voluntary’ commodification of the self and a ‘willing’ capitulation to the dominant logic of capital” (Magubane 2001, 829). As Wong argues: The “earliest legal contests over slavery in Britain were fought over the status of those slaves whom slaveholders had brought into the realm. Somerset [v. Stewart (1772)] was the culmination of a score of earlier freedom suits that abolitionists had initiated on behalf of these slave attendants, and it established a powerful antislavery precedent favoring freedom for slaves once on free soil”. (2009, 11)

The African Association’s legal proceedings against Baartman’s exhibitors in many ways were part of this attempt to challenge slavery through the figure of the traveling slave who geographically traversed slavery to freedom. However, what distinguished this case was its need to ascertain whether or not Baartman was a slave in the first place, and not whether the condition of her slavery followed her into Britain. Such an attempt allows us to critically intervene, not so much as to whether Baartman was a slave or not, but rather in the discussion of a freedom that is dependent on and productive of slavery itself. Thus the discussion shifts from the exaggerated differences between contractual black labor and slavery to their similarities, specifically the similarities in the operation of limited agency. Comparing Baartman’s performance with those of slaves during sale allows me to disrupt simplistic binaries of agency and subjugation by showing agency to operate on a continuum: always responsive and determined to various degrees by its context. By retheorizing agency, one can avoid an overestimation of Sarah Baartman’s agency as a participant in the supposed free market of capitalism and an underestimation of slave agency during sale. While comparing these historical moments of performance necessitates maintaining a distinction between Baartman’s supposed contractual obligation and the slave’s will-lessness,

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I place her coerced performance alongside the spectacle of slaves during the slave auction in order to flesh out the various degrees of coercion and consent implicit in these painful performances of subjugation. Looking at these heart-wrenching bodies on display, I make the argument for a limited notion of agency that erupts at various moments of these performances. In comparing Baartman and slaves for sale, I do not assume a shared black identity. To do so would be to collapse their differences by not paying close attention to the contextual specificities that anchor the meaning of their bodies in place and time. Scholars such as Oyeronke Oyewumi and Chandra Mohanty warn against falsely universalizing methodologies and constructs that can either retroactively map contemporary meanings onto historically located bodies, or under the guise of universality utilize Western concepts such as “gender” while subjugating indigenous worldviews and systems of meaning. However, for the purposes of my chapter, I find it essential to set transatlantic sites in conversation with one another not so much to apply the same universal identitarian categories to both situations but rather to map their uneven development and application. I set these two seemingly disparate sites in conversation with one another precisely because these bodies on display were being evaluated against each other (albeit indirectly). These bodies were being compared to the bodies of their viewers, all in order to develop modern transatlantic systems of race and gender that enable capitalism and its attendant modes of political power. The second half of the seventeenth century saw a shift, as Philip D. Curtin argues, from “culture prejudice” to “color prejudice” (1964, 30). I would argue that instead of a shift, one sees the growing use of science to legitimate older racial/cultural classifications for the purposes of national politics. Color prejudice did not replace the culture prejudice but rather supplemented the latter, showing that “race is a discourse of vacillations. It operates at different levels and moves not only between different political projects but seizes upon different elements of earlier discourses reworked for new political ends” (Stoler 1995, 72). The development of a scientific codification of older racial prejudice became crucial in order to justify and structurally develop involvement in the slave trade and imperial policy. From the 1670s onward, slavery began to be inextricable from notions of blackness. Early seventeenth and

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eighteenth-century travelers’ descriptions of “Hottentots” threatened to disrupt the growing codification of race into a visual science that underpinned slavery, due to the “fairness” of their skin. This literature on the Khoikhoi insists that they are not black or brown but yellow, tawny, fairer skinned, with their babies being born white-skinned. For example, “in a 1707 report sent from the Cape to the members of the Royal Society, John Maxwell describes ‘Hottentot’ skin color as ‘naturally as White as ours,’ . . . ‘a race onto themselves’ . . . [and therefore] ‘unfit’ for slavery” (Merians 2001, 26).7 There were similar discussions regarding the Khoikhoi’s hair texture and physical features, leading to the conclusion that “[b]lackness is less a stable, observable, empirical fact than an ideology that is historically determined and, thus, variable” (Magubane 2001, 823). Racial formations are “shaped by specific relations of power and therefore have different histories and etymologies” (Stoler 1995, 90). In her comparative study of race, class, and gender, Magubane pays close attention to these histories and etymologies. As a result, she is loathe to propound a general theory of the articulation of race, class, and gender that is capable of explaining the very different social relations of, for example, England in the nineteenth century and Brazil in the twentyfirst . . . [Rather the] utility of historical case studies lies less in their ability to generate a totalizing theory than in their ability to suggest ways of looking at the world or at social situations that may be taken up and deployed, with modification, in other contexts. (Magubane 2004, 185–186)

Magubane wishes to foreground what might be called a diasporic methodology that highlights the connections between economic processes and racialized gender. In other words, discourses of sexuality, race, and labor must be placed “within a common frame as productive sites in a broader process of [the] normalization [of the white bourgeois body]” (Magubane 2004, 92). It is also crucial to redefine notions of agency away from liberal ideals in order to read the willfulness and will-lessness of Baartman and diasporic slaves. Reconceptualizing agency within the coercive systems of imperialism and slavery requires thinking through our definitions of significant action and who is capable of such action. Historical action, in conventional terms, can be defined as the

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“public-sphere expression of individual will, remembered and narrated by an empowered audience” (Stone-Mediatore 2003, 138). The actions of Baartman and slaves for sale thus can easily be overlooked, not only by the institutional structures that disenfranchised them but also by the interpretative lens by which their action has been defined and understood. New ways of understanding the agencies of these people rendered as spectacle involve the expansion of definitions of action as more than individual achievement within the public sphere. One must acknowledge that action can yield “no immediate or self-evident ‘products’ ” (Stone-Mediatore 2003, 140). Thus Baartman’s and slaves’ resistance may have had little impact on their larger conditions—slave resistance seldom prevented their sale and Baartman’s resistance changed little about the conditions of her alleged “contract.” This lack of easily recognizable results has enabled readings of Baartman and slaves as disempowered people totally lacking in agency. If one theorizes historical action to include those actions that do not have direct results or that do not result in self-aggrandizement, agency starts to look very different. It lies in the interstices of performances by black people on display. Historical action pays very little attention of the vocabulary of the body. One needs to focus not just on how bodies are read, but how to read these bodies in ways that allow for the resurfacing of agency and will. Foucault’s often cited mode of modern power called biopower comes to mind in that it functions as a “political technology that ‘[brings] life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and ma[kes] knowledge/power an agent of transformation of human life” (quoted in Stoler 1995, 3). Biopower regulates and disciplines the (social) body via an imprinting on the body of historical events. The task of genealogy then becomes “to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body” (Foucault 1984, 83). Diasporic Africanists have also taken an interest in the body as an important site for the consolidation of identity, stating that “the body . . . cannot escape being a vehicle of history, a metaphor and metonym of being-in-time” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, 79) and that “embodiment articulates the evolution of capitalism and colonialism” (Magubane 2004, 4). However, as Timothy Burke cautions, one cannot simply translate a local African or African American vocabulary for the body into scholarly language on the body as

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understandings of the body as a unit of analysis is not consistent across time and space. Rather biopower is historically and culturally specific: Regarding the body as an invariably significant or coherent subject in any culture must be regarded as a suspect notion; the body as a subject is specifically a product of the peculiar and convoluted history of Western and Christian insistence on mind/ body duality . . . In particular, bio-power . . . makes sense only in reference to historically specific and modern figurations of the body in Western history, and thus have dubious relevance to the precolonial and perhaps even contemporary cultural experiences of many Africans. (Burke 1996, 190–191)

Burke also reminds us to ground the theorization of the (social) body in material conditions to avoid the reification of bodies. Close attention must be paid to (black) bodies’ signification on discourses of race, nation, and gender and also on the flesh and blood realities of bodies that are brutalized, captured, and that survive and resist. Looking at the body in a historically contextualized manner allows us to unearth the embodied ways in which domination works as well as to reveal the plural notions of identity and agency that diasporic Africans were able to practice even within conditions of extreme violence. I would like to turn to some of the descriptions of Baartman’s performances that came out of the African Association’s lawsuit and that appeared in newspapers at the time in order to read her agency. The descriptions contained in the affidavits, precisely because they are concerned with issues of will, allow us to re-read Baartman’s performance for her limited agency, and to link it to the violent staging of the body occurring during slavery that created blackness as a transnational spectacle, even as slaves resisted with whatever means they could access. Macaulay noted that Baartman gave evident signs of mortification and misery at her degraded situation in being made a spectacle for the derision of bystanders without the power of resistance . . . do believe that from the dejected appearance of the said female and from the obedience which she pays to the commands of her exhibitor that she is compleatly [sic] under restraint and controul and is deprived of her liberty . . . appeared very morose and sullen. (Stoler 1999, 43–44)

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Macaulay’s affidavit was riddled with contradictions that are produced by his simplistic binary of individual agency and victimization. He made much of Baartman’s complete inability to resist and her total obedience even as he pointed to those parts of the performance where her resistance was evident in some shape or form. He read her agency in order to argue that this performance was against her will, even as he attempted to show that the performance deprived her of her will absolutely. He thus talked about her total obedience to her master even as later he documents an instance when Baartman refused to display herself. Her refusal necessitated that the Exhibitor . . . let down a curtain . . . after the curtain was let down [he] looked behind it and held up and shook his hand at her but without speaking and he soon afterward drew up the Curtain and again called her out to public view and she came forward again upon the stage. (Stoler 1999, 44)

This incident and the tension that appears between willfulness and domination in the affidavit speak volumes, not only about coercion involved in the spectacle of the “contractually” obligated Baartman, but also about the vectors of agency and submission that cross-hatched the performative sale of the slave. Rather than locating agency only within the realm of “free” labor and coercion only within the quintessential realm of unfree labor/ slavery, an examination of these troubled sites where blackness is being staged, allows us to see the coercion and severely constrained workings of agency in both types of performances. I am not collapsing the two and thereby underestimating the terrible subjugation of slavery. Rather I locate them with a genealogy of performance where as Roach argues, culture “reproduces and re- creates itself by a process that can be best described by the word surrogation . . . [a] process that does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric” (1996, 2). Thus the performances of Baartman and slaves at auction are not identical but indelibly and uncannily linked in a violent network of surrogations that render racialized bodies as fleshy commodities. These undeniable links between the performances constitute a crisis in notions of coercion and consent that raises crucial

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questions about how we conceive of blackness, performance, and agency today: In contrast to approaches that foreclose performance in the troubled frame of autonomy, arrogating to the enslaved [and obligated] the illusory privileges of the bourgeois subject or self-possessed individual, or performance as evidence of the harmonious order of . . . hegemony and the slave’s consent to that order, or performance as a reprieve from the horrors of the system, what is considered here are precisely the ways in which performance and other modes of practice are determined by, exploit and exceed the constraints of domination. (Hartman 1997, 54)

While Hartman largely focuses on pleasure in its various modalities as possibilities for agency and redress, I wish to focus on performing one’s fungibility and resistance to that fungibility as possible sites whereby one can trace agency. Such a tracing acknowledges that resistance, both in form and content, is shaped by domination as people negotiate the daily violence of coercive systems and performances. Buyers of slaves were aware of the numerous tricks of the trade and often spent considerable time trying to extract the “truth” from the carefully enacted performances insisted upon by the slave trader. Buyers prided themselves on their ability to separate the slave body from the performance forced by the trader. In a ritual enactment of mastery, buyers questioned, probed, fingered, and groped slaves in an attempt to read the truth of his or her body as they mapped their desires onto the black body as spectacle and imagined blackness into being. In an engraving appearing in Le Commerce de l’Amerique par Marseille (Chambon 1764) entitled Marche D’Esclave (slave market) one sees an Englishman licking the chin of a slave to determine his age and deduce from the taste of his sweat whether the slave was sick.8 So important did being a “good judge of slaves” become, that the ability to buy a “good” slave became part and parcel of the requirements of a white masculinist social world. As Roach puts it, “in the staging of New Orleans slave auctions, there is a fiercely laminating adhesion of bodies and objects, the individual desire for pleasure and the collective desire to compete for possession. As competitions between men, the auctions seethe with the potential for homosocial

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violence” (1996, 215). One sees similar fantasies operating around Baartman’s body that to a certain extent required her severely limited participation. Audiences pinched, poked, groped, and questioned as they attempted to confirm the veracity of her sexualized and racialized performance as advertised by her “exhibitors.” Through an enactment of this degrading ritual, they consolidated their own mastery, their own fantasy of white superiority, and subjectivity.9 They refused to be fooled by the exhibitor who merely wanted their money—rather, as rational beings they were able to “correctly” read Baartman’s body and thus create their own. However, one must remember that even while black bodies were being packaged, sold, bought, and misread, the “Other” was looking back. Even as these black bodies on display constituted semiotic fields onto which “physicians, scientists, and lay people [could] . . . inscribe and project power cultural meanings and moral prohibitions” (Urla and Terry 1995, 2), they were also resisting these hegemonic readings. They were pushing against the fantasies and anxieties enacted to create them as abject spectacles of blackness in the first place; “as the traders instructed them in how to represent themselves as salable, the slaves learned about slaveholders’ system of slave-buying signs; as the buyers looked them over and asked them questions, the slaves looked back and came to their own conclusion about the prospects held by a given sale” (Johnson 1999, 171). At every opportunity, black bodies were observing, learning, and looking back at their enslavers and other slaves. One could think about Baartman as refashioning submission into a challenge against the authority of her exhibitors. Her obedience becomes a tactic in a strategy of resistance. Thus the performative, even as it has the power to make bodies in certain ways, has the ability to unmake those same bodies. No mechanism of power can foreclose all possibilities of disruption, intervention, and transformation. Power, rather than being an absolute, assumes various guises via historically specific mediums. Such variance results in the unevenness of the workings of power, an unevenness seized upon by resisting subjects and exploited as much as possible. The conditions of oppression shape the performative modes of resistance seized upon by the black body, even as they exceeded and disrupted them. These performative modes of resistance are characterized by “the nonautonomy of the field of action; provisional ways of operating within the dominant space;

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local, multiple, and dispersed sites of resistance that have not been strategically codified or integrated” and a re-working of the discourse of abject (black) body (Hartman 1997, 61). Thus while Baartman cannot refuse her performance outright, she can disrupt her display in various ways that resist the hegemonic readings of her body as ethnographic spectacle/freak and captive body. For example, her temporary refusal to appear on stage, while it does not cancel her display, slows down the performance.10 The seamlessness of an un-self- conscious performance is disrupted; the audience instead of viewing an object is forced to deal with the troublesome assertion of a denied subjectivity. To put it another way, an object does not draw attention to the conditions of its display. To do so would be to exceed the category of the object, no matter how that will was expressed. I would argue that Baartman’s “work slowdown” was no accident. Rather her “reluctance” drew her audience’s attention to the complex workings of her will within the cramped space of her coerced performance. This was not so much to manipulate the audience’s sympathy as to assert her agency in a context where her behavior was seen as natural instinct, a primitive un-self- conscious, unthinking mode of being. Similarly, Baartman’s reportedly “rude” performance of the one-string bow can be seen as a refusal of virtuosity of an instrument whose playing was supposedly instinctual to her and her tribe.11 Via her lackluster performance of the bow, Baartman de-naturalizes her performance, using her playing to speak against the intentions of the exhibitors. Her “morose” attitudes, frequent sighs, and her sullenness all work against the ideological underpinning of subjugation that insist upon the simulation of pleasure and “consent” on the part of the dominated. Baartman’s slowness and her general reluctance expose that the “simulation of consent in the context of extreme domination was an orchestration intent upon making the captive body speak the master’s truth as well as disproving the suffering of the enslaved” (Hartman 1997, 38). She shows herself suffering and captive, even within the confines of a so-called “voluntary” exhibition of her body. Johnson argues that “[u]ltimately . . . the rites of the market had to be enacted by the slaves. From the time the buyers entered the yard in the morning to the time they left at night, the slaves were expected to enact carefully scripted roles” under threat of beating,

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deprivations, torture, and inducements (1999, 129). Slaves for sale were forced to perform complex roles. While traders could “feed them up,” oil their bodies, provide tallow for their hair, allow their wounds to heal, pluck grey hairs and dress them up, traders were forced to rely on slaves to “act” as they were advertised. Traders needed slaves to perform their role as human commodities and to this end the traders instructed slaves to make up ages that corresponded with their oiled and costumed bodies and to hide pasts that might lower their price and disrupt their sale. Slaves who had run away or been ill were told to hide their histories. Those who were being sold for their skills were told to play their skills up, whether real or imaginary. This small space of performance provided the key for many slaves in resisting and shaping their subjugation. Slaves used the opportunity at times to undermine their own sale. A Virginia trader in 1850 for example wrote to another trader about Coleman who delayed his sale by telling potential buyers that he had lost his hair because he had “cupped.” Another letter from South Carolina states, “James is cutting up . . . I could sell him like hot cakes if he would talk Right . . . The boy is trying to make himself unsound. He says he wore a truss in Charleston” (Johnson 1999, 180). Slaves manipulated information about themselves in order to have some limited say over their sale, often presenting themselves as opposite to whatever the potential buyer was seeking. The slave John Parker remembered, “I made up my mind I was going to select my owner so when anyone came to inspect me I did not like, I answered all questions with a ‘yes’ and made myself disagreeable” (Johnson 1999, 179). It is interesting that Parker used “yes” instead of “no” to discourage buyers. Through a compliant noncompliance, through a remaking of submission into a direct challenge, Parker ripped off the veil of simulated pleasure that covered over slavery’s consumption of the black body. Through his orneriness, Parker marks out a small terrain of resistance that counters notions of consensual domination, insisting on a form of subjectivity that disrupted the myth of “happy darkies” on plantations. Other slaves cut off fingers and mutilated their bodies to protest the necromancy of the market place that reduced them to fungible commodities, even as they utilized its logic of laboring commodity. In such instances, one sees slaves using the internal logic of the marketplace to protest their sale and in some

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small way, to shape the terms of that sale. Though we do not have Baartman’s words to attest to her own use of the logic of her display, we can politically imagine the rude performances, the work slowdowns, her “sullenness” and her gestures as possible moments of compliant noncompliance. One must continually bear in mind that often acts of resistance were undertaken with the full knowledge that the conditions under which they were being attempted would most likely not change. Baartman’s refusal to appear on stage when called ultimately resulted in a delay of her show though not its cancellation. No matter how skillful and careful the slave’s manipulation of the discourses whereby his or her body was contained, ultimately he or she, in most cases, was still sold and continued to suffer under the brutal regime of slavery. If ultimately these performative acts of resistance did not end oppression, one could argue that they are not examples of agency at all. Instead one could see them as evidence of failed agency and the success of the processes by which the black body was commodified and dispossessed. Such a reading then would lead us to conclude that Baartman was only victim, an injured body reduced to racialized and sexualized spectacle and that slaves were only ever commodities, brutally displayed, bought, and sold. In these historical contexts where the effects of power appear to be overwhelmingly repressive, where bodies are brutally displayed at will as fungible objects, where every glimmer of resistance is met with even harsher punitive measures—it would be easy to dismiss those tiny challenges embodied in the interstices of various performances. The image of a sick Baartman dying far from home, and the knowledge of the extreme violence of a system that unceremoniously bought and sold human beings as beasts of burden would overwhelm the inheritors of this legacy. However more nuanced understandings of coercion and consent, resistance, and victimization lead us towards an understanding, not only of how freedom did not break with but elaborated many of slavery’s paradigms but also of the crucial political role of the performative The performative, while it cannot simply transcend the constraints of domination, provides us with a means to reinvest in the body as spectacle. Through its denaturalization of abjection and blackness, of body and commodity, the performative can create a context within which to transform the spectacle into something more than an

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expression of the master’s will. It gestures toward a deeply important, fragmented, and difficult-to-locate agency of beings rendered as objects for far too long.

Notes 1. There has been much confusion about what tribe Baartman belonged to, especially in light of the complex history of imperialism and nomenclature in the Cape. There are numerous linguistic, physical, and cultural differences between the various clans of Khoisan, all called “Hottentots” by Europeans. See Linda Merians, Envisioning the Worst: Representations of “Hottentots” in Early- Modern England, (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2001). Baartman belongs to the KhoiKhoi people, a group that was recently officially recognized by the United Nations as an indigenous “First Nation.” For more in-depth discussions of issues of nomenclature, indigenous status and the politics of Khoisan identity, see The Proceedings of the Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference (1998). 2. See Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 70–71. 3. Bernth Lindfors says that Baartman testified in Low Dutch on “behalf of her managers, saying she had freely consented to exhibit her person in England, was earning good money” (1996, 210). I doubt that Baartman “freely consented” to anything. 4. Some newspapers indicate that Baartman was subsequently exhibited in Manchester, Limerick in Ireland and perhaps Bath. We also have her baptismal records from 1811. See Footnote 36 in Qureshi, Sadiah, “Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus,’ ” (2004, 254). 5. R. D. Altick explains Baartman’s death by saying that she “possessed, in addition to a fondness for trinkets customarily attributed to savages, an even greater one for the bottle. Thus debilitated, she was in no condition to fight the smallpox . . .” (1978, 269). Altick reiterates racist stereotypes of drunken natives and vain Hottentots. Writers in the eighteenth century warned against pride and excessive vanity by describing such behavior as belonging to “Hottentots,” as Linda Merians discusses. 6. This emphasis on labor later becomes obscured by issues of respectability and morality, the result of evangelical sentimentality and the British government’s support of capitalism. 7. Magubane (2001) makes a similar point on page 822, referring us to the original travelers accounts of Barrow 1801; Burchell [1827] 1953; Lichtenstein 1812; Pringle 1834 and Thompson 1827. 8. See image at http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/details.php? filename=C001

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9. From Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian (London: Richard Bently, 1839), Mrs. Mathews states: “Of the people attending the show, ‘one pinched her, another walked round her; one gentlemen poked her with his cane; and one lady employed parasol to ascertain that all was, as she called it, nattral’. This inhuman baiting the poor creature bore with sullen indifference, except upon some great provocation, when she seemed inclined to resent brutality, which even a Hottentot can understand. On these occasions it required all the authority of the keeper to subdue her resentment” (4.137). Cited by Bernth Lindfors, 1996, 208. 10. A London Times Reporter records: “And one time, when she refused for a moment to come out of her cage, her keeper . . . went behind and was seen to hold up his hand to her in a menacing gesture; she then came forward at his call, and was perfectly obedient.” London Times, November 26, 1810, 3. 11. I am aware that to European audiences, all musical performances by “Others” were heard as rude, unmusical, and primitive. However I wish to read descriptions of Baartman’s against the author’s intentions.

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Chapter Four Baartman and the Private: How Can We Look at a Figure that Has Been Looked at Too Much? Gabeba Baderoon

The burial of Sara Baartman’s remains on August 9, 2002 in Hankey in the Eastern Cape, near where she was born, was a signal event in South African and world history. The story of Baartman’s life has often been recounted, yet below I consider a little discussed aspect of the negotiations over the return of her remains from France and propose a theory of the private based on an analysis of Baartman’s life and her contemporary meanings. For over a century after her death, Baartman was simultaneously an excessively visible and nearly forgotten historical figure, visible because for most of that time her remains were on public display and little known because she had slipped from public view. As the essays in this collection show, Baartman was taken from South Africa to Europe in 1810 and exhibited publicly in London and Paris as the “Hottentot Venus” in shows that drew large audiences and even wider notoriety. Between 1810 and 1815, Baartman’s public visibility was heightened by the circulation in London and Paris of popular caricatures, paintings, and songs that focused compulsively on her body. After her death in Paris in 1815, Baartman’s body was dissected by the renowned scientists Henri de Blainville and Georges Cuvier and a plaster cast was made of her body. Their reports became the basis of a now discredited science of race that placed European men at its apex and black women at its nadir and asserted the racial inferiority and sexual deviancy of black people. Baartman’s skeleton, brain, and genitals were subsequently exhibited in the Musée de’ l’homme in Paris, and it was only in 1974, 159 years after her death, that these were removed from public view.

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Gabeba Baderoon

After a period of obscurity, Baartman was brought once again into public view in a series of highly influential essays published the 1980s, this time through writing that explored the uses made of her visibility in the nineteenth century to cement a derogatory view of black female sexuality. For the past thirty years, Baartman has been the subject of a different kind of visibility—in poetry, plays, visual art, and scholarship by women of African descent who have asserted an intimate bond between Baartman’s legacy and the lives of black women globally. Writing and visual art about Baartman since the 1980s has been a largely recuperative project, aimed at recovering her memory in service of broadly anti-racist and anti-sexist projects (see Guy- Sheftall, among others). Through them, Baartman has again become one of the most visible women in African history. In fact, as Zine Magubane points out, a “veritable theoretical industry” has grown up around her (2001, 817). In the process, Baartman has again become a “hypervisible” figure (Gqola 2006, 45). The nature of this visibility, despite the good intentions behind much of the writing and art, has caused Magubane and Gqola to point to discomforting echoes between nineteenth-century representations and those that have emerged since the 1980s in the insistent corporeality that continues to characterize images of Baartman. Combined with a neglect of African feminist writing on Baartman, this dehistoricized image of Baartman has been marked by assertions both of singularity and representativity that in effect disarticulate her from African history and turn her into a floating global symbol of the Black female body. As a result, we have been left with a plethora of images of Baartman and a continuing compulsion with gazing at her. How then, can we look at Baartman differently? One answer to the question is not to represent her, to respect the limits of what we can know, and the purposes to which we can put her memory, her body, and her history. Pumla Gqola posits the idea that despite the plethora of images and debates about Baartman, there is an ‘unknowability’ about her life that signals her full humanity (2010, 102). I embrace this proposal, and build upon it, exploring what Baartman’s unknowability may mean for us as a theory. For me, this means to consider a new definition of the “private,” drawing on recent analyses of autobiography and documentary forms in Africa.

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An originary moment in studies of Baartman occurs in Zoe Wicomb’s essay “Shame and the Case of the Coloured,” delivered as the keynote speech at the 1996 conference of the Association of University English Teachers of South Africa and published in 1998. In the essay, Baartman is for the first time placed in a theoretical perspective attentive to slavery, colonialism, and apartheid and the notions of race and sex that these generated in South Africa. In the essay and later in her novel David’s Story (2001), Wicomb takes the unprecedented theoretical step of asking what Baartman means for Black women who have been made the bearers of the shameful memory of sexual violence during slavery. Wicomb proposes a radical rereading of Baartman located within a rigorously non-nationalist analysis of South Africa’s memory of slavery and sexuality. Wicomb wrote about the lingering psychological impact of slavery for the descendents of enslaved people and specifically for black women. She proposes not a heroic recovery of Baartman, but situates her within the lingering self-denial and shame generated by the memory of slavery among the descendents of enslaved people in South Africa. In a formulation that links the memory of sexual violence during slavery with an accusation of women’s complicity with violence. Wicomb states, “Baartman exemplifies the body as site of shame . . . the shame of having had our bodies stared at but also the shame of those (women) who have mated with the colonizer” (1998, 92). This unprecedented analysis addressed the psychological effects of systemic violence, recalling a debate raised in the United States by the critic Darlene Clark Hine in her widely cited essay “Rape and the inner lives of Black women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” an analysis of the psychological impact of sexual violence during slavery for contemporary African American women. In her essay, Hine theorized a sophisticated yet subterranean strategy for survival by Black women in the aftermath of the multiple violations of slavery. She argued that in response to continuous sexual assault during North American slavery, African American women developed “a cult of secrecy, a cult of dissemblance, to protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives” (Hine 1997, 436). Thus Black women transformed memories of sexual violence into oblique signs that were “better left unknown, unwritten, unspoken except in whispered tones” (Hine 1997, 436). This “dissemblance” was crucial to

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Gabeba Baderoon

Black women’s psychic survival and their withdrawal into a recuperative and resistant space created the possibility of new subjectivities. Hine asserted that: only with secrecy, thus achieving a self-imposed invisibility, could ordinary Black women accrue the psychic space and harness the resources required to hold their own in the often one-sided and mismatched resistance struggle. (1997, 437)

Her essay is important for showing the logic of such silence and its coded symbolism in light of the continuing impact of systemic sexual violence. Importantly, in Hine’s analysis, African American women’s dissemblance is conscious and rational, and it constitutes “a self- conscious Black women’s culture of resistance” (1997, 438). This emphasis on a self-conscious political project means that the unconscious is largely absent in Hine’s view. Her conception of a resistant and resilient pattern of psychic responses among the descendents of slaves to widespread sexual violence is reframed in Wicomb’s paper into an analysis of suppressed shame. Other writers have gone on to discuss less conscious and ‘rational’ patterns of response among African American women such as self-injury and infanticide, most famously articulated in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Such patterns are harder to see as resistant. Arlene Keizer’s essay “Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory” (2008) probes the notion of a conscious project of resistance by Black women during and after slavery through examining a series of works about slavery by the renowned African American visual artist Kara Walker. Walker’s “cut-out” silhouettes represents acts of sexual violence by slave-owners against female slaves without the reassuring script of the latter’s heroic resistance. Walker’s images allude to Baartman through visual codes that recall nineteenthcentury caricatures of the latter’s body. In her analysis of Walker’s work, Keizer shows that such pieces speak more ambivalently and therefore uncomfortably about how Black women survived psychically, revisiting, like Wicomb, the suppressed accusation that to survive continuous violation, enslaved women used various strategies against sexual exploitation, including negotiating emotional relationships amid constant violence. Such negotiation carried steep costs, or, as Wicomb phrased it, the memory of survival is

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burdened by “the shame of those (women) who have mated with the colonizer” (1998, 92). Walker’s art has met with controversy among many commentators, including an older generation of Black artists, who found untenable her allusions to the ambiguities of survival, rather than a preferred recollection of resistance. In the South African context, Wicomb’s “Shame” essay and David’s Story proposes a similarly discomforting and challenging vision that Baartman “exemplifies the body as site of shame” (1998, 82). At a moment in the country’s history when a nationalist view was in the ascendancy in South Africa, Wicomb’s 1998 essay was already post-nationalist and wary of the uses made of Baartman. Zine Magubane points similarly to the unreflective repetition of a focus on Baartman as body in contemporary representations of her that neglect how notions of race and sexuality have changed. The focus on Baartman’s body disarticulates her from a necessary attention to history, giving her a simultaneous singularity and representativity, thereby ascribing “Baartmann’s [assumed] corporeal alterity the power to produce history” (2001, 832). I revisit the idea of the singularity and representativity of Baartman below. Wicomb also refuses this pattern, insisting instead on attending to the specific legacy of colonialism and slavery in the self-conception of those descended from slaves, known in South Africa as “coloureds,” and posed the ethical question of how to speak about Baartman without invoking her for contemporary ends that neatened the untidiness and ambiguities of history or repeating its violations. As both Magubane and Wicomb argue, one way to repeat the past is to repeat the pattern of Baartman as bodily icon. Meg Samuelson discusses the production of such images in her important study Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition (2007). In a series of readings of contemporary representations of Baartman, Samuelson shows how images of women were deployed to symbolize the transition to a new national identity in 1994, but were simultaneously de-centered and deprived of meaningful access to power. Among the examples she analyzes is Baartman’s state funeral on National Women’s Day at which then-President Thabo Mbeki gave the main address. Samuelson argues that the South African state’s discursive use of Baartman operates on a rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion that entrenches binary oppositions, resulting in a policing of insiderness, belonging and authenticity that can be deadly for

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those deemed on the outside of such categories. Later, I discuss a photograph by Zanele Muholi that addresses this formulation. Reading Wicomb’s David’s Story, Samuelson shows that in contrast to such nationalist claims on Baartman, the novel refuses to deploy the latter either in the service of a mythology about the antiapartheid struggle or of static notions of ethnic histories and identities. Instead, the Baartman whom Wicomb writes into existence in David’s Story is definitively resistant to all mythological claims, leaving readers at the end of the novel with an image of a recurring, elusive figure whose meanings cannot be defined by national or ethnic symbolism. Pumla Gqola’s compelling essay “(Not) representing Sara Bartman” in her book What is Slavery to Me? (2010) speaks to this Baartman, and then goes further. Gqola proposes that in the face of the “theoretical industry” around Baartman, there is a space to negotiate how much we can seek to know about her. To establish the grounds for such negotiation, Gqola first locates Baartman in African as well as Western history, and contests the neglect of southern theorists in much contemporary Western writing on Baartman. Gqola then offers a meditation on the ethics of representing Baartman, proposing a limit on what can be known about Baartman’s life. She suggests that Baartman is ultimately unknowable, and that to accept this unknowability offers a way to accept her full humanity. The notion of observing a limit on what can be known about Baartman, of discretion, of declining to bring her again into what Premesh Lalu calls “colonial frames of intelligibility” (2000, 45), is ultimately a political choice. This subtle navigation of the imperative to know is a new element in the debates about Baartman’s life.

How the journey ends “A tale that begins with [Baartman] cannot be one with narrative certainty” (Gqola 2010, 56)

In the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, Baartman was one of thousands of people from Europe’s former colonial territories whose remains had been gathered in metropolitan museums. Among the

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many human remains exhibited and stored in the museum’s collections, hers had fallen into obscurity. I draw a particular lesson from accounts of the negotiations that led to Baartman’s return and propose that there was a philosophical and political meaning to what happened in the course of the negotiations that followed. I base my theory of the “private” on these meanings. In the course of the protracted negotiations between South Africa and France to return Baartman’s remains—her skeleton, brain and genitals—the process was stalled by French claims that the remains had been lost and could not be identified among the museum’s holdings (Maseko 1998). However in 2002, once the French government agreed to return them, a dispute arose about the veracity of the physical remains offered by the French (Abrahams 2010). Despite this, the South African committee that negotiated her return declined to have the remains tested to verify whether they belonged to Baartman, or even whether the three sets of remains belonged to the same person (Abrahams 2010). To the committee, to do so would amount to a replication of the violation through enforced access to which Baartman had been subjected, and repeat the “great long national insult” to which Baartman had been subjected during her life (Abrahams 1997). Instead, on August 9, 2002, Baartman was given a ceremonial burial in Hankey, near the place where she was born. This set of acts constituted a philosophical and political assertion that the committee would define its way of knowing differently. The committee decided to accept without DNA testing that the remains offered by the French belonged to Baartman and to ensure this, they would be honored through a homecoming and burial ceremony. This series of events can be read in several ways. Death is a marker of the human, and after death, whether bodies are violated, displayed, or buried, determines whether they are seen as human (Butler 2004). Baartman’s burial therefore restored her to the realm of the human. This was done through technologies of the sacred; rituals that dress and cover, pray over and bury the body. Her burial also offered the possibility of completeness after a century and a half of interruption represented by her unburied state. Thirdly, her interment signaled the end of the invasive visibility to which Baartman was subjected during her lifetime and for 159 years after her death. I propose that this withdrawal from public and scientific access meant that she became once again a

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subject with an interior that is inviolable and private. The use of the term private may seem surprising here, but I have in mind a privacy occluded by notions of the solipsistic liberal humanist subject. Instead, I envision a different concept of privacy, one that is both collective and historically formed. For this, I draw Wicomb’s insight that Baartman’s fate symbolized a collective “shame of having had our bodies stared at” during slavery and colonization, a shame that transmuted the colonizer’s visual and sexual access to Black women’s bodies into an accusation of deviance and sexual collusion with the colonizer (Wicomb 1998, 92). If during her life and for 159 years afterward, Baartman’s fate symbolized this enforced and shameful availability, then burial returned her to the inviolable and the private. We can analyze further the committee’s decision by asking what was at stake in its refusal. We are left with two perspectives: it matters whose body was buried, or it matters that the remains were given an honorable burial, even if they belonged to someone other than Baartman. In effect, one could read the committee’s decision to mean that Baartman’s funeral also symbolized restitution for those for whom we have no records, the unnamed thousands of human beings on whose bodies rested a conception of the universe. In a crucial way, therefore, through the process of negotiation, return and burial, the remains returned by the French, consisting of her skeleton, brain and genitals, were accepted, or rather, asserted, as constituting Baartman’s body and her person in its entirety, as can be seen in the title “the return of Sara Baartman.” To those in the committee whose view had prevailed, the withdrawal of Baartman’s body from scientific access was a withdrawal from a racist and invasive gaze at a vulnerable Black body, which became once again a subject with an interior that is neither fully knowable nor violable in order to seek that knowledge. After her subjection to an invasive visibility during her lifetime and for 159 years after her death, it is this shift that I suggest can be seen as a move into the private.

Rethinking the private What is privacy? In Sources of the Self, the philosopher Charles Taylor provided a definition of the private self as a being “with

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inner depths” (1989, x), and that our sense of individual subjectivity is marked by “the senses of inwardness, freedom, individuality and being embedded in nature” (1989, ix). In contrast to the universalizing reach of Taylor’s view, and drawing from the analysis above, I theorize an “African privacy” after Baartman, proposing a set of subjectivities formed in the context of colonialism and its aftermath. In an essay in the collection Refiguring the Archive (2002), the literary scholar Bheki Peterson asserted that the absence of fuller, more nuanced views about Black lives in official South African archives was the effect of deliberate policies of exclusion. South African archives were shaped not only by what they contained but what had been “ignored or criminalized . . . banned and destroyed” (2002, 31). Such archives had been configured to exclude the evidence and complexity of Black lives, “as though [people] do not exist” (2002, 32). As a result, Peterson proposes that we look for hidden archives “stored in the stubborn memories of people, in suitcases and plastic bags under beds, in wardrobes and in ceilings” (2002, 31). There is a different reason for the paucity of details about the lives of the less powerful in the archive. This was due to an intellectual and political project on the part of the powerless to evade the archive and its strategies of surveillance, to elude the threat of capture and classification that official archives represent. Dominated people have long crafted a way to exist and keep their histories outside of conventional archives, in an analogy to the “memories,” “plastic bags” and “ceilings” alluded to by Peterson. South Africa’s slave-holding history holds examples of both the official erasure of the details of slave lives and efforts by enslaved people to evade surveillance. The slave-holding society of Dutch and British colonies generated foundational discourses of the body, of race and sexuality in South Africa. The Dutch East India Company, which colonized South Africa in 1652, brought people from East Africa, India and South East Asia to the Cape as slaves, and enslaved people eventually formed the majority of the population. This fact and the high proportion of male slaves to colonists meant that the exercise of discipline over slaves was violent and often “spectacular,” or intentionally visible. Female slaves were subjected to enforced prostitution, and the Slave Lodge, where the Dutch East

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India Company housed its slaves (and which is now a museum that memorializes slavery), was also the main brothel of the city. Despite this, slavery in South Africa has been portrayed through a discourse of the picturesque that has erased its sexual and racial violence (see Baderoon 2004). There was an intense anxiety in settler society at the Cape about insurrection, so the visibility and transparency of slave bodies and minds was compulsively pursued. Because of anxiety about their unknowable minds and often indeterminate bodies (due to enforced prostitution of enslaved women, the colony was marked by a high degree of racial heterogeneity) legal codes subjected enslaved people to continual surveillance, for instance, regulating what they could wear, requiring them always to carry a lantern at night, and forbidding their congregation. Slave subjectivities were intended to be rendered transparent by such regulations, but the knowledge held by slaves was both sought after and feared. For instance, there was the mythology about slave-women in the kitchen who could “gool” (bewitch) or poison their owners, or how submissive enslaved men were seen as wily and duplicitous. Many of the slaves at the Cape were Muslim and there was a high rate of conversion among slaves and indigenous people because Islam offered what the historian Nigel Worden calls “a degree of independent slave culture” separate from that of slave-owners (1984, 4). Islam was tacitly tolerated by the Dutch at the Cape, but under the Statutes of India, its public practice was punishable by death. In this context, to talk about resistant subjectivities among enslaved people suggests that they were reacting to and therefore logically subordinated to dominant society. Instead, to talk about “privacies,” suggests a parallel and hidden culture constituted of ritualized, internally varied and changing practices hidden from dominant society, interior to the societies created by enslaved people and interior to their consciousness. Importantly, the subjectivities of enslaved people are not easily or transparently available in the archives and the desire to render them visible runs the danger of echoing the techniques of surveillance that made them invisible, seen in the compulsions to probe “the secrets possessed by the Hottentot Venus” (Gilman 2010, 27). Therefore it is necessary to read signs of such subjectivities in “oblique” ways rather than simply to try to render them legible. For me, the oblique meanings inside archives and the project to evade surveillance extend what I mean by the private. I intend

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the word to connote the intimate, personal, closed, hidden, coded, secret, veiled, unknown, the apparently meaningless, the invisible, the ordinary, the in-between, the silent, the autobiographical, the unrepresentative, the unimportant, the individual, the singular, what is removed, marginal, informal, obscure, underside, obverse, overlooked, unofficial, subversive, interstitial, vulnerable, transitory, undocumented, separated, varying, unpredictable, and unreliable in dominant views of history. Using Baartman, I draw on a notion of a privacy that unsettles established narratives, but avoids the risk of “privatizing” and then abstracting human beings from history, or what Sarah Nuttall calls the “intensification of private life as a counterpoint to public life” (2004, 30). I locate my notion of the private in the context of a history of surveillance and enforced visibility that mark ways of knowing in South Africa. There are precedents for thinking about the way Africans have negotiated technologies of domination and surveillance through a careful navigation of the private and the public, and the individual and the collective. An example can be found in a study by Kerry Bylstrom of a “public private sphere” in post-apartheid South Africa and post-dictatorship Argentina in which those who have lost relatives to political violence have been given the public space to grieve their personal losses in ways that “have been emplotted and mobilized to construct democratic publics” (Bylstrom 2010, 139). Less visible examples are also helpful for examining new ideas about private lives on the African continent. Recent scholarship about personal African archives constituted by letter writing, diaries, obituaries, and other forms of “tin-trunk” literacies (Barber 2006) have expanded how we can think about private lives on the continent. The literary scholar Karin Barber writes about a set of African “hidden histories” through what she calls “ ‘tin-trunk texts’: letters, diaries, obituaries, pamphlets, and other artifacts often stored in boxes hidden under their beds” (2006, ix). Barber argues that these “obscure but important uses of literacy, often overlooked in favor of the more visible and public writings, of the political and educational elites” represent an important source of insight into ordinary lives (2006, ix). Importantly for my theory of the private, Barber calls these practices “a privacy that borders on secrecy” (2006, 9). What we see at work in such “privacy” is a complex negotiation with language, individuality, authority, and power that

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occurs through these texts. Barber points out that a wonderfully subtle process is functioning here, one that expands how we think of autobiography and the making of the self. Through such writings, Africans were trying to negotiate huge disparities of power during the colonial period, but: they were also assembling and consolidating selves . . . in many cases not constituted . . . as autonomous agents founded upon an individual interiority and subjectivity. Often instead, what we find is a form of exteriorization and projection, or a text that goes behind the scenes rather than into the interior of personhood. (Barber 2006, 9)

All of these processes reframe what we think of as the archive, the self and the individual. In fact, these “tin-trunk texts” show us the thin and porous line between the individual and the collective, and the “hoarding” and collection of letters and other precious texts constitute “a kind of local, do-it-yourself archiving” (Barber 2006, 9). One fascinating area is the line between the authentically constituted self, separate from other selves and separate from the collective. Barber suggests that by “adopt[ing] the established textual genres of diary and letter [Africans in the colonies] refashioned them to express new forms of social being” (2006, 12). In complex ways, such social beings were simultaneously individual and social, private and public. An example can be found in collective letters. Barber suggests that these literary practices “evoke forms of personal publicity and collective privacy . . . for which we still need to develop a vocabulary” (12). Barber notes that the elite texts constitute a far larger and more visible corpus, more at ease in colonial languages and infinitely better represented numerically and in terms of representativity. In contrast, “tin-trunk texts” are a far more complicated, liminal and occasional genre. To what extent can we theorize more broadly about African lives on the basis of such texts, Barber asks, “in what sense do the lonely, isolated, one-off inventions of tin-trunk literates constitute a history?” (2006, 20). Other studies in the same collection support Barber’s subtle hopes for the tin-trunk genre. Keith Breckenridge writes about another genre that crosses the apparent divide between the individual and the collective and the private and public in the form of love letters written by professional scribes and shaped by conventions established in working class mineworkers’ compound

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communities. These letters, Breckenridge contends, are examples of the “multiply-authored nature of working- class private lives” (2000, 29). As with Barber, Breckenridge finds that in these letters working class African men formed a private sphere that was “simultaneously personal and collaborative” (2000, 30). The epistolary form here does not generate the individual subjectivity that is familiar from the formation of the European bourgeois self, but marks a private life that negotiates the public in the form of shared authorship of letters shaped by illiteracy, distance and class. The above practices of “tin-trunk” literacies by Africans during the colonial and postcolonial periods suggest complex views of African subjectivities that go beyond resistance, complicity or passivity. These studies generate new ways to think about the dividing line of the private and public, the authentic and the crafted, truth and fiction, and self and persona in Africa. Archives that record these “tin-trunk” literacies, as well as the long history of autobiographies in South Africa that have unsettled and expanded the relation of private lives to larger national narratives, such as Native Nostalgia (2009) by Jacob Dlamini, means that the post-colony may be the site of particularly sophisticated engagements with the genres of biography and autobiography. “I see Sara Baartman as a lover because I refuse to talk about pain . . . . I love Sara.” —Zanele Muholi, 2010

I end this essay by discussing an image of Sara Baartman seen not through the themes of resistance and reclamation, and not as a redemptive or redeemed figure but as a beloved one. This possibility was envisioned in a presentation by Zanele Muholi, an internationally renowned lesbian activist and photographer from South Africa, at “The Meanings of Sara Baartman” colloquium held at Pennsylvania State University on March 1, 2010. Muholi’s work since Visual Sexuality (2004) has been crucial in crafting new ways of seeing lesbian and gay life in South Africa, both individually and collectively and through intersecting and layered conceptions of identity. Sexuality is one of the main themes through which a nationalist mythology formulates its codes of inclusion, authenticity, and belonging. The notion of homosexuality as “unAfrican” gives a

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deadly license of violence against lesbians and gays. It also poses a complex challenge to ensure that activist responses are not solely reactive, so that this theme does not unwittingly continue to frame the ways lesbian and gay lives become visible in South Africa. This insight is central to Muholi’s work. She sees her photographs firstly as an activist project that engages the formula of exclusion and denigration through which dominant images of lesbian, gay and transgendered lives are produced in South Africa. She is insistent on conveying a wholeness to such lives, including, for instance, evidence of official neglect that enables systematic sexual violence against Black lesbians to continue and, as importantly, produces compelling portraits of ordinary life, intimacy and sexual pleasure. Because of this, Muholi’s photographs of Black lesbian, gay and transgender communities in South Africa have also made it possible to re-imagine ways of seeing the Black body more broadly. Desiree Lewis locates Muholi’s images of lesbian bodies within a broader history of visual representation, “Historically, black women’s bodies have often been the subject of voyeuristic consumption, the consumption not only of black women’s sexuality, but also of black women’s trauma and pain” (2005, 15). How one looks is therefore crucial. Muholi shows that a repeated focus on the violation and trauma suffered by lesbian and gay people becomes part of a dangerous formula that entraps people in the community in narratives of violence, rendering them vulnerable to further violation, and distancing those who see such images from the possibility of empathy and exchange. Therefore her work consciously enlarges the visual language through which lesbian and gay lives become visible. At the level of content, Muholi interrupts the insistence on untrammeled access to Black female bodies, particularly Black lesbian bodies, predicated on repeated themes of violation, estrangement, and trauma. Beyond the radically expansive thematic content of her images, Muholi also creates new a form of documentary photography, what Desiree Lewis calls a “documentary dialect” that “create[s] cognitive space for the subjectivity of the woman in her photograph” (2005, 15). This is suggested primarily by the relationship she creates with the people she photographs. This relation is as much a theme of the photographs as the subtle modes through which Muholi approaches the people she photographs-she declines

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to call them her subjects, insisting instead that she and they form a community, are equals, and co- creators of the photographs. This is important not only for its egalitarian ethos, but because histories of sexual violation manifest themselves in interior psychological spaces, as Hine showed in the case of United States slavery and Wicomb illustrated in her analysis of Baartman’s contemporary meanings in South Africa. For Muholi to see her work as mutually constituted by those she photographs is therefore to create a space in which Black lesbians and gays in South Africa imagine themselves in a hitherto uncharted way. Below, I explore this sense of the photographic relationship by reading a specific photograph. Muholi’s photos also manifest a strong aesthetic of pleasure. They are characterized by the play of natural light and shadow, and the texture of skin and fabric. In her work, she carefully navigates rules of access to intimately domestic and private spaces in which she can convey an unafraid sensuality, yet there is also room for opacity and paradox in her images. These simultaneously documentary and aesthetic modes convey “a process of imagining, circling, uncovering and implying . . . an unwaveringly nuanced representation of Black lesbian identities that gestures to the impossibility of effective containment” (Gqola 2005, 85). In their varied approaches, Muholi’s photographs constitute a “self-archiving” of lesbian and gay life in South Africa that contests dominant patterns of intrusive and hostile visual logic. Muholi memorably applied this approach to her view of Sara Baartman. In her presentation at “The “Meanings of Sara Baartman” colloquium, Muholi proposed a new way to look at the woman who has been too much seen—through a gaze that does not allude to the history of violation that generally characterizes images of Baartman, even if only to contest it, but which sees her instead as a lover, with desire, admiration for her beauty and a promise of what the poet Robin Becker calls “perfect affection. “I want to see Sara as my lover,” Muholi said during her presentation, pointing to the photograph “Nomshado, Queensgate, Parktown, 2007” part of her Being (2007) series, as exemplifying how she saw a beloved person. How does the photograph teach us to look at Baartman the way Muholi does? As Muholi describes in her statement about the series, Being testifies to “existence” and its complexities (2007). The photograph

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Nomshado, Queensgate, Parktown 2007 Permission granted by Zanele Muholi Courtesy of Michael Stevenson, Cape Town

“Nomshado” conveys the scale and also the multiplicity of this assertion. Simply to exist and to name oneself as lesbian and African is already a claim of vertiginous importance, but beyond this is the task to envision new possibilities, the realm not only of politics but of art. The dominant theme of the photograph is the interplay between what is revealed and what is hidden. All the photographs in the series are named for the women whom they portray and the place and year when they were photographed. Muholi echoes the familiarity and affection of using a lover’s first name by calling Baartman “Sara.” Despite the identifying details in its name, as a portrait, “Nomshado” one observes a certain discretion about the

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woman in the photograph. In it, we are invited to look at her from slightly behind and to the left. She is naked, sitting on a white mattress set close to the floor and covered by a thin, almost transparent white sheet, layered and folded beneath her. Her body is full and her dark skin gleams in the light that comes from the same direction as the camera. Though naked, she does not convey a sense of vulnerability or exposure. Instead, she is tilting her head slightly toward her raised left shoulder and holds a loc of her hair between the fingers of her left hand. These gestures carry a meditative and unwatchful tone. The photograph has been taken at eye level, as though there is an equitable relationship between the woman and the photographer. This is echoed in the comfort the woman seems to feel in the presence of the camera, and the freedom she expresses in her contemplative state. Her back is to us. In front of her is a net curtain, its interlocking pattern of small squares obscuring the room behind it though the outlines of what may be a more public part of a house are faintly visible. The curtain recalls the soft and layered sheet, thin enough to see through, on which the woman sits. The curtain and white cloth proclaim a line of access and discretion, what we are invited to see and what we cannot. What else can we know about this woman? This is small interior scene-the photograph contains only the woman on the mattress and the white curtain in front of her, yet the space inside the photograph does not limit her. The curtain, wall, mattress, cloth and floor are close but not claustrophobic. Light flows from the outside over her skin, covering her, touching her, folding along the lines of her body. On her left side, she and the light become each other, melding where her skin glows. In a pale gleam on dark skin, the light disappears into her and her skin has a translucent sheen. She is sitting on the soft folds of white sheet that hangs over its edges onto the floor. The light flows over the soft folds of her skin. The photographer and, through her, we are standing close by. The woman trusts the photographer. She composes her body to be seen by the photographer. Together they create what we see. The setting may be a bedroom. Certainly, it is a domestic space, yet despite the fact of the camera, the temper of the photograph is not exposing. Instead, the photograph shows a woman in a place where she is exquisitely at ease. It reminds us that this is how a woman can inhabit her body and her home. The translucent white

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curtains hide the other parts of the house. We cannot see beyond it. Inside these translucent boundaries, we are allowed into private, unprotected spaces. This is an image of intimacy not only in the presence of the woman’s nakedness but because we are also allowed close to her when she is unwatchful and undefended. Everything in the photograph is modulated. There is a before to this image and an after. We have entered this picture at a particular moment. The more we look at the image, the more detailed and layered our understanding of the woman’s relationship with her self and between the woman and the photographer becomes. The posture of the woman’s body is angled away from the camera but not against it. We see only the side of her face and the angle of her eyelashes indicates that she is looking down. The left side of her body is visible from head to toe, yet there is a great discretion in what we see of her. Her posture does not suggest that she is revealing herself to the camera but in her nakedness she is at home; a space in which the photographer is also present. The white lace curtain divides the private space from another area and yet also points to the parts that are hidden and not for us to see. The woman in the photograph may be looking just at the dividing line where the curtain meets the floor. She may be thinking about precisely this. She appears to be comfortable with what she has allowed the camera to see and not to see. She has chosen where this line falls. The photograph creates a sense of at-home-ness about her in this space. The curtain in the photograph speaks back to a history of seeing. The photograph is against simple transparency, against pulling down the curtain. Instead, it is intrigued by what the woman is thinking. It asks us to wait to find out what she will share with us. This photograph is about boundaries, where they lie and who chooses them. We follow the angle of the woman’s head, the orientation of her body; see who she will allow near. Our eyes track the play of light on the curtain in front of the woman, the pale wall, the space around the photograph, the translucent white cloth beneath her, and the light that makes her skin gleam. We see again what is hidden and shadowed behind the curtain-all of these are about borders and nearness and distance. The woman’s skin looks smooth and it seems to invite both touch and thought. Her fingers stroke her hair like the light touches her skin. This is an intimate photograph but it also signals to us

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the rules of a necessary discretion. The photograph tells us how to be close. This photograph allows one to be near but not too near. The photograph seems to be about who can be inside, and the rules for being invited there. In the photograph the woman holds the posture of the lover who retains her selfhood, not the one fully occupied by the presence of the beloved and therefore who is herself empty and invisible. The photograph is also about the past and how it is evident in the body. This woman’s image has been invoked in the name of Sara Baartman, a woman who was looked at too much. The photograph teaches us how to look at her differently. The curtain in front of her is a border to mark the line where the inside ends, and also an acknowledgement of what lies beyond. The light on her skin suggests that the outside can also be felt inside, softly and beautifully. The image is a paradoxical portrait of the woman. It does not look directly at her face and yet it deeply reveals her character and even what we might call the atmosphere, or the relationship, between her and the photographer. She does not hide from the photographer and yet not everything is shown. The photograph portrays her through her expressive back and through the presence she conveys to the camera. Perhaps we can say it is a portrait of two people: the woman and the photographer. In this portrait, which is usually an image that explores one individual’s inner self, the photograph allows us to puzzle out something we do not know, how two people can create a mutual presence that is visible in one body. What has Muholi taught us by asking us to look at Sara Baartman as a lover? For one, the possibility of unbounded affection, and also the necessity of boundaries. The photographs show us what it is like to be invited inside, and also how to recognize a line of discretion. Perhaps most important of all, it shows us how to accept that there are places where we cannot look. In this essay I have proposed that this is a crucial question that emerges from South African feminist writing and art on Baartman. What we will do in order to pursue the imperative to know? I have shown that the life of this most visible of icons offers us a theory of the private as a way to understand the complexity of African subjectivities. The private realm, the exemplary text of love with which this essay ends, invites us to learn the languages through which self-archives convey the complexity of African lives.

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Chapter Five Placing and Replacing “The Venus Hottentot”: An Archeology of Pornography, Race, and Power Sheila Smith McKoy

In 2009, The New York Times included Sarah Baartman on its list of “Top Ten Plundered Artifacts.”1 The list was created as a side bar to the well-publicized conflict between the government of Egypt and the Louvre concerning the return of fragments of ancient Egyptian frescos. The thrust of the article was twofold: to examine the value of “plundered art and antiquities” and the conflicts their contested ownership created. Baartman appears as number four on the list, sandwiched between the Elgin Marbles and Ramses’s mummy, the only other “item” on the list of the plundered artifacts that is a human body. Unlike Baartman, whose body and genitalia were exhibited for over a century before her burial, Ramses’s body is immortalized and complete; he was reverenced and buried appropriately before his body became a captive. In short, her body was dehumanized while his was deified. In the expanded story about Baartman, The Times adds that “The Hottentot Venus was not a piece of art at all. Instead, it—rather, she—was a person named Sarah Baartman.”2 The article is an interesting commentary on the value of Baartman’s body and her place as an object, even contemporaneously. Nearly 200 years after her death in 1815, Baartman’s body is easily defined as an object before she is revealed to be a “person.” As an African American female scholar of South African and African American trans-cultural studies whose body has been placed in a particular sexual box because of these kinds of longstanding racial and physiological mythologies, I find it difficult not to internalize Baartman’s odyssey from free woman to colonized “coloured” slave to sexual curiosity. My response to her

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victimization is as fresh and familiar as my first trip to South Africa in 2002 when I was “mistaken” for a colored woman in the immigration line. And for me, that mis-identification came with a history that included being marked as sexually available. It is also clearly echoed in the words of one of my male students upon his first encounter with the fabled “Hottentot” hips, with their lush concentration and protrusion of body fat, on the streets of Cape Town: “Professor,” he said, “I can kind of understand why the British couldn’t stop looking at ‘that lady’.” Those hips that had, for centuries, inspired poetry, prose, scientific, and pseudoscientific inquiry represented more than an accumulation of body fat. In the Western mind, these hips marked the boundary between self and racialized “other”; they also demanded correction. Identified by Western science as the deformity “steatopygia,” these hips were markers of race that simultaneously legitimized theories that scientifically “proved” the supremacy of white manhood and its concomitant sexual dominance. I include these examples because my own encounters with sex, race, and anatomy indicate that there are similarities between the cultural mores that placed Baartman into the position of sexual artifact and those that defined her in terms of sexual oppression and gender inequality when she was repatriated and buried in South Africa in 2002. Baartman’s own, particular history, with its nuanced and secret knowledge of what defined her as a KhoiSan woman, was obscured when she was infamously immortalized by Europe as something alien, inhumane, but as also uniquely sexually positioned. Anyone familiar with the cartoons and prints that advertised Baartman’s exhibitions should recognize that these images were designed to titillate both male and female voyeurs. To the contemporary eye, these images are as arresting as they are uncomfortable because we cannot immediately access their meaning. What history is obscured by these images? What is the dialogue that we, as contemporary viewers and consumers of these images, are missing regarding Baartman’s sexual captivity in Europe? What made it possible for the sexual proscriptions of the era to be ignored while men and women paid extra money to be allowed to touch Baartman’s buttocks in public?3 And how can we “read” these depictions as “real” when the image of Baartman is so skewed that she appears taller than her audience when she was only four and a half feet tall?4 The focus of my discussion here is to uncover the

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mechanisms that made Baartman’s body so sexually caricatured and so pornographically appealing to both nineteenth- century European sensibilities and twenty-first-century consumers of her image, nearly 200 years after her death. Even two centuries removed, the uncomfortable history of “The Venus Hottentot” is one that can only be contained within the margins of quotations marks. She was and is so clearly a colonized subject, one so completely contained within an entire list of categories created by colonization—racial, sexual, scientific, gendered, and national—that history has yet to uncover her real name. And, although I will refer to her throughout this chapter as Sarah Baartman, I must emphasize the fact that, though less objectionable than “The Venus Hottentot,” the name that we have for her is a misnomer. Born in the Gamtoos River basin around 1770—although the paucity of birth records for people of color in the era make it difficult to determine her exact birth year— Baartman’s time in South Africa was dominated by British and Dutch settlers who were battling for control of the Southern Cape, its mineral resources, and the colonized peoples upon whom this battle was waged. Because of the racial, political, and national upheaval that defined life in the Southern Cape of the late eighteenth century, Baartman can only be accessed through the lens of her various colonized identities. As “Sartje,” “Saartjee,” “Sarah,” or “Sara” Baartman, she is forever detached from her indigenous KhoiSan name and cultural moorings. Instead, she is called out of her name in ways that emphasize her enslavement, bondage, and servitude. Baartman scholars cannot ignore the dual and competing histories of Baartman’s story because her body is displayed in both the nineteenth century as a sexual oddity and in the contemporary era as a museum artifact. In the nineteenth century, Europeans of both genders were enthralled by the nearly naked bodies of enslaved blacks. And their bodies were desired precisely because they fed into the English erotic culture of flagellation and sexual pleasure. As Collette Colligan suggests, this genre of erotica dominated early nineteenth- century Britain.5 Baartman certainly provided entertainment that fulfilled this demand. However, Baartman is not without kinswomen in this regard. Frederick Douglass, who obtained both sexual freedom and manumission in England, recounts the connection between sexual desire and eroticized

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violence in his description of his Aunt Hester’s flagellation in The Narrative of Frederick Douglass.6 Baartman’s closest counterpart, Mary Prince, the Antiguan woman whose enslavement in “free” England was transcribed in 1828 and published as The History of Mary Prince was brought to London as a slave just a decade after Baartman arrived in London; she was sexually coerced by her “master” who enjoyed requiring her to bathe him. This coercion is absent from the legal proceedings for both women. Instead, court records suggest that Baartman came to London of her own free will to exhibit herself for profit. Likewise, documents created by Prince’s enslaver, John Wood, indicate that she was brought from Antigua “at her own request and entreaty.”7 Like contemporary pimps, the men who profited from Baartman’s and Prince’s bodies claimed that these women were willingly engaged in their own enslavement. It is clear that Baartman was not the only sexually objectified black woman in Europe in the early nineteenth century, yet she could not escape a history of pornography, power, and race after her death. Baartman’s body was not “naturally predisposed” to be a sexual curiosity. She only became so because she was used to support the scientific, political, and racial hierarchies that defined nineteenthcentury England. When Georges Cuvier, the French anatomist who dissected her body because of its “unique” scientific significance, he did so to prove his theory that species were “fixed” and “divinely” created. His beliefs were supported by European scientists and philosophers who had determined that white Europeans represented the perfect species, and that they were distinct from those of other, inferior racial groups. Carolus Linnaeus, the “father” of genus categorization—the practice of differentiating species by categories—in biology, who also believed that racial hierarchies were divinely created and unchangeable, sent two of his students to study the “Hottentots.” Without any acknowledgment that the term “Hottentot” was as degrading as it was grounded in Western racism, they subsequently “scientifically” proved that “Hottentots” were on the bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder.8 It is not surprising, then, that Cuvier’s scientific inquiry into Baartman’s genitalia “proved” her inferiority; that decision had been made long before her body was used to cement what had already been predetermined in a science based on European “normalcy” and racial superiority.

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No matter how we might read this racialized science, its timing is noteworthy. Its appearance coincides with the expansion of the British Empire in South Africa. In 1795, a decade before Baartman’s first appearance in London, the British took the Cape Colony from the Dutch; it was returned to the Dutch in 1803. However, in 1806, just four years before she was brought to England, the English finally defeated the Dutch in the region and officially colonized the Cape of Good Hope. As with any transition from one government to another, the British government enforced its power most explicitly on people who had the least legal and political rights. And in South Africa, the KhoiSan and the Dutch both had an abundance of legal rights that only served to make them subject to British colonial rule. The Dutch were socially displaced and dispatched to the hinterlands. The KhoiSan had the right to live and work in the Cape, primarily because they provided the domestic labor needed to build the colony. They had few property rights, and extremely limited political rights, a situation that made the KhoiSan women particularly subject to sexual slavery and victimization. There is a clear connection between the social and political organization in the Cape Colony and Baartman’s London exhibitions. When Baartman first appears on stage at 225 Piccadilly, she is nearly naked and “being ordered by her keeper,” Hendrick Cezar. Her “act” provided entertainment that simultaneously supported the racial and sexual realities that characterized the British ascendency in South Africa. However, Baartman cannot be clearly defined by her KhoiSan identity either because it, too, is complicated. Generations of the KhoiSan had been murdered and displaced when Dutch South Africans fled to the hinterlands. Adults were hunted and killed while the children were taken into captivity as servants. KhoiSan, with their pastoral lifestyles and nomadic tendencies, were targeted as objects of sexual desire and as proof of the “superiority” of Europeans. As I note in When Whites Riot, there were two groups classified as “coloured” in the Cape Colony. The first were the KhoiSan; the second were “coloureds” who appeared in South Africa approximately nine months after the first encounter with Europeans (2001, 28). Because the first white settlers in the region were all male, intermarriage between KhoiSan women and Dutch settlers was initially legal in the Cape. And, long after these unions were outlawed, KhoiSan women were frequently

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described for a European audience in terms of their sexual desirability. Travelogues like François le Valliant’s Voyage de F. Le Vaillant dans L’Interieur de L’Afrique (1796) depict “Hottentot” females as beautiful, graceful women who allowed their white lovers unlimited sexual access (Crais and Sculley 2009, 14). By the time Baartman was taken to England and accused of “exhibiting herself” as a ethnological oddity, her people—variously called the KhoiSan, the San, the Nama, and the Griqua—had been intermixing with the Dutch and British settlers of South Africa for almost 200 years. Many of the KhoiSan not only had Dutch names, but they also had begun to form their own “Baster” villages, claiming their mixed racial heritage even as they rejected the bastard status from which the name “Baster” is derived. Several Baster communities fled South African altogether, settling in neighboring Namibia to escape the oppression they faced in South Africa. Those who remained in South Africa and escaped the genocide ongoing in the South African hinterland, like our Sarah, were often displaced from their cultural origins. Baartman’s hips, her “Hottentot apron,” her Dutch name, and her racially ambiguous handler highlighted the British victory over both the Dutch and “Hottentot” bodies it had conquered in South Africa. She had the perfect body to represent this cultural mastery. When Baartman arrived in France—thanks to press coverage she received during her time in London—she was already a wellknown “exhibition.” She had lost even the comfort of bearing the colonized name of “Sarah Baartman” (Crais and Sculley 2009, 116). She was “The Hottentot Venus,” completely without the protection of even an assumed, inferior humanity. Like London in 1810, Paris was undergoing significant political upheavals. France was recovering from the reign of Napoleon, who was exiled to Elba the same year that Baartman arrived in Paris. She entered the country as an oddity, but she did so in a country accustomed to racialized images of black and other women of color. Just prior to Baartman’s arrival in Paris, Josephine Bonaparte—Napoleon’s wife from 1796 to 1809—captured the attention of the French public because of her identity as a sexual paramour and an exotic, racially ambiguous Martiniquian. Clearly, the French fetish for the erotic, exotic woman of color, which set the stage for France’s embrace of Josephine Baker in the 1920s, had already been established with the fetishes that arose from French colonization in the

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Caribbean and in Africa. This fetish opened a space that Baker occupied by choice; however, it was space that afforded Baartman no means of escape. Crais and Scully note that just over 1300 people were legally recognized as being mulatto or black in France in the early nineteenth century (2009, 121). However, despite the lack of historical records attesting to their presence in nineteenth-century France, as the existence of Alexandre Dumas, his lettered offspring, and people of African descent who “escaped” race in France suggest, people of African descent were there. While the male members of the Dumas family lived openly in their racial otherness in France, women—as Sarah Baartman reminds us—were not afforded the same freedoms. When Baartman arrived in Paris, both celebrated and denigrated as “La Venus Hottentote,” she performed at the Palais Royal, which was dominated by exhibitions of oddities and brothels. In Paris alone, 180 brothels, whimsically called “maisons de tolerance,” were licensed to operate in 1810, and many of them were located in the Palais Royal. When Baartman arrived in Paris, as Sander Gilman reminds us, the groundwork linking the Hottentot female and the prostitute had already been laid (1985, 206). And, though Gilman’s assertions can be seen as intensely problematic, his focus on the displacement of white sexuality and sex onto bodies of color is quite useful in reading Baartman’s experiences in France. As bell hooks notes, this kind of exploitation grows out of the pornographic mutilation of the female other into constituent, sexualized parts (1997, 115). What Baartman finds in Paris is a social landscape in which her space is sexualized; her geography is consigned to hypersexualized hips and the fabled “Hottentot apron,” and neither would belong to her as the display of her body, brain, and disembodied vagina would later prove. Clearly, the European fascination with her body grew out of sexual fetishes that were excited by her buttocks, her breasts, and her labia—the constituent parts of her anatomy that, along with her taxidermied body, were displayed in Paris’ Musée de l’Homme for over 160 years. It was the public commodification of her body—the sexually suggestive exhibitions that defined her life in Europe and the race-based pseudo-science that defined her death—that has sustained the intellectual and political interest in “Baartman’s” life. The incomplete history of her life and the focus on her anatomy represent a wider colonial history in

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which Africans and other peoples of color were commodities as well as objects of sexual titillation and domination. The image of the “Venus Hottentot’s” womanhood is, in essence, institutionalized by twin shadows of European colonization and white African nationalism. And, although the South African government was finally able to repatriate Baartman’s remains, it has proven to be difficult to separate “Baartman” from the images that defined her during her lifetime. The discussion that I now undertake is difficult because Baartman’s repatriation—certainly something to be celebrated— also demonstrates that upon her return her “home” to South Africa, the images of her remains, of her gutted genitalia, and the cast of her preserved body, are also vexed by a contemporaneous, racebased pornography. The pattern of political upheaval and its racial othering that dominated Britain, France, and South Africa during Baartman’s lifetime also describe the racial and political palette of postapartheid South Africa when Baartman was repatriated in 2002. As I turn to the narrative of Baartman’s repatriation, recall that South Africa in 2002—like the Britain that she encountered in 1810—was in the process of reconstructing its own hierarchies of race and sexuality. When Nelson Mandela, the first president of the “non-racial” South Africa, made the initial diplomatic request for her repatriation, the French government refused to return her body because of its vast holdings of human artifacts from around the colonized world. In fact, Mandela had completed his term in office before the French government passed the appropriate legislation that freed Baartman from her captivity in Europe. Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, was the one responsible for facilitating her return. Although postapartheid South Africa is politically defined by a constitution based on “non-racialism” and political and social power, it now resides with the country’s black majority. Colored South African identity had been located in the “middle” of the country’s long history of black disempowerment and white privilege. Even for the millions of South Africans who identified as colored who supported this new ascendency, the social arena was vastly changed by this new South Africa. With the national focus on reclaiming Baartman’s personhood and the rituals of purification that accompanied her interment on National Women’s Day on August 9, 2002, she was also reclaimed as an ancestral mother, one

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whose experience was linked to the national body of the country; this placement is emphasized in Mbeki’s assertion that “a particle of each one of us will stay with the remains of Sarah Bartmann.”9 However, the repatriation of Sarah Baartman could not have escaped being impacted by the visual representations of black and colored South African women who were overrepresented in both Internet pornography and among the ranks of sex workers. Simultaneously, rumors that having sex with a virgin could cure HIV/AIDS led to stark increases in the rape rates in the country. I must ask, then, if it is possible that the process of repatriation and relocation could avoid being characterized by the same pornographic impulses that had defined Baartman’s life among the Europeans? After all, is it possible that South Africa—postapartheid or not—recognized Baartman as a person, rather than the sexual other she represented during her life? The answer to these questions can be found in the media coverage surrounding her repatriation, in the place that women of color occupied in South Africa in 2002, and in the politics of sexual power that defined the country even as it welcomed Baartman home. While in France, Baartman was acquainted with the ways in which her race and her position as an African woman “of color” was located in the taboos of sexual desire. Similarly, when her body was brought “home” to South Africa, the country had been so inundated by Internet pornography that a 2001 psychological case study suggested that the preoccupation might rightly be diagnosed as a new pathology of hypersexual disorder (Stein et al., 2001, 1593) The most comprehensive study of sexual vice in South Africa, Ted Leggett’s Rainbow Vice: The Drugs and Sex Industries in the New South Africa, suggests that these sexual preoccupations were focused on the very bodies that Baartman’s represented. Leggett’s statistics certainly support his thesis that their customers prefer a “taste of Africa” (2002, 116); he notes, “Ethnically, street sex workers in inner Durban are about half black and about 15% (each) white, Indian and coloured. Durban is atypically diverse in this regard; surveys done in Cape Town have found a much higher percentage of coloured sex workers, while those done in inner Johannesburg are more black” (Leggett 2002, 98). These distinct, but related, examples of how Baartman’s contemporary counterparts became the register upon which the anxieties about race, sex and HIV/AIDS were measured.

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This anxiety is neither ahistoric nor antithetical to Baartman’s sexualized history. Her repatriated body provides a commentary on the new South Africa. It is true that the South Africa in which she is buried is a racial inverse of the one in which she was imprisoned in the pornographies of white, English sexual oppression, and desire. However, the script written onto the bodies of black and coloured women, the racial and gendered prototypes of white patriarchal rape, has not proven to be rewritable. This prototype is clearly molded by the kind of sexual violence Baartman sustained in her lifetime. If, as Helen Moffett suggests that the legacy of apartheid is best characterized by the violence employed against women in both intimate and domestic spaces, then the bodies of women of color like Baartman’s remain most at risk (2006, 12). Although South Africa’s transition to a nonracialized democracy was not marked by widespread ongoing racial violence, it has certainly been marked by a social predilection for the rape of women, in a society where women, and particularly women of color, are coerced into a sexual economy built upon their bodies (Abrahams 2004, 4). Baartman’s remains did not, in fact, could not, elide this history. Though one might trust that the rituals performed at her funeral produced spiritual wholeness, her physical body is forever historicized into its constituent parts. This dis-integration is the pornographic legacy that exists alongside the celebratory dynamics of her repatriation. Even her gravesite, vandalized in the years following her burial, echoes this dismemberment. It was originally encased in a fence that the official governmental report on the site admits is defined by a sense of “imprisonment and alienation.”10 Tellingly, the gravesite was selected in order to use Baartman’s history as a tourist attraction through which to bring economic development to the area. Like the unfulfilled promise of financial gain that Baartman never realized in her lifetime, her gravesite has not contributed to growing the local economy in part because the proposed Sarah Baartman Center of Remembrance has yet to be built (though funding has been made available, as has the land in 2010). In both its symbolic dismemberment and in its physical dismemberment, Baartman is at the center of an economy dependent upon the display of her body. It is difficult to erase a history of oppression that has had the shelf life that Baartman’s has had. Her history, as Mbeki rightly

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contends in the funeral oration for Baartman, is “the story of the African people of our country in all their echelons. It is a story of the loss of our ancient freedom. It is a story of our dispossession of the land and the means that gave us an independent livelihood.”11 However, even as Mbeki declares, “We are South Africans . . . We do not have to recall a European history” to understand the meaning difference, he sabotages this sentiment as he variously cites, denigrates, and celebrates European thinkers throughout the oration.12 Most significantly, even as Mbeki calls upon South Africa to manifest as the nonracial and gender-equal nation it constitutionally ascribes as being, he admits that antisexism is still a goal. And, despite the rituals performed for Baartman at the funeral to assure her wholeness, Mbeki continually referred to Baartman in terms of her remains and as an object, rather than as Sarah Baartman who, despite the complications of pornography and history, had seemingly regained her personhood in the public space of South African national memory. Sarah Baartman’s body has sustained more theoretical, anatomical, academic, and cultural critique than almost any other body in modern human history. Situated as she was between the colonial and the colonized and between sexual freedom and sexual enslavement, Baartman could not escape being defined by the unique matrix that historically characterized black women’s bodies. And, as I have suggested the contemporary images of colored South African women, clearly demonstrate how African diasporan women are sexually objectified in the shifting power structures of Baartman’s Europe as well as those in postapartheid South Africa. Since Baartman’s body was acquired, examined, dissected, and used to support European illusions of race, our exploration of her life have brought us no closer to her complete history, to her indigenous name, nor to how she understood the cultural crossroads onto which her body was mapped. Sander Gilman’s exploration of Cuvier’s “research” on Baartman exposes how his study places her at the intersection of racism and science. Likewise, as Sadiah Qureshi notes, the literature about “Baartman” from the earliest studies of Bernth Lindfors and Richard Altick to more contemporary inquiries fail to provide a nuanced reading of her life, though they assure that Baartman will remain a focal point of our discussions about the colonized and the colonizer (2004, 233–234).

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However, my focus here is on the ways in which any reading of Baartman is entrapped in some way by the cultural framework into which she was placed by Cuvier. And his findings, teetering between science and pornography, lock Baartman’s narrative into the racial and social paradigms that tortured her in life. They also led to her early death that was ascribed to various causes—from alcoholism, smallpox, prostitution, and exposure—all of which were fashioned by a European hunger for the sexual and racial tastes that her body fed, but could not satisfy. She is now buried at “home” near the small town of Hackney, chosen because of its proximity to the Gamtoos River and—as I indicated previously—for its possibilities as a tourist site. Clearly, then, her return to South Africa is complicated by the cultural politics of the moment. Just as clearly, her body—even repatriated—is still ripe for commodification. Baartman’s sexual enslavement was possible only because nineteenth- century Europeans placed her on exhibition, replacing her identity with an inaccessible history. “The Venus Hottentot” still exists as a dis-membered pornographic image, one that is shaped in sexual and racial fantasies that link two cultures and the two continents on which Sarah Baartman tried to live. Given the radical social and political shifts that defined the South Africa that welcomed her “home,” she could not escape the unfortunate mold into which she was cast in Europe.

Notes 1. New York Times, “Top Ten Plundered Artifacts,” http://74.125.47.132 /search?q=cache:7X0ggDpDIcJ:www.time.com/time/specials/packages /article/0,28804,1883142_1883129_1882999,00.html+nelson+mandela +formal+request+baartman&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us#ixzz0av3Q Jtc5 (accessed November 30, 2009). 2. Ibid. 3. Testimony of William Bullock, November 21, 1810, quoted in Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the “Hottentot Venus” A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 80. 4. Gould, Stephen Jay, The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985), 296. 5. Colette Colligan, “Anti-Abolition Writes Obscenity: The English Vice, Transatlantic Slavery, and England’s Obscene Print Culture,”

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000 (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 76. Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DouNarr.html (accessed October 5, 2009), 5. Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, http://digilib.nypl.org /dynaweb/digs/wwm97262/@Generic__BookView, (accessed January 10, 2009). Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 12. Thabo Mbeki, “Speech at the Funeral of Sarah Bartmann, 9 August 2002,” http://www.dfa.gov.za/docs/speeches/2002/mbek0809.htm (accessed August 1, 2009). “Final Draft: Sarah Bartman Burial Site Conservation Management Plan,” http://www.sahra.org.za/sbaartman/Final+DRAFT+Sarah+Bart man+CMP+2.3.09b.pdf (accessed March 1, 2010). Thabo Mbeki, “Speech at the Funeral of Sarah Bartmann, 9 August 2002,” http://www.dfa.gov.za/docs/speeches/2002/mbek0809.htm (accessed August 1, 2009). Ibid.

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Part Two Troubling the “Truth”: Corporeal Representations

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Chapter Six Writing Baartman’s Agency: History, Biography, and the Imbroglios of Truth Desiree Lewis1

Truth and the Trope of Victimization “Baartman belongs to all of us,” states the central character in Zoe Wicomb’s novel, David’s Story (2000, 135). An activist who believes he can tell his own story only by meshing history, memory, and imagining, David insists that a story of Sara Baartman must be told in relation to his own locations and politics. In explaining his fusing of biography and autobiography, he comments on an enduring discursive role for Baartman. Whether configured in terms of grotesque physicality in the late 1800s and early 1900s, or as a figure testifying to colonial domination from the late twentieth century, Baartman has provided a reference point in the autobiographical narratives of those who represent her, with storytelling about her functioning to convey collective or individual desires in the present. As the “Hottentot Venus,” the spectacle for nineteenth-century observers, writers, and scientists, her status as hyper-corporeal “other” is well known. Far more complex though is the function she serves in various cultural representations from the middle of the twentieth century. From this time, there has been a global surge of creative and scholarly work on her; the deluge of artwork, poetry, autobiography, documentaries, drama, and academic writing dealing with Baartman reveals how much of a transnational icon she has become. Much of this work dwells only on her painful entrapment. Scholars such as Sander Gilman 2 and Yvette Abrahams3 or a filmmaker such as Zola Maseko4 represent very different theoretical and political positions. But like many other cultural and scholarly projects produced from the late twentieth century, they foreground Baartman’s victimization in conveying her “true” story: whether

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represented as the innocent who became the “Hottentot Venus” as in Maseko’s film and much of Abrahams’s writing, or as a specimen for consolidating nineteenth-century evolutionary and racist thought, as in Gilman’s study, the truth about Baartman is the truth about the individuals, relationships, institutions, and structures that dehumanized a black South African woman and created the “Hottentot Venus.” My emphasis in this study is on two texts, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus and Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully’s Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography, both of which seek to transcend the definition of Baartman merely as a casualty of her times. Clearly, other authors have also been concerned with portraying Baartman’s humanity: Abrahams’s writing and Maseko’s documentary insist on her erased humanity by stressing the tragedy of her exile and display. What makes Venus and Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus distinctive is their effort to uncover something about human complexity and ambiguity beyond the all-determining influences of social structure and relations of domination. These are not the only recent works that do this. Rachel Holmes’s Hottentot Venus as well as a number of recent historical studies, such as writings by Robert Shell5 and Carmel Schrire6 have sought to shed light on the intricacies of the history of Baartman’s departure from the Cape, the identities and motivations of those involved in her departure from South Africa and her life in England and Paris, the details of the milieu in which she lived and worked before her removal from the Cape, and her personal possibilities in the face of oppressive circumstances. I intend to show, however, that these two texts are especially revealing in testifying to the entanglement of history and imagining in the present. Biographical narrative is particularly important here. Life storytelling, whether in the form of Crais and Scully’s historical project or Parks’s drama, organizes elements of a life to construct a coherent narrative of the self. How the “life” in biographical narrative is represented in relation to its history and society, and how biographical construction reveals agendas about the present is the burden of much of this essay. As Hayden White observes, the transformation of biographical fact into narrative involves patently fictive strategies: the suppression and selection of certain events, and

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the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of view . . . in short all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or play. (2002, 200)

White makes it abundantly clear that the textual devices in biography, whether these appear in fictional works like Venus or scholarly projects such as Crais and Scully’s, can be subjected to the close textual analysis usually reserved for interpreting literary texts. Despite the related interest between the two texts, they reveal radically different philosophies about “truths” and Baartman’s life story. Parks’s play, a blatantly fictional invention of a character based on Baartman, teases out themes about her life to focus on storytelling in the present. Fully acknowledging the claim of Wicomb’s character that Baartman has been collectively laid claim to, Parks intervenes into a maze of storytelling by explicitly defying the narrative rules of stories told from the nineteenth century to the present day. The historical project of Crais and Scully is motivated by very different aims. Working to lay ghosts conclusively to rest, the authors claim to write a book “about discovery, about what really might have happened” (2009, 6). As I go on to show, however, it reflects narrative conventions and ideological assumptions that merely repeat earlier accounts. While the authors stress the veracity of their account, their methods of emplotment and symbolic patterning are strikingly similar to those of historical fiction: in producing what they see as a corrective story, they not only resort to the mythologizing that they associate with other accounts, but also testify to their locations in the present.

Multiple Truths and Contested Meaning Parks tells the story of a black South African woman (Venus) trying to transcend a life of servitude in colonial South Africa by finding fame and wealth in the West. Exhibiting herself in England, she meets up with a white doctor and becomes his lover. Venus fantasizes about the depth of their relationship: He will leave that wife for good and we’ll get married (we’d better or I’ll make a scene). (Parks 1997, 135)

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But she overestimates his feelings for her. Realizing the social cost of the discovery of his affair with a black South African woman, the doctor kills her and then dissects her body. The implausibility of this tale is characteristic of obvious fictionalizing. But this story also powerfully thematizes familiar social forces: the combination of attraction and revulsion in colonial fixations with black female bodies, associated especially with the obsessive work of Georges Cuvier, the scientist who dissected Baartman’s body. Parks’s play has been the subject of considerable controversy,7 possibly because the playwright is a black woman. Parks uses tremendous license in reconstructing Baartman’s story, and the play is not intended to be realistic. Rather, the playwright has selected themes that are deemed central to the story of a figure, often imagined only as a target of oppressive forces, as someone with contradictions, weaknesses, and desires. The central character based on Baartman wants money, sexual pleasure, and a relationship with the white man who uses her and because of this becomes complicit with the circumstances of her subjugation. In presenting Venus in this way, Parks is concerned with dislodging narratives that rendered Baartman a guileless innocent. Determined to unravel the function of an icon in many black consciousness writings, Parks insists that Baartman’s symbolic meaning has erased a sense of her humanity. Consequently, her interpretation of Baartman does not reproduce a trope of the oppressed black female body, but conveys an imaginary figure exceeding neat containment. Moreover, in dramatizing the figure of an iconized black woman, the playwright avoids the impulse to capture a “real” Baartman. However ambiguous and complex, Venus is far from a realistically conceived historical figure: Parks’s primary concern is to deconstruct—from the perspective of her vantage point as an African American woman—the discursive role of a symbol who has consistently served the purposes of others. Jean Young argues that “Parks’ historical deconstruction presents a fictitious melodrama that frames Sara Baartman as a . . . sovereign, consenting individual with the freedom and agency to trade in her human dignity for the promise of material gain” (1997, 609). Yet to speak commonsensically of either Baartman’s or Venus’s “characterization” in this play is misleading. Avoiding humanisms’ freely willing subject, Parks squarely confronts processes of subjectification created through performance and representation.

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As a culturally constructed subject, Venus defines herself in relation to available scripts of identity. These open up possibilities for action, behavior, feeling, and thought at the same time that they set limits on these: Venus may act according to her “own” thoughts and desires, but these have discursive, institutional, and political matrixes. The dualism of “victim” and “agent” is therefore transcended, with Venus’s personal choices and action always occurring through and within cultural conventions, social codes, and relations of domination. Yet it is these choices and actions that define the human, as opposed to the sign or symbol. Early in the play, Venus’s dialogue with those often seen only as her villainous captors reveals aspects of a social subject that the victim image totally erases: complicity, greed, naiveté, and, as the use of dialogue clearly indicates, some degree of instrumentality in her own fate: The Brother Come to England./ Dance a Little. The Girl Dance? The Brother Folks watch. Folks clap. Folks pay you gold. The Girl Gold. The Brother We’ll split it 50-50 The Girl 50-50? The Brother Half for me. Half for you/ May I present to you: “The African Dancing Princess” The Girl A Princess. Me?/ A princess overnight . . . (Parks 1997, 15)8

Parks’s play draws on historical material such as newspaper reports, broadsheet ballads, extracts from anatomical studies undertaken on Baartman, legal documents, and allusions to figures and events in historical records of Baartman’s life. In the extract above, “the brother” refers to the man for whom Baartman worked in Cape Town, brother of the “Free Blacks”9 who bought Baartman on behalf of his white employer. “The Man” possibly

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alludes to Alexander Dunlop, the surgeon primarily responsible for Baartman’s display in Britain. Yet Parks’s presentation of Venus constantly alludes to her being chimeric—hypervisible in the collective imagination and yet also curiously absent. The opening statement by a narrator who partly conveys the playwright’s voice is therefore telling, particularly since this statement recurs throughout the play: “I regret to inform you that the Venus Hottentot is dead . . . there wont b inny show . . .” (Parks 1997, 3). While this functions partly as prolepsis, it is also a philosophical comment on Baartman’s “meaning” in relation to the audience and all those who presume to “know” about her. Sara Warner’s study of Parks’s play draws attention to its intricate discursive and political effects (2008, 2). Focusing on how the playwright works consistently against closure and interment, she stresses that the play exposes the homogenizing effects of conservative and ostensibly progressive nationalist, feminist, or blackconscious storytelling. With these overtly partisan narratives, the coherence of the fiction is achieved at the cost of acknowledging the messiness of history. This coherence also reinforces the cultural meaning of the black female body as serviceable signifier. Parks refuses the catharsis of telling a tragic story, instead obliging the spectator to confront the muddled motivations and forces that propel stories about pasts and presents. In the process, the audience is confronted with the unsettling truth that the meaning of life narratives is integrally bound up with the circumstances of their creation and reception, that meaning is contingent on how particular figures are represented and read, that beyond the process of fictionalizing there can be no essential meaning: Venus is dead; she is alive only in the constructed worlds of the playwright and the spectator. The play’s obviously postmodernist use of a “chorus of spectators” reinforces its emphasis on processes of meaning-making and the artificiality of theatrical representation. As Warner observes, the play’s self- consciousness about its status as discourse is evidenced when the narrator announces that Baartman is dead, and the chorus cries out: “Outrage. It’s an outrage. Gimmie gimmie back my buck!” (2008, 3). The demand uncomfortably conjures up the voracious desire embedded in the gaze directed at black women’s bodies. It alerts us to the fact that the problems associated with the need to know about Baartman may be as obscenely

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self-serving in nineteenth- century specularity as they are in the present need to know her in different ways. Historically, dominant textual and visual representations of black women have concealed, silenced, or denied their humanity and voice, with the black female body coming to signify masculinist and white racist desires and struggles. As Pumla Gqola puts it in her study of black women in much black South African fiction, “Black female characters provide the slate on which the chalk marks of history and Black patriarchy are inscribed . . . place for epistemic battles between white men and Black men” (2009, 108). Parks’s response to the projection of the black female body as surface for inscription is to develop a story of disinterment, of unraveled black female personhood. The process of narrative construction in the play is part of this effort, and functions to draw attention to how storytelling is in many ways a dramatization of the obdurate cultural effort to tame the immensity of “fact.” Explicitly defying realism, the play uses a heavily contrived style and schematic structure. Parks fuses elements of Greek theatre, absurdism, and hip-hop, and delineates characters and narrative by unsettling spectators, by prompting disquiet similar to the effects of theatrical alienating techniques. The register used in the play also alludes to some of the satires produced in Baartman’s times, texts which explicitly stereotype Pidgin English in ostensibly mirroring black psychology. The blatant intertextuality of the play consequently foregrounds its status as artifact, and it is within the artifice of texts echoing other texts that the audience must confront the figure of Venus. The delineation of Venus as an enigmatic, often baffling, and frequently infuriating character helps to achieve the alienating effect created by the play’s commentary on its status as text. Venus is described as being courageous, actively acting on her desires, astute, but also often manipulative and avaricious. Far from arousing our unqualified sympathy, she often appalls us. In interviews and responses to criticism of her play, Parks has insisted that to depict Baartman simply as the object of persecution of others is to underscore her subhuman status. Thus, her rendering of a dialectic in which social structure contends with Venus’s response can be seen as central to the playwright’s refusal of Baartman’s convenient symbolic meaning in both racist and ostensibly radical accounts. Commenting on the meaning of the repatriation of Baartman’s remains to South Africa, Meg Samuelson writes, “Healing,

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recovery and wholeness . . . were the eagerly sought results of Baartmann’s return” (2007, 99). We can think about the effects of much Baartman storytelling in the same way. Drawing connections between stories told about Baartman and nationalist narratives, Samuelson argues that nationalism has been a “derivative discourse . . . Postcolonial nationalism reiterates the colonial demand for unified ‘covered and enclosed’ bodies to reflect the unified subject of nation” (Samuelson 2007, 97). The partisan storytelling about Baartman can be explored as a metaphor of her covering—in opposition to her exposure in the nineteenth century. Yet rather than constituting an act of talking back to past myth-making, this covering connects myth-making in the past to the present. It is this totalizing myth-making, the effort to tell the story of a unified subject that Parks refuses to pursue. From the perspective of her present as an African American woman acutely aware of the politics of race, gender, voice, and representation, Parks is concerned first and foremost with the messiness and complexity of storytelling about socially marked and situated bodies. Most critics who applaud Parks’s play argue that its strength revolves around her reinvention of a historical figure who must have had human desires and motivations. This view misses the political force of her dramatic intervention: its power revolves around her interrogation of discursively constructed “truths” enlisting the black female body as signifier, rather than her offer of new definitive truths about Baartman. Rather than proposing her own story as an alternative truth, Parks comments incisively on the fraught process of truth construction. Instead of correcting existing records of a historical figure with her own, she unravels the manipulative process of truth-telling.

Discovering Truth: Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus—A Ghost Story and Biography Historical biography is never the biography of a life. It is not even, as many would argue, a biography of available texts and documents. It is first and foremost a story driven by the authors’ will to truth. In Crais and Scully’s historical biography, the authors set out to settle the question, Is it possible for scholarly biography to

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transcend re-presentation and allow for storytelling of Baartman that reveals more than subjective truths? From the very start, they insist that their reconstruction is singular in achieving this aim. I argue in what follows that, despite the writers’ exultant conclusions about the purpose and effects of their study, much of its content reveals the manipulative devices that Hayden White describes in linking the writing of history to the writing of fiction. However persuasively the study may appear to be faithful to the past “as it really was,” it conveys information in a particular way and with particular cultural effects. I deal with these by focusing on three areas associated with obviously textual reconstruction: emplotment in the narrative, the conception of the “self,” and the emphasis on Baartman’s agency. The most striking evidence of the constructedness of Crais and Scully’s text is its preoccupation with compelling storytelling. On one hand, the authors criticize many Baartman fictions in which “someone comes to stand for too much, when the past can stand no more” (2009, 6). On the other, their own historical record routinely exploits long established narrative models and ideological assumptions. One of these models is the captive narrative, a model—rooted in the genre of tragedy—in which an innocent becomes enmeshed in an overpowering and materialistic world. The start of the text therefore invokes a fantasy past in great detail. The precolonial world of Sara Baartman’s childhood is portrayed as a pastoral ideal, with the account including florid details such as the following: The Gonaqua gazed upon the stars and moon and danced to the eland, turning their arms into horns and their feet into hooves stamping the ground. They danced because all the animals were once men and women in the time of the First People. The great antelope was both ancestor and oneself. As a young child Sara would have watched as kith and kin danced to the eland, became the antelope and she listened to the stories of her parents and elders. (Crais and Sculley 2009, 11)

The start of the study portrays Baartman’s birth into a community rich in customs (but without much history).10 She may have heard stories that Gonaqua had told for generations, “of the eland and the moon and of the meaning of the bit of tortoiseshell hung around her neck” (Crais and Sculley 2009, 22). Such imaginative narrativizing sits oddly with the claims to definitive truth-telling elsewhere in the text. As the story proceeds,

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it becomes clear that descriptions of the geography that Baartman negotiates convey certain themes, moods, and emotions. The preoccupation with conveying mood and framing events often grossly distorts what is plausible. This is clear in the account of Baartman’s putative relationship, shortly after she arrives in Cape Town, with a white man. Contesting the familiar story of Baartman’s painful subjection to white patriarchy, the authors hone in on obscure “evidence” of her relationship with a European man, Hendrik van Jong, who lived in Hout Bay, far from where she lived and worked. We are told that “for nearly two years they lived happily together as husband and wife,” and that “Each week or so Sara returned to her masters, washing clothes, spending a few nights in the shed, then passing through stands of yellowwood and silver trees as she walked back to the bay” (Crais and Scully 2009, 46). Considering that Baartman would have walked this distance between 1804 and 1805, and that she would have had no roads to “pass through,” she is unlikely to have leisurely strolled among “stands of yellowwood and silver trees.” Apart from the great distance, the terrain at the time would have been extremely dangerous. Implying, as this section of the text does, that Baartman leisurely traversed a scenic landscape is outrageous. The assumption here is that she was a free woman. But apart from the outrageousness of this claim (anchored by a footnote that does not really lead the reader anywhere), the mode of storytelling is revealing. This kind of narration echoes the conventions of romantic storytelling, replete with picturesque setting and atmosphere, and sentimental purpose and action. And it is this formula that the reader can recognize over and above the inexactness (even implausibility) of the idea of Baartman freely travelling a very great distance and in difficult terrain “each week or so.” Generally, the description of setting in the text frequently conveys the tragic story that the authors often associate only with others’ myth-making: the way Baartman has been ensnared by diverse people’s expectations (Crais and Sculley 2009, 6). I have shown that a vivid picture of the first stage of Baartman’s life is conveyed through description of the pastoral world she is seen to inhabit before she travels to Cape Town. The image of the Gonaqualands is of a static precolonial idyll in which, “Mostly they would have kept to themselves, watching over their own animals and trying to live much as they always had except for an apprehension that their

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world was changing in ways they could neither identify or control” (Crais and Sculley 2009, 19). In stark contrast, Cape Town is portrayed as a space of rupture and turmoil, with Baartman’s location within it implying the tumultuous turn in her life experience. As the fictional account of her imagined sea sickness implies, Baartman’s emotional and psychological trauma intensifies when she leaves South Africa, “Just out of sight of Table Mountain a malaise would settle in, followed by cold sweats and then the nausea and vomiting. Dehydration, sleeplessness, and fatigue led to dry retching and vertigo, the small cabin spinning round and round as the waves ricked the ship” (Crais and Sculley 2009, 60). The implied trauma of her arrival in England is conveyed by the account of this new geographical space. Even more than Cape Town, it invokes turmoil, corruption, and industrial contamination—especially in the description of the Old Kent road, which Baartman supposedly travels along immediately after arriving in England. Using a Dickensian trope of early industrial London, the authors write: [They] entered London . . . through one of the poorer, rougher parts of the city, passing brick kilns, clothing manufacturers, breweries, and some of the earlier factories of the Industrial Revolution. These were among the meanest of streets. The road became ever more squalid and overcrowded, with people as well as animals living in the houses. (2009, 62)

The description of the road connotes moral and cultural degradation; it invokes Baartman’s descent into a depraved world of chaos, creeping modernity and dehumanization in contrast to the idyllic ethos previously described. The heavily figurative description of detail masquerading as a slice of life is characteristic of nineteenthcentury realism, and it is often this tradition that Crais and Scully draw on. What is therefore striking about their study as a text is the way it reconfigures models, narratives, and tropes in the emplotment of events. Even when it seems most strongly to resist conventional Baartman storytelling, it falls back on the charged meanings embedded in familiar modes of narration. Peter Burke proposes “thick narrative” as a progressive alternative to naïve historical narrativizing as well as the unsatisfactoriness of attention to rigid structure in more recent historicizing. Drawing on Clifford Geertz’s ideas about the anthropological

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value of “thick description,” he commends the scholarly value of “making a narrative thick enough to deal not only with the sequence of events and the conscious intentions of the actors . . . but also with structures—institutions, modes of thought and so onwhether these structures act as a brake on events or as an accelerator” (Burke 1991, 240). Crais and Scully set out to do this. In so doing, their study aims at being a work of historical revisionism, overturning the blunt and reductive preoccupation with social process and structure toward acknowledging complexity, multiplicity, and most importantly the agencies of social actors. One central example of this is the authors’ explanation of the roots of Baartman’s exhibition not in Britain, but in colonial Cape Town. Their argument is that Baartman gradually became a “performer,” rather than an exhibit, starting her “career” with early self-displays for small groups of sick seamen in Cape Town. It is this iconoclastic revisionism that has generated not inconsiderable acclaim for Crais and Scully’s work. In her laudatory Sunday Independent review, for example, Maureen Isaacson writes, “Ignoring the Sara Baartman fatigue that set in after her emotional return to this country in 2002, two energetic historians and authors of a new book, Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, rescue our long-suffering sister from the sameness of narratives about her momentous final years in Europe” (2010). Writing for the journal Biography, Nadja Durbach applauds the study’s rigorous response to most academics’ preoccupation with Baartman to “interrogate early nineteenth-century understandings of race and sexuality, as well as to critique the practices of science and imperialism” (2009, 4). Isaacson’s claim that the biography radically departs from the “sameness of [previous] narratives” is revealing about a tendency to applaud only the revisionist intent of a text that often repeats familiar narrative strategies and ideological assumptions. Crais and Scully express a scholarly impatience with the tragic mode that has dominated accounts of Baartman. Yet their own use of formulae and conventions betrays the overwhelming need to “tell a good story,” a story that resonates in the repertoire of stories that we recognize as meaningful fictions. The biography’s intertextuality is often quite explicit, with this intertextuality revealing their need “to make sense of a set of events which appears strange, enigmatic or mysterious in its immediate manifestation . . . to encode the set in terms of culturally provided categories . . . to familiarize the

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unfamiliar”(White 1978, 196). In straining to reconstruct a world so different and distant, they resort to the anachronistic tropes they have imbibed from a particular education: Dickens’ portrayal of industrialized London to describe Baartman’s arrival in London, Romantic notions of innocent childhood and the noble savage, and popular, early anthropological fictions of an eternally innocent and static precolonial Africa. By reconfiguring plots of capture, displacement, and degeneration, along with the formulaic figurative description often used to symbolize these processes, the authors situate their story in a repertoire of other familiar stories. The effect is not so much to reveal new knowledge about Baartman’s past as it is to convey meanings that reverberate in our present. If the narrative strategy of this biography reveals White’s claim that historical writing creates arguments, plots, and ethical implications through tropological formations, its preoccupation with the self illustrates the authors’ reliance on a culturally specific humanist definition and exploration of subjectivity. The notion of the politically significant and culturally important “self,” of the individual whose life is valuable, gripping, and worthy of narrative reconstruction is deeply rooted in a humanist conception of subjectivity. Originating with the Enlightenment emphasis on free will, this conception assumes that the individual, as well as the depth, desires, and thoughts of the individual, clearly distinguish one self from others. For the leading humanist thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, society was the creation of individual subjects with unique desires. The subject was believed not only to be distinct, but also uniquely layered. The subject was thoughtful and reflective, retreating from the world into contemplation and privacy and therefore able to act willfully and autonomously. Much Western contemporary fiction is rooted in this philosophical belief, with the novel form especially focusing on the fascination of the individual subject as he/she navigates a complex world of other selves and an external environment. However much these externals may affect the self, the notion of an essential, bounded self remains central to novelistic storytelling. Interestingly, at the start of their book, Crais and Scully provide commentary on the discursive status of the “self” in Western biography: “Biography”, we are told, “emerged at a particular time and place in Europe’s imagining of the self . . . It emerged along with the idea of the

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possessive individual, that person who has agency, autonomy a vision of the self. This idea of the person is not so easily transferred to anytime and anyplace and to worlds where there is no clearly possessive subject, no ‘me’, ‘myself.’ ” (2009, 5)

Curiously, this acute theoretical reflection is entirely abandoned elsewhere, with the writers consistently working with the idea of a clearly possessive individual. Overall, it is striking how the authors struggle to recreate this culturally sanctioned construct with the limited evidence that they have laboriously discovered and, of course, transformed to suit their purposes. At times, modality gestures toward Baartman’s interiority in phrasings such as, “she may [have],” “she would [have],” “she might [have],” “she could [have].” For example, when Baartman travels to Cape Town there is this description, ostensibly of the environment, but mainly of Baartman’s implied state of mind as she encounters and processes what she sees, “Rock cairns marked people who had died in the great small pox epidemic of the 1750s . . . This could have been a terrifying sight . . . The land no longer held the stories and souls of the Khoekhoe: it was alienated land, alienated from heart, from history” (Crais and Sculley 2009, 29). Elsewhere, the speculativeness established by modal auxiliaries gives way to direct accounts of her inner world. In describing Baartman’s feelings during her sojourn in England, for example, the conjecture yields to overtly ascribing feelings. Here the authors use a mode of describing consciousness that the literary critic, Dorrit Cohn, describes as “psycho-narration” (1978, 11):11 Dunlop had income; Sara Baartman was busy. Alexander promised lots of money, and the crowds were coming. And if Hendrick beat her was that so different from his chastisements in Papendorp? Here there was money in the beating . . . Life had not been perfect for Sara. It was far from perfect here, but it was perhaps a bit better than eking out a living at the edge of colonial society in Papendorp, three babies dead, one love vanished, only drudgery to fill the days. (Crais and Sculley 2009, 81)

In this section of the narrative, Baartman is seen to think certain thoughts and draw particular conclusions, with the reader being persuaded that she is following the inner workings of her mind. The

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biography’s attention to Baartman consistently reveals an authorial need to convey the depth, complexity, and uniqueness that has been a singular source of interest in Enlightenment philosophy and cultural production. While the authors clearly battle with the challenge of constructing interiority about a figure shrouded in myth-making, their narrative also reveals a dogged determination to deliver to the reader the promise of the coherent and plausible “self.” The cultural value attached to narratives centering on the self endures in the present. Currently, biographies assume that individual lives are valuable and compelling human experience. This value has been encoded in our social imaginaries, the stories that stimulate and inspire us, that move and persuade us. Our cultural life is saturated with the production and consumption of stories about remarkable or unique lives. Biography is an influential site of popular meaning-making and a symbolic route for making sense of our lives and our worlds. In gaining access to the life of Sara Baartman especially, as observers we have unique insight into a subject previously shrouded in mystery. Our curiosity is satisfied in similar ways to finding pleasure and being entertained by the revelation of the private lives of contemporary public figures. The fixation with the knowable and complex human subject in Crais and Scully’s text is linked to the bifurcation of self and society, a splitting that has been central to Enlightenment notions of free will and human liberty. The authors’ fixation with the self is therefore connected to their exploration of agency. On one level, this is again introduced as a revisionist effort to supplant the determinism of some writers’ attention to structure and process. Yet it also reveals the authors’ ideological entrapment in a specific way of codifying their world. The exhaustive research associated with their scholarly biography highlights, much more than Parks’s play, a tension between social structure and individual agency. The historical study seeks to give evidence of an actual person’s complexity and agency, an individual with passions, desires, beliefs, and choices. It seeks to show that beyond the symbol of victimization is a complex human being who made choices and had freedoms that other truth-telling does not allow for. We can think about this as allowing for a shift away from the “Hottentot Venus” as symbol and icon, to Sara Baartman, as an individual and human being.

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Clearly, Crais and Scully do not jettison theoretical and political attention to nineteenth-century colonialism. What is noteworthy is the narrative space that they devote to agency. In their effort to produce a corrective history, the authors repeatedly affirm Baartman’s choices and scope for personal choice. Stressing agency as a theme and privileging this over the social structure in which it occurs means obscuring why and how certain structures define what we understand by choice, freedom, independence, passion, attachment, affection, intimacy—the feelings and actions that they often associate with Baartman. Overall, the main events that are seen to mark Baartman’s agency do not conceive of the social content and meaning of her “individual” acts. Baartman is defined as an autonomous being with individual will, and episodes that convey her agency assume a clear boundary between the self-possessed individual and an exterior world. The text deals with three events in ongoing debates about Baartman’s agency: the circumstances of her removal from Cape Town, her display in the West, her remaining in England despite the controversy there about her slave status. In contrast to many stories about Baartman, this study insists that Baartman was not the unwilling dupe she is often presented to be. In the detailed account of the advertising of her display in London, the authors are at pains to stress that Baartman “had the rights to her representation” (2009, 75), that she in fact chose the fetishised dress in the well-known broadsheet advertisement of her freakishness. One other significant incident meant to establish the authors’ triumphal revisionism is the inquiry, following the intervention of Macauley, the antislavery campaigner, into the terms of Baartman’s sojourn in England. In dealing at considerable length with this, the authors discover that Baartman was far from an unwilling and silenced captive in England, but chose to remain in this country. How this startling fact is disclosed in the text is worth quoting: Ah what a lovely picture Sara Baartman painted. The court offices . . . did she want to want to go back to the Cape of Good Hope or stay in England? “Stay Here”. (Crais and Sculley 2009, 100)

With a sleight of hand that reestablishes the authors’ progressive orientation, they interpret this response as complex subaltern resistance, “In saying she was content to exhibit herself for money in

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London, Sara Baartman refused what was to become one of the most potent sites of self-representation for the British public in the early nineteenth century, that of liberators of black women from the abuses of slavery” (2009, 101). Crais and Scully therefore reinforce Holmes’s revisionist claim that Baartman’s response to those who presumed to defend her “suggests a combination of naïve obstinacy with sanguine practicality. The white wigs might argue over whether she was slave or freewoman, but Saartjie knew that she was seller and commodity in one, and must take care of herself” (Holmes 2007, 107). These “revisionist” accounts of Baartman’s agency, responding provocatively to key contested themes in Baartman scholarship and storytelling, convey the complacent assurance of certain historians’ discovery. Yet they are also extraordinarily naïve in reinforcing the idea that the subject is, in the first place, a proper self-possessed individual, not a social subject who has not only never been “autonomous,” but whose value as a driving force in history and society is itself culturally constituted.

“We do not live stories” (White 2002, 120) Globally, there has been a growing impatience with dualisms and dichotomies, with polar opposites and certainties in accounts of political oppression, freedom, and struggle. Multiple truths, incomplete conclusions, insubstantial, and spectral stories are the new truths of a world of fragmentation, a world that can and should no longer be clearly understood as having a coherent “structure.” Superficially, Crais and Scully deliver on the promise of this spectral story, seeming to promise the reader the “thick history” and revisionist narrative that refuses neat certainties provided by many Marxist, nationalist, or feminist accounts. Yet their marshaling of evidence, which seems to bring mystery firmly under control, does not transcend the way in which Baartman continues to provide scope for configuring a historicizing present. Baartman storytelling raises the extent to which uncertainties about truth haunt cultural practices including obviously imaginative writing and scholarly productions. Baartman stories also raise the way that pasts are always locked into presents. Most importantly,

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they show that life storytelling can be the basis for reinforcing certain perceptions or actions, and for constituting, rationalizing, and reinforcing certain perspectives on reality. Many critical studies of Parks’s Venus focus on the “problem” of this playwright’s crediting Baartman with agency, and especially with her insulting or insensitive representation of Baartman’s complicity. Jean Young writes, “Parks’s stage representation of her complicity diminishes the tragedy of her life . . . [and] reifies the perverse imperialist mind set, and her mythic historical reconstruction subverts the voice of Saartjie Baartman” (1997, 701). This lambasting of Parks strikingly echoes the tone and assumptions of Crais and Scully’s writing. Like the historians, Young speaks in the name of a definitive truth, accessible in the present, about Baartman. Where the historians’ truth is the agency and complexity that most have ignored, hers is the truth of the racism and misogyny seen from the present. In Young’s articulation of this truth, Baartman is rendered symbolic, a cipher through which the critic articulates her present concerns. Maybe, as Parks suggests, the most powerful revisionism, the most radical intervention into truth-telling about Baartman may not be projections about what the “actual” Baartman thought or experienced, but the recognition of her role in textualizing others’ subjective and cultural needs—both in the past and in the present.

Notes 1. I am indebted to Angelo Fick for comments on a first draft. 2. See Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature”, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Race, Writing and Difference (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 3. See Yvette Abrahams, “The Great Long National Insult: “Science”, Sexuality and the Khoisan in the 18th and early 19th century”, Agenda, 32 and Colonialism, Dysjuncture and Dysfunction: Sarah Baartman’s Resistance, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Cape Town, 2000. 4. See Zola Maseko, dir. The Life and Times of Sara Baartman, 1998. 5. See Robert Shell, Children of Bondage (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997). 6. See Carmel Schrire, “Native Views of Western Eyes,” ed. Pippa Skotness (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1997).

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7. See Young, Jean Young, “The Reobjectification and Recommoditization of Sara Baartman in Suzan Lori Parks’ play Venus,” African American Review, 31( 1997), 609 8. Venus’s echoed words in this dialogue are of course symbolic indications of the limits of her capacity for true dialogue. This reinforces the play’s attention to her scope for action only within the confines of her entrapment. 9. “Free Blacks” in the colonial Cape had economic possibilities that slaves did not, although they were invariably controlled by white employers and landowners. Crais and Scully focus mainly on the autonomy of this group as, for example, employers of others’ domestic labor or property owners. 10. Landeg White comments incisively on “the image of a culture with customs but no history” in the romantic nationalism of Chinua Achebe’s early novels. See Landeg White, “Literature and Society in Africa,” Journal of African History, 21 (1980), 540. 11. Cohn’s use of this neologism addresses both subject-matter and the activity it denotes, and is a way of analyzing “the plainly reportorial, or the highly imagistic ways a narrator may adopt in narrating consciousness.” See Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Representing Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1978, 11).

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Chapter Seven “I Wanna Love Something Wild”: A Reading of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus Ilaria Oddenino

The story of Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman brought to Europe in 1810 to confirm the racial inferiority of her people,1 is emblematic of how colonial relations of dominance can be reproduced independently of contexts of political and territorial occupation. Within the very heart of Western civilization, her body became the equivalent of a far away land to conquer and rule, conveniently transformed by the “cartographers” of the race into a morbidly detailed “map” of otherness. Being reduced to a mere assembly of parts, Baartman’s body was transformed into a site of inscription for the values of the dominating culture. The colonization of her body naturally resulted in the creation of a colonized corpus, “body” of literature, which ranged from caricatures, to scientific writings, to ballads and vaudevilles. It is through this heterogeneous ensemble of texts that the image of the “Hottentot Venus” was cemented in the European collective imagination, in a way that made her “other” and yet “entirely knowable and visible” (Bhabha 1994, 71). Within this body of texts there are hints to a parallel discourse, more socially dangerous and therefore less explicit, where Baartman’s body is revealed as a repository for the erotic fantasies of Western men. This is clearly evident (although never seriously dealt with) in La Venus Hottentote, ou haine aux françaises, the 1814 French vaudeville that I will take as a starting point for the exploration of the gray area where these two seemingly incompatible perspectives coexist; I will then move to an updated and reinterpreted version of the vaudeville in the play within the play of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus. Some other aspects of her extremely dense drama will be an occasion for looking more closely at the

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complex dynamics of attraction and repulsion aroused by the sexualized female “other,” and they will be considered as part of a more general attempt to free the memory of Baartman from the previous eurocentric discourse. Discussion of the playwright’s success at creating a decolonized narrative (freed from the projections of the desires and fears of the beholders, and therefore, representing nothing but her own existence as a woman) will conclude this work. La Venus Hottentote, ou haine aux françaises opened in Paris on November 19, 1814. While Sarah Baartman was gracing private and public rooms alike with her “wondrous” presence, a French actress was delighting masses of theatre-goers with her leading role in this highly entertaining one-act vaudeville, whose plot can be summarized as follows: Adolph, a young man whose heart has been broken twice, is determined never to love a Frenchwoman again, and with the support of his “traveler” uncle (who, in fact, has hardly ever left France) he is ready to begin his search for an “exotic” inamorata. When Amelia, his wealthy cousin and, therefore, his expected future wife, discovers the terrible news, she is determined to find a way to trick him into marrying her. She hears of the soaring popularity of the so-called “Hottentot Venus,” a woman of “frightening beauty” (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 138), 2 as she is told, and a solution to her worries is suddenly revealed; she will disguise herself as a “Hottentot” lady by the name of “Liliska” and seduce him with her mysterious, foreign appeal. The trick seems to work, and both the young man and his uncle are instantly ravished by her charms, “what a marvelous woman . . . that smile without treachery, in Europe such a one is never seen . . . Oh blessed is the day that led you to our rivers” (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 150). Adolph and Amelia/Liliska thus engage in a lengthy amorous interplay, which culminates in a hasty betrothal and a wedding ceremony to be held that very same night. However, an unexpected element of disruption bursts on the scene; it is “the chevalier,” Amelia’s suitor, who, to definitively scoop the competition, has found Adolph the savage woman he appeared to be longing for: “Here, look at her,” he says as he unrolls a large scroll of paper he had in his pocket with a portrait of Sarah Baartman, the “real” Hottentot Venus3. At the sight of her “savage monstrosity,” to which Liliska clearly bore no resemblance, everyone cries out in fright: “What a

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strange thing! Such features until now unknown! With such a face she cannot be a Venus.” (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 161)

And so the conspiracy is revealed, but now that he has been awakened to the uninviting reality of the facts, Adolph is well happy to renounce his exotic fantasies in favor of his civilized white French cousin. Order is thus reestablished and everyone will live happily ever after. Although the play clearly testifies to the astounding, and infamous, popularity that the “Hottentot Venus” rapidly attained in Paris (Badou 2000, 123), I believe its main significance is to be found elsewhere. It seems to me that this vaudeville, blithe, and unproblematic as it may be exposes some fundamental contradictions that lie at the core of not only Sarah’s personal story, but of the era as a whole. While the idealized image of the noble savage was still very much part of the Western collective imagination (Liliska is alternatively referred to as “a new Atala” (Badou 2000, 160) or “the child of nature” (Badou 2000, 150)), the so- called “Age of Reason,” imbued as it was with a new faith in Western man’s capability to rationally decode and organize the chaos of creation, had mainly invested its energies in finding a rather less flattering collocation for the “savage” Other. Indeed, following the trend of taxonomic frenzy inaugurated in the first half of the eighteenth century,4 a number of (pseudo) sciences (from phrenology, to physiognomics, to social anthropology) began to proliferate, aiming in their specific ways at isolating and rationalizing all tangible signs of physical and temperamental difference in the hierarchical order of mankind. The stigmatization of such signs as racially inferior and/or clinically pathological often justified, rather than dismantled, widespread popular preconceptions, the most insidious and prurient of which regarded African sexuality. The perception of the libido of Africans as unrestrained, “dirty,” and animal like, had inhabited European imagination since the first moments of exploration and “discovery,” so to speak, of those territories. However, as Blanchard has underlined, it is from the seventeenth century onwards that this idea consistently began to gain ground (1995, 27), and the subsequent “siècle des Lumières” saw eminent scholars such as Buffon working toward supposedly scientific explanations for these peoples’ intrinsic attitude of debauchery. On the

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other hand, the very same “primitive” bodies that so reprehensibly symbolized the all-instinct nature of Africans (as opposed to the rational, sophisticated mores of Europeans) also represented an accessible contact zone for white men with (African) female nudity, thanks to the growing number of ethnographic images available in the West. These can be said to have actually worked as “ersatz pornography” (Pieterse 1992, 94), and Baartman’s display as “The Hottentot Venus” is the quintessential example of the scopophilic instinct (i.e., the “pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object” (Mulvey 1989, 25)) aroused by the sexualized female Other. Alternatively disguised as biological specimen and wondrous freak, Baartman could in fact be considered “the anthropo-erotic sensation of nineteenth-century Europe” (Pieterse 1992, 94), epitomizing a type of desire that was socially unacceptable and, as such, utterly unavowable. This is the gray area that the vaudeville hints at but simplistically resolves by conveniently reestablishing the uncomplicated Manichean order of the world. As effectively put by T. Deanan Sharpley-Whiting, “La Venus Hottentote, ou haine aux françaises opens with a show of reverence for exotic difference and ends literally in incestuous sameness: Adolph and Amelia are united in marital bliss—members of the same race, culture, nationality, and family” (1999, 41). Little less than two centuries later, the vaudeville returns in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus as part of a more general process of historical re-reading. Indeed, following her typically unconventional approach to literature and performance, the Fort Knox-born playwright has tried to dig out the most stubbornly hidden pages of Baartman’s controversial story. The word “dig” is particularly relevant in the approach to Parks’s theatre, since the way she understands her task as an author is closely connected with this act of searching and bringing to light what lies underground, buried under dusty documents or years of unchallenged truths. In this regard, she writes: A play is a blueprint of an event: a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of literature. Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to “make” history—that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as playwright is to—through literature and the special strange relationship between

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theatre and real life—locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down. (Parks 1995, 4)

In Venus, Parks offers her personal rendering of several aspects of Baartman’s life in Europe, but the bones she has found in this specific process of archeological digging seem to have sung primarily of love. She has thus made this controversial, slippery ground the heart of her complex work, stretching her speculations from the merely physical interest of the “highly civilized” Europeans for the Venus (this is how she is always referred to), to the possibility of a love affair between the alter ego of Georges Cuvier and the Venus herself. The first of the two hypotheses is the one she explores in the play within the play (For the Love of the Venus) modeled on La Venus Hottentote, ou haine aux francaises, but departing from the original in minor aspects of the plot and in the use of more overtly sexual overtones. It consists of six scenes unevenly distributed within the main play, and once again it depicts a “young man” and a “bride-to-be” whose relationship is on the verge of falling apart; the young man’s fantasy has been set off by his father’s and uncle’s stories about the “dark continent.” What excites his sexual desire is something quite different from the white, middle-class young lady who is standing before him, offering him some tea. “Ahhh me: unloved!” sighs the bride-to-be at the end of the first scene (Parks 1996, 37), where he turns down everything she offers him (with a slight hesitation only when presented with chocolate). He first reveals his new fascination with “otherness” by saying; “Uncle took Dad to Africa. Showed Dad stuff. Blew Dads mind” (Parks 1996, 35). This time (unlike the original) the young man, having seen a picture of the “Hottentot Venus” in the paper, knows exactly what he wants to “love”: THE YOUNG MAN. [B]efore I wed, Uncle, I’d like for you to procure for me an oddity. I wanna love Something Wild. (. . .) THE UNCLE. Be a little more specific. THE YOUNG MAN. In the paper yesterday: “In 2 weeks time

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For one week only” Something called “THE HOTTENTOT VENUS” Uncle. Get her for me somehow. (Parks 1996, 58)

Again, the bride-to-be has no choice but to dress up as “the Hottentot Venus,” and here too she easily fools both of them. She and the uncle then engage in an elaborate clicking and clucking to simulate a conversation in a Khoi language, and this is the enthusiastic “translation” he reports to a mesmerized young man: She sez she comes from far uhway where its quite hot. She sez shes pure bred Hottentot. She sez if wilds you desire She comes from The Wilds and she carries them behind her. (Parks 1996, 136)

With the Uncle’s “translation” of the fake Venus’s5 “selfdescription,” Parks effectively summarizes all stereotypes surrounding the “Hottentot” woman’s sexuality. She is “wild” because she comes “from where it is quite hot,” namely Africa. Anne McClintock reminds us that “[l]ong before the era of high Victorian imperialism, Africa and the Americas had become what can be called a porno-tropics for the European imagination—a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears” (1995, 22). One of the recurring traits of the so- called “freak shows” in history6 was the need to invent a background story that would collocate the “extraordinary” people exhibited in a quasi-legendary realm, which was then confirmed in the moment of the performance through the exasperation of all features connoting them as unquestionably “different.” Hence the “vast enterprise in picture postcards of human exhibits and “true life” pamphlets, which purported to be biographical sketches of freaks, but were usually elaborate fictions” (Gerber 1990, 17), and the stereotyped costumes, scenery and exotic tinsels employed on stage.7 Sarah’s display as the “Hottentot Venus” is no exception, and the set of implications evoked by the pornotropics she came from (which her performance—from the “pastoral African scenery and verdant, exotic plants” (Holmes 2007, 2) placed behind her, to the skin-tight costume revealing every inch of her sinuous body—constantly underlined) was enough to surround her with a veritable aura of myth.

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The white men’s morbid curiosity was thus easily titillated, and the fact that the revelation of what the young man wants to love meets with no shocked reaction, not even a hint of surprise on his male relatives’ side (as opposed to the bride-to-be, who receives it with disgust) is emblematic of a Euro-masculine, shared (but repressed) sexual desire. Furthermore, although she has grown accustomed to the Western civil ways, she still unmistakably carries the signs of her wildness, that is to say her lasciviousness: “behind,” in her posterior, “large as a cauldron pot,” as a popular ballad of the time described it (reprinted in Lindfors 1996, 210); “inside” in her savage temperament; “in front” in the peculiar shape of her genitalia, commonly known as “Hottentot apron” or “curtain of shame.”8 In any case, as Gilman points out, “for most Europeans who viewed her, Sarah Baartman existed only as a collection of sexual parts” and her “genitalia and buttocks summarized her essence for the nineteenth-century observer” (1985, 87–88). For the white civilized world to proceed on the tracks of fixed, easily recognizable, and safely uncontaminated truths on which it was founded, it was vital that the erotic pulsations aroused by someone who embodied precisely what that world was not, remain hidden. Being obscene, they belonged off-stage, outside the scene.9 In other words, for Western men to lie to themselves about their own civility, they needed to dissimulate their erotic leanings toward Baartman10; the attraction provoked by her shape was a feeling that had to be banished in order for these individuals to exist socially.11 Julia Kristeva argues in her essay on abjection, from the margins to which it is relegated “the abject does not cease challenging [its] masters” (1982, 2); the fact that it has been forcibly obliterated does not mean that it is not there. Quite the opposite, in fact. With this in mind, there is one more element, trivial and insignificant as it may appear, that I believe should be taken into consideration, and that might stimulate a reflection on what that particular shape (I am referring, of course, to Sarah’s posterior) could have really evoked; I am thinking of the extremely wide bottoms that respectable European women began to reproduce with their most “à la mode” dresses. Around the time of Sarah’s Parisian display, skirts were beginning to become “more voluminous and bell-shaped” (Bratting 2003, 45), and through the first half of the nineteenth century “the volume of torso and sleeves . . . continued

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to be reduced so that, with the disproportionately vast domeshaped skirt, the feminine silhouette came to resemble the shape of a dinner-bell” (Bratting 2003, 47). Furthermore, the history of European fashion tells us of beautiful dresses featuring the socalled “cul de Paris” bustles, which seem to have been a recurring characteristic of women’s clothing, reaching a peak in the late eighteenth and then in the late nineteenth century (Bratting 2003, 54). Should not this seemingly marginal fact (not obscene and therefore un-banished and clearly visible) make us reconsider the potential appeal of Sarah’s natural “cul” to the eyes of the Western onlookers? The natural curves of the Venus might have been irresistible, but the play within the play ends with the young man’s decision to stand by his civilized white bride-to-be, as long as she “keeps her core” once she shrinks back to her original size. The young man gives her a red heart box of chocolates, the curtain falls and the Baron Docteur, the only spectator of the play, applauds. The Baron Docteur is the fictional counterpart of Georges Cuvier, the French scientist who dissected Sarah’s body in Paris and meticulously described every inch of it in his search for a precise collocation for this boundary-blurring Other. He is also the one who matched his supposedly scientific measurements with partial and purely aesthetic judgments12 describing her appearance as brutal, her physiognomy as repulsive, her lips as monstrously swollen, and so on (Cuvier 1817, 262–264). The main body of the play is built around the suspicion, which soon becomes a certainty, that the Baron’s real interest for the Venus is indeed rather unscientific, but on an altogether different level. It all begins when, to make his offer to follow him to Paris more tempting, the Baron gives the Venus a red heart box of chocolates (Parks 1996, 90), the same one that the young man gives to his beloved at the end of the play within the play. From that moment onward, although the “medicolonial discourse” (Thompson 2007, 179) is never abandoned, it becomes inextricably entwined with a discourse of romantic love (ibid.). Despite any historical records to support this curious scenario, it is nonetheless quite easy to guess where the seeds of the development of this idea might have come from; against all reasonable predictions, I believe this fertile ground can reasonably be found precisely in Cuvier’s original description of Sarah’s body, which Parks reproduces in a scene

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called The dis(re)memberment of the Venus Hottentot (1996, 95–102). The Baron, on a podium, delivers details on the Venus’s dissection: THE BARON DOCTEUR. The condition of the flexor brevis digitorum pedis presented rather anomalous characters It might be said to form 2 distinct muscles. This condition interests us Because of the well known fact that in the chimpanzee, And in all inferior Primates, a considerable portion of this muscle Always arises from the long flexor tendon . . . Her shoulders back and chest had grace. Her charming hands . . . uh hehm. Where was I? (Parks 1996, 102)

Georges Cuvier had indeed described Sarah’s hand as “charming” (Cuvier 1817, 264), an undoubtedly unscientific consideration whose value is however diametrically opposite to the derogatory ones I mentioned before. This apparently insignificant detail is in fact very eloquent, and Parks’s rendering of this “incident” is effective in underlining how, for a moment, the scholar’s unconscious could have slipped in to expose what the person actually thought. The obscene inadvertently infiltrates on the scene through the cracks in the Baron’s stream of thoughts, and it takes him a conscious effort to recover his composure (“uh hehm. Where was I?”). How could a man whose task was to scientifically demonstrate that this woman belonged to the lowest rungs of humanity find some of her features “charmantes”? In Venus, Parks sets out to explore a broader spectrum of questions stemming from that first, crucial one: what if the Baron’s attraction for the Venus was not a merely uncontrolled sexual impulse? What if it turned out to be real love? What if that love was reciprocated? And how can love and reason, “amor et timor,” and again, attraction and repulsion coexist? If the two people in question were simply Georges, a man, and Sarah, a woman, the hypothetical outcomes of this love scenario would probably be less problematic. However, the author introduces the characters of her play with a list that she significantly entitles “the roles” (Parks 1996, 4), and roles are indeed what each is called to represent. Instead of Sarah there is “the Venus,” instead

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of Georges Cuvier, there is “the Baron Docteur” and so on. The real person is thus always hidden behind the mask of a socially constructed persona, and reality is founded on the fixed, predictable relationships between these masks; it is through these certainties that Sarah’s contemporaries “know” the world. In Venus, Parks further exasperates this condition by making her actors conveniently slip from one role to another, keeping her audience always fully aware of the artificiality of the parts performed. Again, as in the play within the play, this stylistic choice is aimed at underlining that the impossibility for this love to truly blossom is social: the scientist cannot love the specimen; the respectable European doctor cannot love the “Hottentot.” Therefore, even though the two do become lovers in the play, their relationship (apart from a few moments of forgetful happiness) is marked by the Baron’s unresolved sense of guilt and shame. This scene evokes his torment particularly well: the doctor, with his back to the Venus, sneaks little looks at her over his shoulder and masturbates, in a vain attempt to deny the object of his arousal: THE VENUS. Whatre you doing? THE BARON DOCTEUR. Nothing. VENUS. Lemmie see. THE BARON DOCTEUR. Dont look ! Dont look at me. Look off Somewhere Eat yr chockluts. Eat em slow. Touch yrself. Good. Good. (Parks 1996, 109–110)

The conflict is never resolved, and the two spheres continue to stand side by side in an irreconcilable juxtaposition. Even linguistically, the areas remain separate, as shown by the Baron’s oscillation between standard English (the language of formality and colonial power) and a more colloquial English, closer to the spoken word (the language “of the heart,” used when talking to his beloved). The play’s two focal discourses, running parallel and therefore

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never touching, find their perfect metonymical representation in the very last pages, where a glossary of medical terms stands side by side with a glossary of chocolates (Parks 1996, 163–167). The brief extract quoted above confirms one of the distinguishing features of Parks’s theatre, namely the fact that, as she explains, “[t]here is a lot of watching going on” (Jiggets 1996, 313) onstage. In Venus, this takes on a special relevance, since Baartman’s exploitation consisted precisely in having her parade in front of an audience who watched her and, as often repeated in the play, “exposure iz what killed her.” Not only does the playwright reexpose, if not “over-expose, the Venus to the ‘poking eyes’ and probing stares of spectators” (Warner 2008, 194), she also reexposes her to the lustful gaze of the man who had once disguised his voyeuristic pleasure as minute medical observation (Fausto-Sterling 1995, 41). Here, the “visual” relationship he entertains with her is explicitly sexual and in many ways similar to a peep show, or, more generally, to porn. It shares with pornography the physical distance from the object of desire, the excitement that derives from the mere act of looking, the sense of doing something improper, wrong, and dishonorable. With this scene Parks seems to be making a comment not only on the Baron’s personal interest for the Venus, but also, more generally, on the nature of European men and their collective role as viewers (of the “Hottentot Venus” herself, but also, for instance, of performances such as La Vénus Hottentote, ou haine aux françaises). However, while being observed by the Baron, the Venus also expresses her desire to see what he is doing, and so, implicitly, to “study” his sex, to observe him while he is masturbating. This brings to the fore another crucial aspect that needs to be addressed, which is in fact the most controversial facet of the entire work. In Venus, Sarah is not simply depicted as the passive recipient of the white man’s love; on the contrary, she is a desiring subject, so to speak, just as much as she is a desired object. This has attracted some very harsh criticism, as Elizabeth Brown-Guillory points out: Parks’s fictionalized version of the story, namely the love scenario, has shocked and angered some critics who feel that Parks romanticized the utterly reprehensible Baartman story by constructing Venus as a subject of complicity in her own destruction. (2002, 193)

Among those who most vehemently opposed the author’s choice is Jean Young, according to whom Parks has depicted Sarah as “an

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accomplice in her own exploitation” (1997, 699), and has therefore diminished “the tragedy of her life as a nineteenth-century Black woman striped of her humanity at the hands of a hostile, racist society that held her and those like her in contempt” (1997, 700). Young is also in utter disagreement with (white male) New York theatre critics such as Ben Brantley or Robert Brustein, who “unsurprisingly” praised the play’s “lack of societal indictment” (ibid.), a position that implicitly seems to turn them, and part of the audience, into complacent witnesses of the reenactment of the dangerous dynamics that the play does not overtly subvert. When confronted with such critiques, Parks insists that her portrayal of Sarah as a woman of agency has to be seen as part of a more general picture of black women refusing to simply submit to the victim mentality. Sarah was a victim, no doubt about that, but Parks believes that reducing her to this static role alone would deny her complexity as a woman, and explains her refusal of what she perceives as a too simplistic vision: I could have written a two-hour saga with Venus being the victim. But she’s multi-faceted. She’s vain, beautiful, intelligent, and, yes, complicit. I write about the world of my experience, and it’s more complicated than “the white man down the street is giving me a hard time.” That’s just one aspect of our reality. As Black people, we’re often encouraged to narrow and simply address the race issue. We deserve so much more. (Williams, 1996)

The weight of the social and historical responsibilities of Sarah’s exploitation is crushing, and placing it all on somebody’s back would undoubtedly be liberating. Yet, allowing a convenient process of catharsis would merely cast a blinding light on the foggy areas that enfold such an intricate matter, ignoring the “greys,” the nuances. This would also mean perpetrating imperialistic binary logics that typically define relations of dominance on the basis of clear-cut distinctions (self/other, civilized/savage, etc.) that fail to take into account the interstitial spaces between opposites. Furthermore, being true to the facts (and, in this case, righting historical wrongs) is not necessarily the prerogative of theatre (Warner 2008, 196–197) even more so when the playwright herself declares that she conceives theatre as “an incubator for the creation of historical events”13 (ibid.), a process which involves dis-membering and reassembling the “carcasses” she finds in her

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“digging” in ways that may have seemed up until that moment incongruous or unfathomable. Yet, all these plausible explanations for the play’s re- (or mis-) interpretation of the role of the Sarah Baartman seem to crumble when one looks more carefully at Parks’ declaration. In explaining the reasons behind her refusal to characterize Sarah as a victim, she tells us that it is the world of her own experience that she writes about. This is what tells her that things are more complicated than white men being the villain and black women being the victim. But her own life is not that of an early nineteenth-century African woman who was clearly exploited by Western society, and this has to be regarded as a major limitation of her work. Parks snatches the representation of Sarah Baartman from the hegemony of the European lens only to place it under that of her own African American sensibility; where is the real woman, when yet another filter has been placed between herself and her representation? Funny enough, Venus ends up retrenching some of the stereotypes that weighed upon previous renderings of Sarah: here, too, the real person is never truly there, and becomes a projection of how the playwright could imagine herself within Baartman’s narrative. In this sense, the play does not fully succeed in freeing her from the burden of representation, and the de-colonization of her story is not fully accomplished. Nevertheless, Venus does succeed in problematizing crucial issues, and it does effectively unearth the (more or less implicit) sexual subtext that lies beneath her general Eurohistorical narrative. Despite its limitations, it has to be regarded as an important step toward the establishment of a fully decolonized body of literature.

Notes 1. “Hottentot” is the racist, derogatory term used to describe the Khoi peoples of South Africa. In some hypothetical reconstructions of the Great Chain of Being, “Hottentots” were collocated in a liminal position between humans and apes, as the following example illustrates: “Animal life rises from this low beginning in the shell-fish, thro’ innumerable species of insects, fishes, birds, and beasts, to the confines of reason, where, in the dog, the monkey, and the chimpanzee’, it unites so closely with the lowest degree of that quality in man, that they cannot easily be distinguished from each other. From this lowest degree in the

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2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

Ilaria Oddenino brutal Hottentot, reason, with the assistance of learning and science, advances, thro’ the various stages of human understanding, which rise above each other, till in a Bacon or a Newton it attains the summit.” (Jenyns 1822, 17). All quotations from the vaudeville are taken from the translation Sharpley-Whiting provides in the appendix to Black Venus. There is clearly nothing real about the “Hottentot Venus.” Sarah Baartman is the person. The Hottentot Venus is her constructed and imposed persona, a simulacrum, a projection of the Western man’s fears and fantasies. We can imagine the picture mentioned in the vaudeville as one of the many caricaturized portrayals of Sarah as the “Venus,” exoticized and eroticized representations which, far from being faithful depictions of Sarah (the woman), merely reproduced what the spectators wanted to see (the freak, the ethnographic curiosity, the “missing link”, the sexualized female, the exotic goddess of love etc.). Most notably with the publication of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, 1735. This is, in fact, the fake version of a fake, since the “original” Venus was nothing but a Western construction. See note 3. I am here using the phrase “freak shows” in its more generic connotation to refer to the public display of a person for profit, a person deemed racially inferior and/or physically deviant. The logics behind the advertising (and therefore the “selling”) of these “products” are at the basis of the most successful industries of such shows, whose evolution Rosemary Garland Thomson summarizes as follows: “The early itinerant monster-mongers who exhibited human oddities in taverns and the slightly more respectable performances in rented halls evolved in the mid-nineteenth century into institutionalized, permanent exhibitions of freaks in dime museums and later in circus sideshows, fairs, and amusement park midways. The apotheosis of museums, which both inaugurated and informed the myriad dime museums that followed, was P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, which he purchased and revitalized in 1841” (Garland Thomson 1996, 4-5). Rosemarie Garland Thomson explains: “An animal-skin wrap, a spear, and some grunting noises, for example, made a retarded black man into the Missing Link. Irregular pigmentation enhanced by a loincloth and some palm fronds produced the Leopard Boy” (1996, 5). See, for example Holmes 2007, 140-9. Although referred to a completely different context, I am thinking here of Elizabeth Costello’s reflection on the word’s etymology: “She chooses to believe that obscene means off-stage. To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must remain off-stage” (Coetzee 2004, 168-9). This is perhaps more clearly evident during Sarah’s British period, where a higher level of morality was always maintained. In Paris, the interest

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around her was more explicitly sexual, and this is where she truly metamorphosed into “a tragic heroine and showgirl manqué, a fallen goddess of love, the epitome of the African exotic” (Holmes 2007, 128). This could also explain the existence of a vaudeville such as La Vénus Hottentote, ou Haine aux françaises. However, the vaudeville also shows the need to still relegate the erotic to a socially acceptable area, where fears are exorcized through laughter and a final celebration of the French woman. The same is true of the medical theatre, where a morbid interest for Sarah’s sexuality is turned into scientific investigation, thus, again, becoming socially acceptable. 11. “The abject is everything that the subject seeks to expunge in order to become social; it is also a symptom of the failure of this ambition” (McClintock 1995, 71). 12. This was a recurring feature of the new sciences that flourished in the eighteenth century: “The observations, measurements, and comparisons that were basic to the new eighteenth- century sciences were combined with value judgments following aesthetic criteria derived from ancient Greece. The Enlightenment passion for the new sciences and the reliance upon the classics as authority were fused in this manner. Whatever the physical measurements or comparisons made, in the last resort the resemblance to ancient beauty and proportions determines the value of man” (Mosse 1978, 2). 13. My italics.

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Chapter Eight “Just Ask the Scientists”: Troubling the “Hottentot” and Scientific Racism in Bessie Head’s Maru and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy Z’étoile Imma

In her essay “African Sexuality/Sexuality in Africa: Tales and Silences,” Signe Arnfred discusses how the conflicting narratives surrounding Sara Baartman exemplify European attempts to consolidate white supremacist discourses of race as facts of science. Indeed, in the life and death of Sara Baartman, science was the overwhelming mechanism through which she was racialized, gendered, and sexualized. As Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais discuss in their recent biography of Sara Baartman, soon after her death, the leading French scientist of the nineteenth century, George Cuvier, examined, weighed, and dissected the corpse of Baartman, directing most his attention of her buttocks and genitals—that he excised and set in a jar for preservation (Crais and Sculley 2009, 139, 140). Cuvier later reported his findings in his Treatis Memorie du Musée d’Histoire Naturalle and Baartman’s body parts were placed in the museum’s permanent collection. In this chapter, I explore how the colonial tales about Sara Baartman and the specter of scientific racism haunt Bessie Head’s and Ama ata Aidoo’s postcolonial novels and how these writers attempt to make visible, and ultimately disrupt, the painful history of European objectification of the African female body. For Cuvier and his contemporaries, science was the primary imperial mechanism through which black bodies could be defined as Other and objects. In the Darwinian system of classification, the indigenous peoples of South Africa, the KhoiSan, renamed as the epithets “Bushmen” and “Hottentot,” were commonly understood

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as the “lowest of the savage races” (Dubow 1995, 21). While popular depictions of the “Hottentot” in cartoons, performances, and travel narratives continued to reify the KhoiSan’s degraded position in the colonial imagination, scientific disciplines such as physiognomy and anthropology provided the foundational discourses and institutional continuance for European constructions of race typology and difference. As Saul Dubow’s book-long study of scientific racism in modern South Africa suggests, the consolidation of these discourses in the racist policies of apartheid is but one vestige of an evolutionary theory that positioned the European in the most superior position and Africans in close developmental proximity to animals. Thus animalized, Africans—more particularly, the KhoiSan of Southern Africa—were targeted as racialized bodies to be studied, observed, and dissected. While some experts attempted to disseminate a more sympathetic view of the “Hottentots,” such attempts at compassionate critique of the hegemonic theories that placed the KhoiSan as the missing link between man and higher primates was most often imbedded in the language of race and racial development and therefore relegitimized scientific racism. The heartbreaking story that centers on Sara Baartman, whether cast as an agent complicit in her expose or as naïve victim of imperial whim, illustrates that the shaping of the KhoiSan as either wild animal or infantile savage, follows a coconstitutive trajectory, one that silences, objectifies, and dehumanizes the African subject. More than a century later, for African womanist writers Ama ata Aidoo and Bessie Head, fiction is utilized as a means to rewrite and contest the ubiquitous, yet often understated, scientific discourses regarding African bodies. Our Sister Killjoy (1977) by Aidoo and Maru by Head (1971) were written in the decade when Baartman’s remains were removed from public display at France’s Musée de l’Homme—after a century and half as part of the collection—and set in the museum storage rooms. They significantly trouble the racist and sexist underpinnings of hegemonic scientific paradigms. The “coloured” daughter of a white woman who was institutionalized for having a sexual relationship with her black stable hand, in 1937 South Africa, Bessie Head’s work is often obscured by her wrenching biography. Raised in foster homes, educated by missionaries and later disgusted with apartheid, Bessie Head left South Africa when she was twenty-eight and lived most of her

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writing years in a remote village in Botswana where she died at the young age of forty-nine. As many critics have suggested, Head’s exile was both a profoundly alienating and liberating experience and it was during these years of struggle that Head’s third novel Maru was written. Maru, set in a rural village in postcolonial Botswana, grapples explicitly with the treatment of the KhoiSan in Southern Africa. The narrative centers on the orphaned protagonist who is ethnically a KhoiSan and according to majority population, the Batswana, she is therefore an untouchable, a Bushman, a Masarwa, a term Head defines as “the equivalent of nigger, a term of contempt which means, obliquely, a low, filthy nation” (1971, 8). From early in the novel, Head attempts to make visible the violence and dehumanizing impact of racism and hierarchical caste systems. While she focuses on how indigenous African groups construct and support hegemony and hierarchy intraracially, the text also examines how eurocentric subjects use science as a primary paradigm to consistently classify, categorize, and objectify African bodies. In the “documentary preamble” to the novel (Lewis 2007, 160) Head states: In Botswana they say: Zebras, Lions, Buffalo and Bushmen live in the Kalahari Desert. If you catch a Zebra, you can walk up to it, forcibly open its mouth and examine its teeth. The Zebra is not supposed to mind because it is an animal. Scientists do the same to Bushmen and they are not supposed to mind, because there is no one they can still turn around to and say, “At least I am not a-”. Of all the things that are said of oppressed people, the worst things are said and done to the Bushmen. Ask the scientists. Haven’t they written a treatise on how Bushmen are an oddity of the human race, who are half the head of a man and half the body of a donkey? Because you don’t go poking around into the organs of people unless they are animals or dead. (1971, 7)

Significantly, Head makes clear that the dehumanization of the KhoiSan peoples by European imperialists culminates in scientific experimentation. Constructed as penetrable and animalized by scientific discourse, “poking into the organs” of the KhoiSan becomes a normalized activity of modernity. In contrast to the invasive politic of eurocentric scientific culture that Head impassionedly describes, she shapes the local response to the Bushmen

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as a hatred of distancing. When the protagonist’s malnourished mother dies on the roadside after giving birth, the local Batswana refuse to touch the body or the child crying beside her mother’s corpse. The community calls upon the British missionaries, and it is finally the priest’s wife, Margaret Cadmore, outraged by the Batswanan treatment of the mother and child, who demands that the body be carried to the hospital, washed, and later buried in the churchyard. While supervising the nurses preparing the body for burial, Cadmore observes the dead KhoiSan woman and is inspired by her peaceful expression to draw a sketch of the body to which she adds the note, “She looks like a goddess” (Head 1971, 10). While this reverent tagline might suggest a reversal of the hegemonic colonial gaze on the degraded Masarwa body, Cadmore is not altogether freed from an imperial perspective as the labeling of Sarah Baartman as the “Venus Hottentot” reflects a similar colonial practice in which both awe and disgust amalgamate in the othering of the African body. Cadmore remarks that dead woman “had the same Masarwa thin, stick legs and wore the same Masarwa . . . dress that smelled strongly of urine and outdoor fires” (Head 1971, 8), so despite the woman’s exceptional beauty in death, as a member of her ethnic group she is as defined by Cadmore as “the same Masarwa”—a filthy body to be recorded, examined, and objectified. Cadmore’s colonial ambivalence is reaffirmed as her attentions turn toward the child; she promptly names the child after herself and decides that the girl will serve as the object of her own experiment of social engineering. Head writes: [Cadmore] was . . . a scientist in her heart with a lot of fond, pet theories, one of her favourite, sweeping theories being: environment everything; heredity nothing. As she put the child to bed that night in her own home, her face was aglow. She had a real, living object for her experiment. Who knew what wonder would be created? (1971, 11)

Head’s tone turns ironic as she writes Cadmore’s giddy titillation in imagining the child as the site of her new project; she is enlivened with the possibility of testing her theories on the body and mind of the orphaned girl. Given Head’s earlier unpacking of science as imperial projection, the problematic of Cadmore as a scientist cannot be disengaged from her seemingly progressive characterization as compassionate foster-mother. Indeed, Head shapes Cadmore as

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a complex figure, whose noble intention to deconstruct the local caste system is embedded within the arrogant assumption that only by displacing the young Margaret Cadmore from her ethnic culture, language and community will her foster-child be empowered and intelligent. Cadmore never considers what value or good might come from KhoiSan culture, as she is confident that positioning herself as Margaret’s mentor, along with a missionary education and an upbringing within a European context will solidify Margaret as a victorious contributor to Botswana despite treating Margaret as a “semi-servant” in the household. Naming the girl “Margaret Cadmore” is a consolidation of the missionary’s arrogance and self- centeredness, a reminder to the reader throughout the narrative, that despite Cadmore’s claims that she is committed to the young Margaret one day “helping her people,” the senior Cadmore can only imagine progress for the “Bushmen” shaped as cultural disassociation tethered to a polite subservience to whiteness. Ultimately the objective of Cadmore’s experiment is to frame colonial mimicry as empowerment for her adopted Margaret, thus a colonial Frankenstein. Ama ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections of a Blackeyedsquint is a multigenred work of fiction that follows the journey of Ghanaian protagonist, Sissie, on her travel from West Africa to Europe. Set in 1968, Aidoo’s text is a post-/neo- colonial protest narrative in that she employs a voice tinged with sardonic humor and rage to interrogate the impact of and resistance to colonialism and racism on/by the bodies and subjectivities of African people. The text performs a series of reversals to this end, as Head rewrites the travel narrative outside the bounds of European expedition and exploration: Sissie travels to Europe, gazes at white bodies in both disgust and awe, recontextualizes European history from a Pan African perspective, and passionately urges her peers in exile to return home to bring to fruition the project of decolonization. As she travels and reflects, Sissie attempts to dodge the objectifying gaze as she articulates her critique of imperialism, colonization, and white supremacy: Suddenly, she realized a woman was telling . . . her daughter: “Ja, das Schwartzed Madchen” From the little German she knew that “das Schwartze Madchen” meant “black girl.” She was somewhat puzzled.

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Black girl? Black girl? So she looked around her, really well this time. And it hit her. That all that crowd of people going and coming . . . had the colour of pickled pig parts that used to come from foreign places to the markets at home. Trotters, pig-tails, pig- ears. She looked at so many such skins together. And she wanted to vomit. Then she was ashamed of her reaction. Something pulled inside her. For the rest of her life, she was to regret this moment when she was made to notice differences in human colouring. (Aidoo 1968, 12–15)

Through Sissie’s musings, Aidoo renders the falsity of race visible yet she shows how despite its constructedness, racial difference will continue to be the scale on which the value of life is measured; the medium through which power articulates itself. Throughout the narrative, Aidoo critiques via Sissie’s poetics, the many variables of power. She grapples most overtly with science as a violent cultural mechanism enacted on the black body when she turns to the case of Clive Haupt and the use of his body in the second world heart transplant surgery as it was performed in 1968 South Africa. Having left Germany, Sissie travels to England where she reunites with her lover, and through him meets a large number of his African migrant friends studying and working in London. One cold evening she meets her “precious something” and his relative Kunle who was “practically a Londoner, having lived in that city for seven years” (Aidoo 1968, 95). Assuming that they would be preoccupied by the Biafran war in Nigeria, Sissie is surprised to find the conversation is entirely focused on “The Heart Transplant”: The evening papers had screeched the news in with the evening trains . . . Of how the Dying White Man had received the heart of a coloured man who had collapsed on the beach and how the young coloured man had allegedly failed to respond to any efforts at resuscitation and therefore his heart had been removed from his chest, the Dying White Man’s own heart having been cleaned out of his chest and how in the meantime the Dying White Man was doing well blah, blah, blah! It is funny. But among certain rural Fantis it is believed that cutting the throat of a pig is simply useless: the only way to get your good pork is to tear the heart out of the chest of a squealing pig—the louder the squeals the better the pork. The Christian Doctor’s Second Triumph. (Aidoo 1968, 95)

While Kunle eagerly celebrates the heart transplant as triumph of “SCIENCE” and “the type of development that could solve the

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question of Apartheid and the whole COLOUR Problem,” Sissie is under no such illusions (Aidoo 1968, 96). Her position reflects the tentative critiques in the US media outlets that reported the success of the transplant, but also put forward questions of race, power, and consent into widespread circulation. With a state sanctioned color- caste system thoroughly entrenched in late 1960s South Africa, and a highly visible and increasingly militant struggle for rights and self-determination by both black South Africans and African Americans in the United States, the use of a colored man’s organ to save the life of an ailing white man, made the remarkable transplant quite a newsworthy controversy for the popular media worldwide. Yet as the author of the article in the January 12, 1968 issue of Time magazine notes, in the context of apartheid, Dr Barnard faced a “delicate problem” when it was realized soon after Clive Haupt suffered a stroke and remained in critical condition—“that Haupt was of a complicated racial mixture (part white, part Bantu, part Malay, perhaps even part Hottentot, that is classified as Colored under South Africa’s race laws” (Aidoo 1968, 32). Signifying several centuries’ worth of representations of the “Hottentot,” the article reinvigorates the Western concocted primate-related Bushman. For Sara Baartman, it was her sexual organs that inspired the dehumanizing attentions of nineteenthcentury scientists, for Clive Haupt his heart made headlines. It was of utter importance that the white patient was asked if he would agree to have a Colored—perhaps even Hottentot—man’s heart. Given that from the eighteenth to early twentieth century, it had been a widespread opinion within Western scientific discourse that the European and the Hottentot were certain not to have derived from the same origin (Dubow 1995, 22), it is understandable that an optimistic opinion (such as Kunle suggests with the use Haupt’s heart in Wasinsky’s body) could be read as the dramatic demise of scientific racism. As a result, Alexandria Niewijk notes that, “foreign headlines read ‘Brothers Under the Skin’ and ‘The Heart That Knows No Color Bar’ accompanied by comments that heart transplants made nonsense of apartheid legislation” (1999, 112). When faced with ongoing ridicule from the international press regarding the irony of “a white man with a black heart” living in apartheid South Africa, a member of Nationalist Party responded by saying, “The relief of suffering knows no colour bar . . . The heart is

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merely a blood-pumping machine and whether it comes from a white, black or coloured man—or a baboon or giraffe, for that matter—has no relevance to the issue of race relations in the political or ideological context. The question of colour is not at issue here” (Malan 1968, 115). Given that whites in South Africa often used the term “monkey” to disparage the black majority, there is more than a tinge of double speak in this state-licensed commentary, nonetheless, as Sissie correctly perceives, Dr. Barnard and his medical team’s use of Haupt’s body cannot be understood outside a cultural context and a historical trajectory that deemed experimentation on the black/ KhoiSan body by European/white experts of science as acceptable and normative. Furthermore, that Haupt’s body was under surveillance and his condition was being closely monitored by Barnard’s team from the onset of his arrival at the hospital raises important questions as to whether Haupt received the comprehensive care necessary for his full recovery. Indeed, Haupt was still alive when his recent bride was asked to sign consent forms for the use of his heart in the transplant. When she collapsed, unable (and unwilling?) to sign the documents, the medical team approached Haupt’s mother, a widow due to her husband’s fatal stroke several years earlier, who agreed to donate her son’s heart. Several hours later, Haupt was pronounced dead and his heart removed. Aidoo writes, “And anyway, the Christian Doctor has himself said that in his glorious country, nigger hearts are so easy to come by . . .” (1968, 97). White, black, colored, or baboon, science as a practice and discourse has been long-invested in the construction of race and type. In a short essay published posthumously, Head states that in South Africa “there is only one race of humans . . . the white race. Anything black or tainted with black has been abhorred, detested, reviled, abused and exploited” (2007, 124). Writing during the final years of apartheid, Saul Dubow’s text, which studies the cultural impact of scientific thought in South Africa, is a powerful extension of Head’s claim, in that he illustrates that scientific racism, a foundational ideological compound in the matrix of global white supremacy, was born and institutionalized not in government buildings of Johannesburg or Cape Town, but in the intellectual chambers of European Enlightenment scholars and scientists. In those intellectual spaces, both material and discursive,

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the body of the “Hottentot,” the dehumanized KhoiSan figured prominently. As this collection attests, postcolonial and Africanist scholars continue to excavate the ways in which Sara Baartman’s experiences in Europe serve to demonstrate how scientific racism gave license to cruel and violent enactments on the KhoiSan body. However, the ongoing and often structural violence against the KhoiSan, and more broadly, on the African body, and the discourses that normalize and naturalize that violence, continue to be obscured by intellectual histories that fail to consider the role that science persistently plays in constructing racist paradigms. Despite this disinterest, or perhaps because of it, two African women writers, Head and Aidoo, use their fiction as a space to interrogate the uses of science as a mechanism to dehumanize African people. Their work, while staunchly critical of scientific racism, uses irony, sarcasm, and humor to deliver a narrative strike against long-standing assumptions that fix a dehumanizing mask cast on subjectivities and bodies of African peoples. Importantly, with Maru and Our Sister Killjoy, Head and Aidoo, remind the reader that science as a modern philosophy and cultural practice speaks volumes on how the imperial imaginings of the so-called Hottentot, and says more about whiteness and European colonial and existential anxieties, than they do about the interior lives of Sara Baartman, Clive Haupt, and the countless other Black people who continue to be the objects of scientific apartheid.

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Chapter Nine Staging the Body of the (M)other: The “Hottentot Venus” and the “Wild Dancing Bushman” Karlien van der Schyff

For many years, Sarah Bartmann, cast as the infamous “Hottentot Venus,” symbolized nineteenth-century European discourse on scientific racism and its blithe fascination with the sexualized body of the Other, especially with regard to the positioning of Khoesan genitalia. More recently, Sarah Bartmann gained fame not only as a symbolic subject of African exile and exploitation, but moreover as a South African icon of nation building and national healing. On December 15, 1995, Dr. Ben Ngubane, then South African minister of arts, culture, science and technology, released a statement to the press in which he claimed that “the return of Saartjie Baartman for a decent burial that a human being deserves would contribute to the collective sense of pride and dignity of all South Africans” (1999, 112). The subsequent funeral in 2002, described by Meg Samuelson as a “spectacle of nation building” recast Sarah Bartmann, already an iconic symbol of the exploited and dispossessed Khoesan, as a national figure of healing and homecoming, as her body “traversed . . . the imperial stage of the early nineteenth century to the nation-building theatre of the transitional era” (2007, 85). However, as both the hypersexualized “Hottentot Venus” and the postapartheid “National Mother,” Sarah Bartmann is most often cast as a symbolic representation of various cultural and academic discourses, rather than the individual Khoekhoe woman who was taken from her home and exhibited as a sideshow curiosity. Yvette Abrahams argues that “we lack academic studies that view Sarah Bartmann as anything other than a symbol. Her story becomes marginalized, as it is always used to illustrate some other topic . . .”

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(2000, 143). Many contemporary scholars have since attempted to recover Bartmann’s “true” story, either by highlighting her status as a victim of imperial racism1 or through an attempt to grant her a measure of agency.2 This chapter, however, is interested in the construction of Bartmann’s iconic status. It explores possible answers to the question as to why Bartmann came to occupy such an important place in the South African national imagination, while the names and histories of so many other exploited Khoesan were forgotten and lost. While Bartmann was without doubt the most famous Khoesan to be taken from South Africa and exhibited on stage, she was by no means the only one, yet hers is the only name that is widely remembered and commemorated as a symbolic representative of Khoesan exploitation and suffering. Annie Coombes notes that “[i]n the early part of the nineteenth century, groups of Khoisan variously described as ‘earthmen’, ‘Bosjemans’, ‘Hottentot’ or ‘Bushmen’ were popular crowd stoppers at many European traveling ‘freak’ shows” (2003, 210). Historian Neil Parsons writes that in 1826 a “ ‘genuine’ live Bushman” was exhibited at a holiday fair in Elberfeld, Germany (2009, 14). Two children, a boy of about thirteen and a girl of about six, were displayed in England from 1845 to 1847, before they were ostensibly returned to their home country. A company known as the Bosjemans, consisting of two men, two women, and a baby, traveled through Britain, Ireland, and France from 1846 to 1855 (Parsons 2009, 15). In 1852, a boy roughly fourteen years old, named Martinus, and a girl about sixteen, named Flora, were displayed in England (Parsons 2009, 15). Flora became part of P.T. Barnum’s “Little People” in America, where she was advertised as the “missing link” between apes and humans. Barnum obtained six more Khoesan from the Kalahari between 1884 and 1885 for his sideshow circus. They were also displayed at the Folies Bergère in 1886 and in Germany in 1887 (Parsons 2009, 14–15). It thus seems as if Bartmann’s exhibition sparked an “acceptable” trajectory of what Bernth Lindfors has called “ethnological show business” (1999, 207), paving the way for numerous exhibitions to follow. Moreover, exhibitions of Khoesan were by no means restricted to the nineteenth century. A group of Khoesan, known as Dave Meekin’s Pygmies, toured Australia for a staggering thirty-five years in the early twentieth century, even returning to tour South

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Africa in July 1951 (Parsons 2009, 32). As late as 1952,3 a group of Khoesan was displayed in South Africa at the Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival, presented to the public as a “primitive people on the edge of extinction” (Coombes 2003, 211). Given the number of Khoesan people displayed in Britain, Europe, Australia, America, South America, and South Africa over the course of roughly 150 years, one has to wonder why and how Bartmann’s memory came to occupy such an important place in South Africa’s national imagination, while so many other names faded into obscurity. Some measure of Bartmann’s fame (or infamy) could be attributed to the fact that she appears to have been the very first Khoesan to be taken from South Africa and exhibited in the West. However, it is doubtful that the impact of Bartmann’s legacy on the South African national imagination can be dismissed as the product of mere novelty value. It is more likely that the nature of her tragic fate, with her dissected remains still subjected to the scrutiny of strangers long after her death, might be the reason for her iconic status, especially since the discourse of nation building surrounding her funeral in 2002 focused on awarding her the dignity of a proper burial and thus sparked a veritable torrent of national empathy. However, while the extensive media coverage surrounding Bartmann’s burial certainly contributed to her iconic status, it still does not answer the question as to why Bartmann, rather than any of the other Khoesan men and women exhibited overseas, became the symbolic representative of Khoesan exploitation. For example, Parsons notes that a full-body, nude plaster cast of a Korana male, named Franz Taibosh, was on display in the American Museum of Natural History until the 1990s, when “the nude plaster figure was relegated to the storage attics . . . with obscenities scrawled around its genitalia” (2009, 91). While the cast is, of course, not Taibosh’s mortal remains, as in the Bartmann case, it is nevertheless a clear example of an exploited African body being subjected to the scrutiny of the Western “scientific” gaze. A more likely explanation for Bartmann’s iconic status might thus be found in the nature of her exhibition and in the way her body was (re)presented on stage. Very little is known about either the content of the “show” or the eventual fate of most the Khoesan exhibited in the nineteenth century. It is therefore interesting to consider the way in which recent scholars have represented and

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appropriated Bartmann’s (rather sketchy) (Euro)history in an attempt to access her “true” story, whereas the fragments of historical evidence surrounding the lives of other nineteenth- century Khoesan “performers” have not sparked nearly the same amount of academic and/or popular interest. While there is very little factual documentation of Bartmann’s life and no evidence of her own voice, her life story has become the subject of a host of academic and cultural texts, which further highlights the question as to why Bartmann became such an important symbolic representative of nineteenth- century exploitation. For example, even though Parsons notes that six Khoesan were exhibited in P.T. Barnum’s sideshow circus as “lovable Earthmen” (2009, 15) for a period of roughly four years, he nevertheless does not—or, perhaps, cannot, due to lack of information—describe either the content of the exhibition or their subsequent fate.

The Carol of “Clicko,” the “Wild Dancing Bushman” The life story of one of Barnum and Bailey’s “Earthmen” does unexpectedly crop up in Laurens van der Post’s loosely fact-based novel, A Mantis Carol (1975). In the novel, the “unconfessed spirit” of the exiled “Bushman” circus performer, Hans Taaibosch, contacts Van der Post through a series of dreams and fantastical coincidences, since Van der Post believes himself “without egotism or arrogance to be the only person alive with the kind of experience necessary” (1989, 126) to tell Hans Taaibosch’s life story and thus restore his memory. Van der Post begins Taaibosch’s tale when an unnamed American lawyer, employed by a likewise unnamed American circus, visits “a variety show in a rather shabby Kingston theatre” while on holiday in Jamaica, where he sees “Hans in the limelight, naked except for a sort of skin bikini, dancing and prancing and displaying his remarkable little figure for the delight of a bored, well-nourished and well-wined audience” (Van der Post 1989, 62). After the performance, the lawyer manages to gain entry to the dressing room, where he finds a “profoundly forlorn, sad, dejected, even humiliated little person,” who was “most unhappy and in a plight from which he had long since despaired of ever escaping” (Van der Post 1989, 62). The

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lawyer “rescues” Hans from the clutches of the “large, red-faced, beery, moustached Englishman” who was showing him in Jamaica and in whose power Hans was “as firmly as any slave of a slaveowner in the days when slavery was legal and respectable” (Van der Post 1989, 63), only to exhibit him in an American circus in turn. According to Van der Post, however, “Hans was immediately at home in it” and that the clowns mattered most to his own warm and spontaneous heart, as if in their tumbling, constant humiliation and incorrigible capacity for laughing at their misfortunes, he saw his own unrecorded fate portrayed, and thus felt accompanied, needed, wanted and so became content. (1989, 65)

A Mantis Carol is Van der Post’s highly romanticized and sometimes factually incorrect version of the life story of the Korana man mentioned earlier, named Franz, rather than Hans, Taibosh. To recount his history in brief, Franz Taibosh (Taaibosch or Taibos— literally tough bush) was most likely born between 1860 and 1870 in the Middelburg district of the Cape Colony, roughly one hundred years after the birth of Sarah Bartmann. The Taibosh family was employed by a tenant farmer named Christiaan Willem Roberts, with Franz Taibosh specifically employed as a shepherd and domestic servant (Parsons 2009, 4–5). During the South African War (1899–1902), Taibosh began his career as an entertainer, dancing for the amusement of British troops and “making a little money for Willem Roberts” (Parsons 2009, 11). After the war, severe drought made sheep farming unprofitable and Roberts became a traveling salesman, installing windmills on farms. Parsons speculates that Roberts probably took Taibosh with him on his travels, exhibiting him as a “dancing Bushman” along the way (2009, 15–16). It is also likely that Roberts exhibited Taibosh in Kimberley in 1911, when a large funfair was erected to celebrate the coronation of King George V. It was probably while in Kimberley that Taibosh was spotted by Morris “Paddy” Hepston, also known as Captain Epstein, an Irish-Jewish entertainer who “purchased” Taibosh from Roberts and convinced him to go to England with him (Parsons 2009, 17). Parsons notes that Hepston most likely painted a tantalizing picture of the world beyond Kimberley and the veldt, enticing the little Bushman with tales of a place where the most

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luscious food was plentiful, beer flowed in perpetual cascade and cigars were smoked in chain . . . a world populated by endless white “dollies,” who would be his for the taking. (2009, 21)4

Hepston exhibited Taibosh in Britain and Europe from 1913 to 1916. The performance always started with a short speech by Hepston, dressed in hunting clothes, in which he claimed to have captured Taibosh during a hunting trip in the Kalahari and then “tamed” his captive by tying him to a post and beating him six times a day. Hepston further claimed that, when putting on a gramophone record one day, he discovered to his great surprise that his “savage” could dance and thus decided to exhibit him. According to Hepston, Taibosh was the only “Bushman” still alive, that he was over a hundred years old and that he could not communicate in any language except incomprehensible clicks. Because of this, Taibosh became known as “Clicko, the Wild Dancing Bushman.” Hepston’s insistence that Taibosh could not speak any language known to man effectively meant that his voice and his own account of his experiences were not only marginalized, but completely lost. From 1916 to 1918, Hepston and Taibosh toured North America and South America. It was during this time that Taibosh met Frank Cook, the legal adjuster for the Barnum and Bailey sideshow circus and the real person behind the fictionalized American lawyer of Van der Post’s A Mantis Carol (Parsons 2009, 87). Parsons, however, gives a very different account of the first meeting between Taibosh and Cook from that of Van der Post: Frank Cook’s daughter Barbara has confirmed that her father first learnt about Franz Taibosh from William Mann, who excitedly brought the Wild Dancing Bushman to Cook’s attention . . . Cook was persuaded to rush down to Havana [. . .] to sign up this peerless new attraction for the Barnum & Bailey circus sideshow. Because of the war in Europe, there was a shortage of new circus acts and of “freaks” in particular . . . (2009, 88)

Cook’s initial interest in Franz Taibosh thus seems to have stemmed more from a keen business sense than from his “New England conscience” being “repelled” by the “arrogant and contemptuous” (Van der Post 1989, 62) nature of the Kingston audience and show. Van der Post was, however, correct in depicting Taibosh

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as unhappy in Hepston’s care, since Hepston did not really concern himself with Taibosh’s welfare and comfort. On Wednesday, December 11, 1918, Cook and his chauffeur broke into Hepston’s unheated apartment, where they found Taibosh huddling semi-naked under a horse blanket in a bare room, looking miserably cold and ill-fed, with the bones left over from previous meals scattered across the floorboards . . . They wrapped him up in Frank’s fur coat, and carried him downstairs and outside to the car. (Parsons 2009, 107)5

In 1919, Cook became Taibosh’s legal guardian. From then onward, Taibosh worked for Barnum and Bailey, spending the winter months of the circus off-season with the Cook family (Parsons 2009, 118–119). Even though the above-mentioned depiction seemingly serves to highlight the extent of Hepston’s abuse, it is also significant that when Cook intervened, he carried Taibosh out of Hepston’s care, immediately inscribing Taibosh in a vulnerable and childlike position and casting Cook as the one in power. The image can be read as an accurate summary of their relationship; while Cook undoubtedly took care of Taibosh, he also controlled Taibosh’s money, infantilizing an adult man to the extent that he could not even be in charge of his own earnings. Taibosh was also billed as a loveable, childlike clown figure in Barnum and Bailey, further highlighting the extent of his infantilization. While the Cook family never cast Taibosh in the role of domestic servant or child-minder, they nevertheless had complete control over his money. Parsons notes that “in return for Taibosh’s summer pay minus pocket money,6 Cook would provide Taibosh with a winter home” (2009, 118). Even after Frank Cook’s death, Taibosh’s salary was sent to his wife, Evelyn Cook, rather than to Taibosh himself. On his deathbed, Cook asked his wife to give Taibosh the choice of returning to South Africa if he so wished. “Instead,” Parsons notes, “Franz chose to stay in America and pursue the only career he knew. He enjoyed the security of the circus and its sideshow, and he took very seriously the idea that he was now ‘the man’ in the depleted Cook household” (2009, 166). Shortly before his own death in 1940, Taibosh was baptized and received into the Roman Catholic Church. He died on August 31of congestive heart failure

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and is buried with Cook’s daughter, Frances Cook-Sullivan, in New York (Parsons 2009, 195). While Van der Post depicts the character of Hans Taaibosch as a passive, naïve victim, Parsons writes that “the picture that emerges from Franz Taibosh’s later career in America is far more complex. He was perfectly capable of making vital decisions, notably his decision not to go back to Africa, but to stay on with the CookSullivan family” (2009, 197). Also, while his earlier career with Hepston was marked by ill-treatment and neglect, his later career with Barnum and Bailey, and, most importantly, his inclusion into the Cook-Sullivan household, seems to have provided Taibosh, by all accounts, with a comfortable lifestyle. Family photographs of Taibosh on holiday with Barbara and Evelyn Cook, for example, show him to very much a part of their family: included, cared for, and cherished. While there is no doubt that Taibosh suffered exploitation and humiliation in the West, it also seems as if he was able to retain a sense of his humanity and to make a relatively content life for himself.

Staging the Body/the Body on Stage While there are obvious and substantial differences between the lives of Taibosh and Bartmann, quite apart from the fact that they were exhibited roughly a hundred years apart, their respective time in the West also share a number of corresponding events. For example, both were subjected to the scrutiny of European scientists; Bartmann was examined by Georges Cuvier, Henri De Blainville and Ėtienne Saint-Hillaire at the Museum of Natural History in Paris in 1815 (Crais and Scully 2009, 134–135), while Taibosh was examined by W. H. L. Duckworth at the Anthropological Laboratory at Cambridge in 1913 (Parsons 2009, 46) and again by J. Kirchner at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1918 (Parsons 2009, 90). Furthermore, humanitarian societies argued that both Bartmann and Taibosh were being exploited by their managers; Zachary Macauley, a leading abolitionist, concerned himself with Bartmann’s case in November 1810, inquiring whether or not she “willingly made a ‘public spectacle’ of herself or ‘whether she was compelled to exhibit herself’ ” (Crais and Scully 2009, 83), while in 1915, John Harris of the Aborigines’

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Protection Society investigated claims that Hepston was abusing and exploiting Taibosh (Parsons 2009, 60). The most significant similarity between Taibosh and Bartmann, however, is the likelihood that they were both already exhibited by their respective employers while still living in South Africa. As was already noted, Parsons believes that Willem Roberts exhibited Taibosh as a “dancing Bushman” in the early twentieth century, while Crais and Scully speculate that Hendrik Cezar began showing Bartmann to sailors in the naval hospital in Cape Town in 1808 (2003, 50). While there is no concrete evidence to support either claim, both Roberts and Cezar were poor, struggling to make ends meet, and might very well have relied on the additional income made by exhibiting their “slaves/servants.” It is thus noteworthy that both Taibosh and Bartmann were already used to being subjected to inquisitive, prying eyes, long before they left for England. One could even speculate that neither of them might have ended up overseas had their employers not first exhibited them in South Africa and, in so doing, brought them to the attention of the men who would eventually took them to England. Furthermore, even though Taibosh and Bartmann are popularly represented as young, naïve victims, they would, in fact, have been roughly in their thirties if exhibited in South Africa, which suggests that they would have understood very well what a life on the stage might entail once they left for England. While Parsons and Crais and Scully respectively try to argue that both Taibosh and Bartmann were not simply childlike, inexperienced victims, but rather mature adults who would have understood the nature of their exploitation, one still has to point out that neither of them would have had the social and political agency to control or avoid these exhibitions, even if they might have understood very well what a life on stage would entail. The precise nature of their exploitation is, however, one of the most important differences between their exhibitions and is closely connected to gendered representations of the African body. Even though Bartmann and Taibosh were exhibited a hundred years apart, both the nineteenth- century “freak show” and the early twentieth-century American circus, with its accompanying sideshow, were grounded in the construction of representations of racial and sexual otherness. The very word “show,” both in terms of the “freak show,” and the sideshow, highlights the constructed

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nature of these public spectacles, in which people were represented in certain stereotypical ways. The different stereotypes to which Bartmann and Taibosh were subjected, however, form the most crucial difference between their exhibitions; the difference between their “shows” is therefore not necessarily dependent on the different historical periods in which they were exhibited, but rather rests on the important fact that Taibosh’s body was never cast in the trope of hypersexuality, as Bartmann’s was. In Bartmann’s case, Abrahams argues that the nineteenth century was the heyday of the freak show. The industrial revolution had irrevocably changed the world of the British lower orders. The freak show, and its accompanying penny prints and advertising leaflets, was one of the many ways in which the disruption of the social fabric was made to seem a normal, almost enviable, state of life. (2000, 123)

She also notes that these “freak shows” had a very specific racial dimension, and that Africans were always represented as “bestial” and “savage” (Abrahams 2000, 124). Furthermore, as the early nineteenth century was characterized by Europe’s pseudoscientific obsession with race and its associated discourse of Eugenics, Bartmann’s exhibition would have provided so-called proof of European “superiority” and African “inferiority.” However, Bartmann’s body was (re)presented in terms of racial and sexual Otherness. Abrahams notes, for example, that the “penny prints circulated prior to [Bartmann’s] exhibition were almost overwhelmingly male, and while they represented Blacks as poor and degraded, they did not stress [their] sexual nature” (1998, 226). It thus seems as if Bartmann’s exhibition was not only the first time that a Khoesan woman was shown on the European stage, but also the first time that the “freak show” cast the black female body in the trope of “deviant” hypersexuality. Sander Gilman’s widely anthologized (and also widely criticized) article on Bartmann suggests ideas around the construction of Bartmann’s body as an icon of sexual otherness in the following way: The antithesis of European sexual mores and beauty is embodied in the Black, and the essential Black, the lowest rung on the great chain of being, is the Hottentot. The physical appearance of the Hottentot is, indeed, the central nineteenth- century icon for sexual difference between the European and the Black. (1985, 231)

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Bartmann’s body thus became a symbolic icon of the way in which not only European scientific and medical discourse, but also quite often literary discourse constructs images of Otherness. Taibosh, on the other hand, was performing during the golden age of the American circus, caught up in the excitement and thrills of the big top. Even though he was billed as an attraction in a sideshow and was thus seen as an “exhibit” to a great extent, he was famous for his ability to dance “with tireless energy” (Parsons 2009, 40), according to a contemporary newspaper review, rather than simply displaying his body as an example of racial and sexual Otherness. Nonetheless, advertisements for his dance performance drew on racist stereotypes of Africans as “wild” and “savage,” still strongly reminiscent of nineteenth century “freak shows,” while Taibosh himself was forced to pander to demeaning racial stereotypes. While still under Hepston’s management, Taibosh was advertised as a simple-minded savage who loved dancing so much that he would simply continue until he collapsed from exhaustion. A postcard sold after the show depicts him in a loincloth, sitting in the branches of a thorn tree. He does not face the camera, but stares into the distance with his mouth slightly open and an unfocused, “wild” expression on his face. Across the bottom of the postcard, the words “Yours faithfully, The Wild Dancing Bushman” are scrawled in white ink (Parsons 2009, 35). The entire image plays on, and thus also strengthens, a perception of the so-called uncivilized and savage African male. Even more racially demeaning is an advertisement for the show, published in 1914: CAPT. EPSTEIN presents THE WILD Dancing Bushman Captured in the wilds of South Africa First specimen of THE MOST PRIMITIVE RACE ever brought before the public. His hair stretches like elastic. A natural Ragtime Dancer. Wild, Weird and Wonderful. Danced for eight hours Continuously, a feat which has never been equaled. The Bushman is nearly 100 Years of Age. Don’t fail to see this unique specimen of human nature. EXAMINED

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BY THE UNIVERSITY AUTHORITIES OF CAMBRIDGE, And pronounced to be genuine. (Parsons 2009, 56)

When he joined Barnum and Bailey, he was recast as a lovable, if still rather feeble-minded, childlike, and cuddly clown-figure. In both cases, though, his body was never displayed as a sexualized object. A poster dating from his time with Barnum and Bailey shows Taibosh wearing a long, leopard-print smock that covers his knees, sturdy leather boots and ankle socks.7 While the fake leopard-print robe draws on a stereotypical image of the “wild” African, his body is nevertheless completely covered and is never displayed as some supposed “evidence” of “deviant” African sexuality. While this clearly illustrates that Taibosh was, without doubt, exploited and forced to pander to demeaning racial stereotypes, it also shows that his body was never cast in the trope of hypersexuality. This fact cannot be dismissed as a mere product of the different historical times in which Bartmann and Taibosh were performing, but rather shows how the female body is often cast as a sexualized object, while the male body—even an exploited and powerless male such as Taibosh—is still preserved, to some extent, by a patriarchal discourse of sexual superiority. Further evidence for this claim can be found in the fate of a group of Ubangi women8 exhibited in the Barnum and Bailey sideshow at the same time as Taibosh. Like Bartmann, they were exhibited only at the level of corporeal difference and performed topless.9 The women had come to America to earn money for their children, but they were lonely, homesick, and incredibly unhappy in the circus, and longed to go home. However, the Ubangi women were managed by a male patriarch from their village, who controlled their money and would not let them return for two years. Taibosh disliked the Ubangi women, perhaps feeling threatened by them. His own attitude to women was grounded in an unmistakably patriarchal point of view that saw women primarily as either maternal figures or sexualized objects and, sometimes, both at the same time. Apparently, when asked what kind of woman he preferred, Taibosh would always shout: “A big fat mama!” (Parsons 2009, 133). Once, while in London, a South African named Malherbe asked Taibosh what he thinks9 about when he sits on stage. According to Malherbe, Taibosh replied: “Oh Baas, just of

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food and women (‘kos en meide’ [a racist term for colored women])” (Parsons 2009, 152). One does not know whether or not Malherbe invented this little exchange. If it were true, however, even more telling than Taibosh’s appropriation of such a casual, ingrained racism, as well as his blatant sexism, would be the fact that he would think of women and food on equal terms—two utterly inert objects for consumption and pleasure. A woman named Dorothy Herbert recalled Taibosh as “a pest to have around,” noting that “he had an awful habit of suddenly running up behind ladies and pinching them, then jumping up and down and laughing” (Parsons 2009, 162). Parsons also notes that “a less charitable view [of Taibosh] might see him as a failure in life and love, reduced to a bottom-pinching old pest: his grabbing and pestering of women was obviously sexually aggressive, rather than just a longing for feminine solace” (2009, 195). The most significant difference between Bartmann and Taibosh can thus be found in the different and obviously gendered representations of male and female bodies on stage, underpinned by patriarchal perceptions of the corporeal. It is telling that even a dispossessed and exploited male, such as Taibosh, was still able to present himself as, in his own words, an “American gentleman” (Parsons 2009, 133), while Bartmann was cast as a “sexualized savage.” It is equally telling that we have a record of Taibosh’s own words, and that, as a “gentleman,” he was able to claim a (masculine) space of personhood and agency, even when portrayed in terms of racist stereotypes. Bartmann’s words, on the other hand, were always mediated by the European men who effectively controlled/owned her, which meant that her account of her life was silenced and eventually completely lost. This goes some way toward explaining Bartmann’s and Taibosh’s widely differing reactions to the experience of being on stage. Bartmann is said to have “heave(d) deep sighs in the course of [her] exhibition, and displayed great sullenness of temper” (Samuelson 2007, 86). According to a contemporary spectator, Bartmann was “exhibited on a stage two feet high, along which she was led by her keeper, and exhibited like a wild beast; being obliged to walk, stand, or sit as he ordered her” (Samuelson 2007, 86). It seems as if the exhibition entailed nothing more than what the word itself suggests—an exhibition of the “deviant,” hypersexualized Other, being displayed by, notably, a white man in control of the black

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female body. The word “keeper” is significant, as it suggests a complete lack of freedom on her part; like an animal. According to Parsons, Taibosh, on the other hand, began to enjoy circus life when he joined Barnum and Bailey in the summer of 1918 and that he “relished being such an attraction in the Big Show” (2009, 104). However, even though Taibosh seemingly enjoyed his performance, it was nonetheless demeaning and propagated racial stereotypes of Africans. Van der Post’s condescending image of the “tumbling, constant humiliation and incorrigible capacity for [laughter]” (1989, 65) of the fictive clowns thus becomes a surprisingly apt depiction of the humiliation Taibosh must have suffered as Barnum and Bailey’s ridiculous clown-figure. However, when one compares Taibosh’s circus experience to that of Bartmann’s, or even to that of the Ubangi women, it is clear that, as a man, Taibosh was never seen as a hypersexualized body. As a fellow man, Taibosh could accompany Frank Cook to parties and events; they shared the same food, the same drink and made use of the same brothels (Parsons 2009, 117–119)—a liberty that was never extended to the Ubangi women. Also, because of the long tradition of Western assumptions about black female sexuality, intimately connected to Bartmann’s exhibition, the Ubangi women could only be seen as sexualized bodies, whereas Taibosh, as a man, could escape the debilitation inherent in patriarchal perceptions of the corporeal. Even though Taibosh was cast as Cook’s humorous “side-kick” on these occasions, which was, in itself, the same demeaning role he played in the circus as the loveable, feebleminded clown-figure, he was still able to exert a small measure of agency and freedom, whereas Bartmann could only “heave deep sighs” as small, silent indications of her own agency.10 It is telling that when Van der Post wanted to portray the character Hans Taaibosch as a victim, he immediately described him in terms of his sexualized body, “naked except for a sort of skin bikini” while “displaying his remarkable little figure” (1989, 62). In general, Van der Post portrays the Khoesan physique in highly sexualized terms, describing “steatopygia” as “the satiny creases where [the] smooth buttocks joined [the] supple legs,” noting the “tablier égyptien” of the women and “semi-erect position” of the male genitalia, laughing “with affectionate pride and wonder that our native earth should have produced so unique a little human body” (Van der Post 1964, 13–14)—using, in short, the kind of

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sexualized imagery and condescending language that invariably leads to complete objectification of the Khoesan body. However, it is noteworthy that he only utilizes these sexualized images in terms of victimhood, but when he wants to restore the dignity of his character, he rather draws on a Jungian (if rather mystical) discourse of rationality, clearly illustrating the underlying patriarchal stereotypes often encountered in representations of the corporeal, which equates the female body with the trope of hypersexuality, and masculinity with rationality. The reasons for Sarah Bartmann’s iconic status are myriad and very difficult to reduce to simple, clear- cut facts. Many scholars have grappled with her history, her tragic fate, her status as, firstly, the “Hottentot Venus,” the symbolic Other, as well as, secondly, her status as an iconic representative of Khoesan suffering. However, one cannot help but wonder why there are so many scholarly and literary works devoted to Bartmann, when there are hardly any on, for example, Franz Taibosh. In a fascinating article on the nature of the construction of Bartmann’s status as the “Hottentot Venus,” Zine Magubane also begs the question as to why Bartmann specifically “has been made to function in contemporary academic debates as the preeminent example of racial and sexual alterity” (2001, 830). Magubane suggests that contemporary scholars are, in fact, “the ones that threaten to finally succeeded in transforming the ‘Hottentot Venus’ into the central nineteenth-century icon for racial and sexual difference between the European and the Black” (2001, 832), and that it is scholarly analysis—or, in Magubane’s opinion, misanalysis—which confers such iconic status onto Bartmann’s body. Since contemporary scholars most often cast Bartmann’s body as an example of either the hypersexualized black female body or that of the new South African “National Mother,” representations of her body are utilized in the service of a specific discourse, be it to illustrate how the language of colonial, “scientific” racism constructs Otherness or to legitimize the project of nation-building. In both cases, however, the tropes of hypersexuality and motherhood are indicative of patriarchal assumptions about the female body and could suggest why, in the case of Bartmann and Taibosh, a woman would function as a symbolic representation of the Other, when even a powerless and disposed man could maintain a semblance of agency.11

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When one compares the histories of Sarah Bartmann and Franz Taibosh, one can clearly see how the female body is cast as a sexualized object, while the male body is preserved by a patriarchal discourse of sexual superiority. One could thus attempt to explain Bartmann’s iconic status in terms of the gendered tropes of sexuality and motherhood through which the female body is so often presented in both literature and the media. As Bartmann’s body is popularly cast as both the helpless female victim, exploited at the level of her hypersexualized body by colonial and imperial racism and then “saved” by (mostly male) politicians, as well as the National Mother of the “new” South Africa, this discourse could not profit by depictions of male bodies that are neither in need of rescue nor able to nurture the new nation state. In other words, Bartmann’s status as both the “Hottentot Venus” and the “National Mother” rely on assumptions about the sexualized nature of the black female body and, accordingly, Taibosh’s patriarchal agency would be of little use in the construction of these symbolic references. Even Bartmann’s resilience and small acts of agency is of little use to a discourse of national healing and homecoming, which needs her to be the Other, the National Mother, and very little else.

Notes 1. See Yvette Abrahams, “Colonialism, Dysfunction and Dysjuncture: The Historiography of Sarah Bartmann” (2000) and “Images of Sara Bartmann: Sexuality, Race and Gender in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain” (1998), as well as Zola Maseko’s documentary The Life and Times of Sara Baartman (1998). 2. See Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (2009) and Rachel Holmes, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman, Born 1789– Buried 2002 (2007). 3. The 1950s also saw the beginning of the construction of the South African Museum’s infamous “Bushmen Diorama,” using casts of Khoesan men and women made between 1907 and 1924 by anthropologist James Drury. One can only imagine the amount of hideous scrutiny, humiliation, and manhandling the Khoesan had to endure while Drury measured and made casts of their genital organs, especially since Drury notes that “on separating the lips of the vulva it was easy to grasp the labia minora with a pair of forceps and pull them out for examination” (quoted in Coombes 2003, 217).

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4. This description was related to Parsons by Barbara Cook, who knew Taibosh when she was a child. It is highly unlikely that Taibosh would have told young Barbara that he was lured from South Africa by the promise of plentiful alcohol, cigars, and sex, and it is even more unlikely that Hepston would realistically have promised Taibosh that he could have as many white women as he wanted. One has to conclude that this description is, most likely, an imaginary exchange invented by Barbara Cook. It is telling that even someone who knew, and by all accounts loved, Taibosh, would imagine that an African man would want nothing better than to have sexual access to as many white women as he wished. 5. Parsons speculates that this description might have been invented by Frank Cook, so that he could have a valid “excuse” for removing Taibosh from Hepston’s care and could therefore exert control over Taibosh’s career and future himself (107). 6. Even the word “pocket money” casts Taibosh as inexperienced and naïve, and thus in need of a “father figure” who could manage his finances for him. 7. Images of Taibosh dating from his time with Barnum and Bailey can be viewed online at http://www.missioncreep.com/mundie/gallery /clico.jpg (accessed September 2, 2009) and http://cape-slavery-heritage .iblog.co.za/2009/08/25/clicko-the- story- of-franz-taaibosch-yesterdays - caster-semenya/ (accessed September 2, 2009). 8. The Ubangi women were a group of thirteen “plate-lipped” women from Ubangi- Chari in French Equatorial Africa, the later Central African Republic. They were so unhappy in America that two of the women tried to commit suicide by throwing themselves in front of automobiles. They were exhibited in America from 1930 to 1932 before returning to Africa (Parsons 2009, 142–143, 148). 9. One immediately has to add that, in many African cultures, women often bare their breasts in an effort to shame men. Parson notes that “when [the Ubangi women] were angry they sometimes stripped off their tops to shame the offender” (143). However, in the context of their exhibition, the men who controlled the circus obviously ordered them to perform topless, drawing on the same stereotype of the “sexualized savage” that characterized Bartmann’s exhibition. It is thus ironic that by ordering the Ubangi women to perform topless, the circus managers objectified them in a manner that would otherwise have been a marker of female rebellion and agency. 10. It is important to note that Malherbe assumed that Taibosh would be thinking on stage, whereas this was never assumed in Bartmann’s case. No record exists of her thoughts or her words while on stage. Even though this exchange might have been invented, it still illustrates the fact that a man would immediately grant another man the potential agency of independent thought, even while being exhibited as a curiosity. 11. The Ubangi women’s options for rebellion were equally limited; they could either bare their breasts to men who already saw them as nothing more than sexualized objects or they could attempt to end their lives.

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Chapter Ten Under Cuvier’s Microscope: The Dissection of Michelle Obama in the Twenty-First Century Natasha Gordon- Chipembere

Who might be a part of a terrorist cell? ... Whose fist-knocks may summon the devil from hell? ... Michelle Rah! Rah! Smear! Rah! Rah! “A Smear- Cheer for Michelle Obama” (Trillin 2008, 6)

*** Ludicrous as the opinion may seem, I do not think an oran- outang husband would be any dishonour to a Hottentot female; for what are those Hottentot. They are, say the most credible writers, a people very stupid and very brutal. In many respects they are more like beast than men; their complexion dark, they are short and thick-set, their noses flat, like those of a Dutch dog; their lips very thick and big their teeth exceedingly white, but long, and ill set, some of them sticking out of their mouth like boars tusks; their hair black, and curled like wool . . . taking all things together, one of the meanest nations on the face of the earth. (Long 1774, 353)

This is the language one engages when climbing the precipitous slope connecting the legacy of the colonial [British and Dutch] “encounter” with the KhoiSan peoples of Southern Africa in the fifteenth century with contemporary popular culture discourse on the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama. My chapter posits two arguments, namely that nineteenth- century

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European scientific racism etched a language that became the cornerstone for representations of Sarah Baartman, which in effect was transferred onto millions of African and African disaporic women’s bodies, culminating in the current display, discussion, and dissection (ala Cuvier) of Michelle Obama. Secondly, I suggest that Michelle Obama has succeeded in disrupting this lens and language through the ownership of her body. The last two years (2008–2010) of international media flurry has solidified the schizophrenic relationship the North has had with black femininity. Placed on the dissection table of the Western gaze, Michelle Obama’s body has been serrated with questions of her human-ness by the simple nature of her black womanhood (Barack Obama’s dissection is not nearly the same as Michelle’s and gender plays a central role in the difference. See Karlien van der Schyff’s (chapter 9) for a focused discussion of gender and exhibition spaces). As First Lady, Michelle Obama has been left to defend herself in the face of, what I consider some of the most insidious, racist castings of the twenty-first century. She has been charged with epithets ranging from being “ape-like” to a “terrorist” to a “bitter, angry Black woman” to President Obama’s “baby mama.” These blatantly disrespectful, linguistic cartwheels have reached profound and frightening proportions. The most startling is the fact that such discourse, in both print media and the blogosphere, exist without someone pulling in the reigns. Michelle Obama’s final months on the presidential campaign trail with her husband and his first year in office produced a plethora of voices who indulged in the absolute freedom of airing their most intimate, racially disparate thoughts without censure. Historically in the North, very few had the ability to protect the black woman’s body, especially in the hands of white ownership. Michelle Obama has taken on the fight and thus far she remains a disquieting figure among mainstream narratives of perceived black womanhood. With her class status and education, Michelle Obama becomes an elusive and thus a troubling figure to mediate and control. Thereby, the mere possibility of her presence as First Lady warranted such a reactionary response, one that continues to equate her with her enslaved forebears of two centuries ago, despite her modernity.

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I suggest here that the negative, visceral reaction to the possibility of her as First Lady and the later celebratory role as “fashionista” and domestic “Mom-in- Chief” are all part of a silencing, insidious trajectory of objectifying her in ways that most white first ladies (besides Hillary Clinton who was rendered masculine) have escaped. Michelle Obama’s blackness distinguishes her and makes her body (one that has been historically viewed as available and expendable), the landscape upon which the American public inscribes their most virulent frustrations about the emerging power of blackness and the possibilities about the “end” of whiteness. Though many assert that with the election of Barack Obama the United States has moved into a “post-Black”/nonracial sensibility, clearly the particular attacks made on the body of Michelle Obama indicate that race and racism in the United States remain at its core. I find much of this troubling public response surrounding Michelle Obama’s Green Garden agenda and “Let’s Move” program for fighting Childhood Obesity. People do not know what to do with her! Michelle Obama has unconditionally claimed her body as whole, as beautiful, as black and without shame (see Gabeba Baderoon’s chapter 4 on black women and shame for a fuller discussion) while planting lettuce in the White House garden or making football moves in partnership with FIFA and South Africa’s World Cup’s reps in Washington, DC during March 2010. The statement is clear—Michelle Obama owns her body. She is also in a consistent struggle with those who have historically assumed the ownership over black womanhood (from the colonial male gaze to Cuvier’s dissection of Sarah Baartman to the Trans-Atlantic slavery to the modern day genital testing of South African track star, Caster Semenya). I suggest this is a brazenly defiant statement in the face of a Western gaze whose underbelly pines with the desire to metaphorically lynch her. In owning her personhood and serving as an active agent of her blackness, Michelle Obama uses the tactic of responding to these attacks through action, reminding others of her humanity, which is in constant question because of her blackness. I ultimately suggest that Michelle Obama disrupts this trajectory of dehumanization, through a direct movement from an assumed silence to implicit, directed, and historically and culturally grounded “alter” acts of celebration and liberation.

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Oh, Sarah Baartman Jennifer Morgan notes that the British representation of African (Khoisan) women’s bodies, in particular their genitalia, became part of a larger racialized ideology of difference: Confronted with an African they needed to exploit, European writers turned to black women as evidence of a cultural inferiority that ultimately became encoded as racial difference. Monstrous bodies became enmeshed with savage behavior as the icon of women’s breasts [and genitals] became evidence of tangible barbarism. (1997, 192)

The Khoisan peoples (comprising many nations including Khoi, San, Griqua, and Quena) are indigenous to the Southern African region. The general European perception of these people was that they were stammerers, and thought to have no language, voice, or literary traditions. Essentially, they were beasts, thus informing the conditions under which Baartman was subjected. The presumption of inferiority about the Khoisan people by the Dutch and British led to eventual genocide. Pieterse further states, “Speculation amongst naturalists about the missing link dated from the beginning of the eighteenth century . . . and it was the Hottentot . . . [whom many scientists] considered to be the missing link between apes and humans” (1992, 41). S.G. Morton, in 1839, labeled the Hottentots as the “nearest approximation to the lower animals . . . the women are presented by [European travelers] as even more repulsive in appearance than men” (quoted in Wiss 1994, 13). German writer, Gotthold Lessing wrote in 1766: Everyone knows how filthy the Hottentots are and how many things they consider beautiful and elegant and sacred which with us awaken disgust and aversion. A flattened cartilage of a nose, flabby breasts hanging down to the navel, the whole body smeared with a cosmetic of goats fat and soot gone rotten in the sun, the hair dripping with grease, arms and legs bound about with fresh entrails. (Quoted in Aduonum 2004, 290)

Here begins a documented entry point for the black body that must be controlled and contained; Michelle Obama struggles against its legacy, as she attempts to define new terms of black personhood. The uncontrollable, wild black body lingers in contemporary

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perceptions of black women’s sexuality throughout the African Diaspora, which by default brought their humanity into question. As European naturalist discourses, which codified racial difference, gained strength in the nineteenth century, new categories were constructed in which one’s morality and humanity were linked with one’s biological makeup. Wiss concludes “by such a process the sexual difference of Hottentot women came to signify a form of racialised difference so extreme as to create a new, and devalued racial type” (2005, 11). The “classical” European body was morally sound by virtue of its civility. The grotesque body, in this case Baartman’s, was designated to the margins, a nightmarish construction external to the “normal” European form. According to Wiss The classical body—as closed, homogeneous, and symmetrical—came to be perceived as marking out the identity of progressive rationalism itself. These binarily opposed body types constructed the ideal bourgeois self as individual, progressively rational and self-contained against the body of the outsider as plural, regressive and incomplete. (1994, 12)

Thus the non-European, captured, labeled, and exhibited, was viewed within these categories of difference and pathology that lent permission to the “salvaging” work of European colonialists and others who sought to save the souls of “wretched” Africans. Baartman’s otherness fixed firm the European positionality of being the norm. Baartman, not seen as an individual woman with a voice or history, became the entryway to a “systemized radical otherness—the exotic and foreign other as an example of [her] race” (Wiss 1994, 13). Rendered monstrous, the “Hottentot Venus” was a fabrication based on what was beyond the intellectual limits of Europeans at the time. Baartman/Venus is a myth necessary for the European imaginings of righteous self-representation and morality. Qureshi explains how Cuvier’s writing and observations of Baartman contain their own pornoerotic perspective: During the [three day] examination at the Jardin de Plantes, Cuvier pleaded with Baartman to allow an examination of her tablier; but she refused and took great care to preserve her modesty. Cuvier only succeeded when her cadaver lay before him. His meticulous description of

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the tablier, including its length, thickness, and appearance folded and unfolded, takes up a long passage that is graphic and violating . . . and makes clear that Cuvier’s attempt in scientific resolution of the tablier was a personal triumph. (2004, 243)

Hobson adds that the European fascination with Baartman’s buttocks and genitals were not for scientific purposes as much as they were for hidden erotic desire (see Ilaria Oddenino’s discussion on pornography and the erotic in chapter 7) where white audiences, both male and female, projected their own sexual desires to exploit the black female body as a means to create racial superiority. Sheila Meintjes adds: The history of this woman’s life is one saga of the humiliation and brutality of the colonial experience. It captures the bizarre fascination of colonial scientists with the anatomical differences between racial types . . . scientific racism. (2002, 1)

The black female body became a location for the forbidden. These notions continue to be etched into the language used in Western popular discourse on the body of Michelle Obama; two hundred years later, one encounters a black female body as a site for the unspoken, forbidden, monstrous, and hypersexual, the body that needs to be “redeemed” (or killed) by the civilized observers in the media, acting as mouthpieces for the American (and world) public. Indeed the media, using the “world” as shorthand, disguises the extent to which intellectuals and journalists assume to know/represent public opinion, when in fact they shape the way people are thinking on an issue. Media analysts drew attention to Michelle Obama’s physique and made it a necessary problem for the average person to absorb and dissect.

The Metaphorical Lynching of Michelle Obama Because of her sudden (and may I suggest highly unexpected) emergence onto the international public stage, Michelle Obama, as potential First Lady, had no place within the imagination of the dominant culture. Caught unawares, the immediate visceral response to Michelle Obama, as black woman, as educated, as

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intelligent wife and mother, was rage. How dare she?! In the freedom of cyberspace, a viral lynching (see image at http://kathmanduk2 .wordpress.com/2008/05/23/michelle- obama-lynching-from-the -dailykos/) began of Michelle Obama as she was “exhibited” in cartoons, dissected across front covers, and made “terrorist” in newspaper headlines.1 The alacrity with which, in particular, the American media sunk its frothing teeth onto the body of Michelle Obama, I suggest, is equally as severe as what Baartman’s body experienced under Cuvier’s microscope and dissecting knife. It is this particular language, etched into Western racist/sexist scientific memory, which supplied the unrestrained approval that the universal exhibition of the African/diasporic black woman’s body was par for the course, dead or alive as it was with Cuvier and other Naturalists in 1815. From “liberal” scholars to political pundits to journalists to bloggers, there were no barriers between those who had the right to engage the body of Michelle Obama. Her body and therefore her person, as black woman, becomes the territory of all those who could see it, access it, and dissect it. Who protected Michelle Obama’s personhood/body during the Obama Campaign and subsequent first year as First Lady? Why did some Americans feel they were within their First Amendment rights to display a cartoon lynching Michelle Obama? The image has a Ku Klux Klan–based warning intimated that the black body, in this case Michelle Obama’s, was always the property of whiteness and one false step beyond its boundaries would lead directly to the noose and tree.2 Concurrently and reminiscent of the now infamous caricatures and aquatints of Baartman in London circa 1810, Michelle and Barack Obama made the front cover of The New Yorker magazine in July 2008. Michelle, dressed in army fatigues, sporting an Angela Davis–inspired afro and holding an AK47 issues the famous “terrorist fist bump” to her husband, indicating their associations with all that is “foreign,” “evil,” “anti-American,” “Islamic/ non- Christian,” and ultimately subhuman. The media was at war with these black people who presumptuously felt they too could have a space in the American landscape of power and wealth. The visual representation and the assumptions undergirding this image was that Michelle Obama was the initiator of the fall from grace, like Eve bearing the apple. After much damage control around intention and humor, The New Yorker quickly removed the image,

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though it was forever a visual imprint of what the media wanted to shape around the Obama ascension into the most powerful couple “in the free world.”

Sarah Baartman’s Legacy in the Twenty-First Century A legacy of demeaning Western representations of black women’s bodies continues well into the twenty-first century. Sadly, many African diasporic women have internalized this oppressive stance, which, similar to Cuvier’s methods with Baartman’s postmortem body, neatly dissects their body parts in order to attract—and possibly gain stardom from—a capitalistic male gaze. Most apparently involved in this process are contemporary African American models and music video “dancers.”3 Though many black women identify with the historical figure of Sarah Baartman, questions about the beauty potential of the black female body remain. Today, black female bodies are widely excluded from the Western dominant discourse’s celebration of beauty, yet visible in marginalized, sexualized forums, namely hip-hop music videos and black male magazines that are semipornographic in nature. Contemporary black male hip-hop artists and white producers corroborate with historical myths of the hypersexualized black woman’s body, refusing to challenge ideas of “grotesque” or “deviant” black female sexuality. These men, in an attempt to capitalize on black women’s bodies, which are already encoded with a legacy of lascivity, reduce black women to one essential body part: their buttocks. From 2 Live Crew’s 1989 album “As Nasty as They Wanna Be” to SirMixaLot’s 1992 rap, “Baby got Back,” hip-hop has sanctioned the pornographic exhibition of fragmented black women’s bodies through the mainstream music industry. Inherent in this exhibition is the implicit act of silencing black women and their realities; they are simply body parts of sexual fantasies. History repeats itself. What I argue here are two major points, namely that a eurocentric gaze continues to objectify and exhibit African and diasporic women’s bodies, marked from the legacy of Sarah Baartman’s exhibited body (alive and dead). This racist, patriarchal “othering” has sought to undermine and silence any resistance by black women. Secondly, I suggest that there is

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no other contemporary Western discourse most encroached in this language of dissection and silencing as that found around Michelle Obama. It is this language of deviance and hypersexuality that has permeated media and the blog space without discretion. The American public, which initially hated Michelle Obama during the campaign because of her perceived “anti-Americanism,” has now shifted to a collective “ohhhhh and ahhhh,” celebrating now the most “famous” and “beautiful” woman in the “free world.” What is most interesting is that in more superficial and current public popular culture discourse on Michelle Obama, she has now been set apart from other black women in order to be diffused and “digestible’ to the dominant culture (essentially silenced). A closer look problematizes how Michelle Obama reached such iconic status in less than one year—her rise to pop culture fame rivals the meteoric fame of Michael Jackson and Elmo combined! From the website www.mrs-o.org, which tracks the fashion prowess of Michelle Obama, to the countless books, magazines,4 the represented body of Michelle Obama (her rear, her bare arms and legs, and the politics of her straight hair) is everywhere. If not properly interrogated, this coating is incredibly dangerous because it pacifies the general public into thinking that the initial sentiments of racial hatred and objectification have passed and now it is “acceptable” for the dominant culture to “idolize” Michelle Obama. The insidious nature of racism slips past the average American media consumer but a stronger analysis of current discourse on Michelle Obama assures that the attack is long from over. The exhibition of Michelle Obama across the American imagination relates directly to the entrenched assumptions around how black women’s bodies are allowed to enter into this “imagination” and made visible. Michelle Obama is readily accepted and understood only as a figure that must remain silent and happily domestic for her to maintain her place as First Lady. Making her a “fashionista” is simply a diversionary tactic. In Salon magazine, Erin Aubrey Kaplan’s 2008 piece, “First Lady Got Back” became the centerpiece of a discussion that has its legacy in the nineteenth century. Here were African American women writing with ecstasy that: “Michelle-good God . . . has a butt!”; “Obama’s baby (mama) got back”;

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“OMG, her butt is humongous!’; It is not humongous, per se, it is a solid, round, black, class-A boo-tay”. (“Michelle’s booty” 2008)

Patricia Hills Collins identifies “controlling images” (i.e., Michelle Obama’s oft-displayed rear) as a means in which to distort the ways black women see themselves and each other (1990, 72). These images and discourse also create a process of “un-mirroring,” to quote Janell Hobson, in which struggles for black female subjectivity constantly grate against the distorted images of the dominant culture (2003, 88). So, in a breathe, gone are Michelle Obama’s Princeton and Harvard degrees, her lucrative careers in law and hospital administration, her political savvy, and territorial protection of her daughters and family; in its place is a discussion that renders Michelle Obama into body parts with questions around her humanity. Sadly, in an attempt at affirmation with the best intentions assumed, Kaplan falls prey to the “un-mirroring” as she is only able to capture Michelle Obama’s potential in terms of the master Western narrative that continues to dissect and objectify the black female body. Kaplan simply exposes herself as a black “pundit” reduced to mimicry in the struggle to assume media spotlight in the White-dominated discourse on the Obamas. Once again, nothing is learned about the personhood of Michelle Obama through this entire unleashing of the media hurricane. Akin to Sarah Baartman, Michelle Obama is an observed object who the media takes on and fills in the gaps of “knowing” based on speculation that is inherently racist and sexist. As much of this is done in cyberspace, the precedents for censure or moderation are lost to the wind at the same time that the American and Western public at large has to discern what to make of black womanhood in power. Examples of the vilification of Michelle Obama abound. Zoe Williams, in her article “Michelle and the Media,” stated that “Conservative [British] press deals with its unease by making [Michelle Obama] sound like a transvestite, offering the questions such as ‘is she a woman or a whole person? So hard to say” (2009, 35). Blogger Heather Cross on www.topix.com states: Michelle Obama looks like an ape! or James Brown’s sister. She is ugly. Why do some people say she is pretty? Vomit looks better than her. She has no class and her husband is so gorgeous and the kids are beautiful. What a nightmare for Obama having to sleep with that woman who looks like a man in drag! (2009)

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Associations with masculinity and animalistic tendencies are redundant nineteenth- century assertions about the inhumanity of African women and thus their bodies become a site to be maligned at will. Blogger Impatient on www.huffington.post comments that “Michelle Obama has large ungainly legs” while an anonymous blogger on www.essence.com states that “Michelle definitely has man-hands. She should be serving ham sandwiches with those meat hooks” (“Michelle Obama” 2009). In the 2009 issue of Vogue where Michelle Obama graced the front cover, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, the article praises Michelle Obama in the same breath that it renders her unusual. In discussing the cover photo, the writer admires “Obama’s lithe frame” though “an uncommon figure for an American First Lady” (Williams 2009). For those viewers who find the photos compelling, the writing instructs a self-doubt that not all is well with acceptance of Michelle Obama as a beautiful woman; she is made strange and singular by the nature of her black body (suggestions of masculinity are subtle but must be read) and certainly not the “material” for what a First Lady should look like. In early 2009, the discourse took a sudden shift away from Michelle Obama’s rear, and the controversy raged around Michelle Obama’s bare arms. Does she have a right to show her arms, which begs the question does Michelle Obama have the right to make choices about her own body—at the expense of a historical trajectory that maintains her as object, never subject of her own agency? A study conducted at the University of Zululand among young black South African women in 2004 indicated an unprecedented high in overall body dissatisfaction and eating disorders where these black women indicated that they wanted to be “thin” and have bodies like those portrayed in Western media, without curves or a rear end, because that is what their men desire (Trainer 2004). The implications of this shift attest to the profound vilification of the African/diasporic female body by media’s negative attachment to all things curvy or non-Western (thereby implicitly ugly and undesirable, though a site of the hidden erotic). The discourse on Michelle Obama’s body fits right in the middle of such a trajectory where she must be “dressed” in order to hide the undesirable or hypersexual. I concur with Janell Hobson, in her analysis of Cuvier’s porno-erotic agenda at the dissection of Baartman’s body, that the impetus driving the dominant dissection of Michelle

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Obama is that of pornographic-erotic desire. Her body becomes the object upon which unleashed, perverse Western sexual desire is bonded, implanted with racial hierarchies and sexual fantasy as this is how slavery was bred. So when suddenly Western feminists begin to interject demands for a more “intellectual, militant” Michelle Obama, one who relies on the excellence of her credentials and not just wallow in her new role as “the black body to dress,” one wonders where the historical context or precursor for such a call is. This feminist “call to arms” (no pun intended) in an interesting juncture to highlight specific trends in the way the black female body gets “robed” and by whom. I want to draw attention to the South African artist, Senzeni Marasela, who uses Sarah Baartman as a profound muse. Axis Gallery, a white South African run artistic space in New Jersey, represents Marasela and her art in the United States. In September 2010, in collaboration with Submerged Gallery, Axis put up Marasela’s most recent work on the Baartman narrative called “Beyond Booty: Covering Sarah Baartman and Other Tales.” All the narratives were constructed on white cotton with red thread, meticulously embroidered. Marasela provocatively leans on the British and French nineteenth-century caricatures of Baartman, with an exaggerated bum, normally in profile, and she engages directly with her body as Marasela’s character, Theodora (representing Marasela’s mother) robes with dignity the naked Baartman throughout the series. What I suggest Marasela is doing in this act of “dressing” Sarah is in fact an act of profound agency in that she directly engages Sarah’s body in respectful, caring ways—akin to how Gabeba Baderoon, in chapter 4, reiterates Zanele Muholi’s claim to desire Sarah as a lover; she is beloved. Also, with this simple act of clothing (which has the sensibilities of personhood; as the assumption is that only living, human creatures are cold or hot and need care); Sarah’s humanity is fully endorsed through this act. Marasela takes on the brutality of the pervasive violence on black womanhood by simply saying that Baartman, as a black woman, deserves to be covered, and thus protected. She also calls forward the caricatures of nineteenth-century newspapers and aquatints and by covering Sarah that history of misrepresentation is silenced and the external gaze muted. Throughout her work, Marasela insists that we see Sarah Baartman differently and provides the visual map in how to do

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so with dignity. Since much of the work on Sarah also includes an imagine of Marasela herself and Theodora on various enactments of journey, the viewer also intimates the profound lessons Marasela takes for herself in the articulations of a new black womanhood who sits firmly at the crossroads of history using Sarah Baartman as ancestor who will guide these artistic acts of recovery. Marasela’s “Sarah Baartman Redress Series” is an intentional project of healing and opening spaces of possibility in how Sarah can be claimed. In the exact opposite way, has the body of Michelle Obama, once vilified in the American public psyche, been “dressed.” There is no silencing of a colonial history of violence when designers flock to clothe her and photographers queue to have her photographs adorn the glossy pages of women’s magazines throughout the world. These magazines (i.e., Vogue, Glamour, etc), with shadows of Black femininity suggested in its pages, have taken the leap and admitted Michelle Obama to the agreed field of beauty. Her body is draped and strewn with jewels, signature pieces created to indicate a sense of “designer” instinct and knowingness about her. Within her first year as First Lady, Michelle Obama’s body becomes the site of increasingly more exclusive, expensive clothing and she is further removed from the “JCrew” and “Target” woman that made her recognizable and very appealing to black women from the beginning of the presidential campaign. Once isolated from black women who felt she was a “familiar” (i.e., a professional, well-educated mother and wife), Michelle Obama becomes the snapshot—the museum relic, as with the now memorialized dress she wore on the night of Obama’s inauguration. These static photographs attempt to mute her dynamic personhood; though she continues to insist on wearing dresses that accentuate her welltoned arms in daily outings, yet on the pages of these magazines what the viewer sees is the blanketing of her arms, of her legs; she is immobilized. American history etched the place of the black woman into either the “mammy” or “jezebel”5 —linking a continuous gender-fixed idea about the role of the black woman. Since Michelle Obama comes as part of the presidential package, it seems that the best way to absorb her into the American psyche is to make her “beautiful,” exhibited, silent, and domestic (and only Black when it counts). However, the powerful “attempt” (because I think they

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fail) at silencing her to cloak the more stringent racist discourses, is entrenched in the language of fashion and entertainment. By mid-2009, Michelle Obama must have been one of the most photographed women in the Western media. She graced cover after cover and many felt a sense of redemption—that finally the American public was owning up to the fact that Michelle could be “beautiful” once displayed—resplendent in colors to match her perfect coif—fixed as a museum artifact to once again be exhibited and observed. In both instances, the overt racial hatred dissecting all aspects of her humanity and the concurrent “capturing” of Michelle Obama as icon, as beauty, as different—the act of silencing, invisibility, and erasure—endures.

Fighting Back Alice Walker, in her essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden” remembers how, as the daughter of sharecroppers in the American South, her mother made it clear that the garden was the central place in which planting and preparing for the future harvest took root, in multiple forms. The rumblings of Michelle Obama’s gardening revolution only struck as charges of her failure to be more aggressive and less domestic became louder. One of the first mandates by the First Lady was to plant a White House Garden and the chief architects were local fifth grade Washington, DC students and White House staff (the president also had his appointed time to come pull weeds with daughters, Sasha and Malia). This African American woman broke ground and signaled that a different time was coming. Facing a history where African Americans have done everything in their power to move away from the field into industrial society because of the ruinous memory of slavery and sharecropping (and rightfully so), Michelle Obama braved the idea of disrupting static ideas about black womanhood and embraced the earth, planting, according to White House reports, over fifty types of vegetables. With each seed, each drop of water, Michelle Obama has told children of color that it is okay to want to be alive, to be healthy, that they can move beyond self-hatred and finally nourish their bodies. She advances a radical black agenda of motherhood. Joined with this idea, she then asked children to move their bodies, to exercise in order to live longer. Acknowledging

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a time when enslaved African mothers killed their children so as to prevent them from the ravages of slavery, Michelle Obama has fought for her body and the bodies of brown and black children (who, statistics show, are the largest group plagued with childhood obesity). Multiple frameworks for Black women’s empowerment need to be employed in order to examine the symbolic power of Michelle’s Garden and Let’s Move agenda. In the end, only those who learn how to read the layers and deconstruct the messages offered by Michelle Obama can understand the profound revolution she has set to pace—that of the enduring and positive image of the black family in the United States. For those who willing to receive the message, she is infusing hope into the idea that Black families can preserve and thrive though historically, this country “never expected us to survive.” Most certainly, in the spirit of black womanhood, her defiance in the face of those who want to undermine and silence her reality, lays claim to the lives of black women who have gone before her, including Sarah Baartman.

Notes 1. I am aware of the growing commentary and analysis of the fact that almost by definition the Internet is allowing and permitting people to be rude and insulting. One explanation is that by enabling “anonymity” people feel free to say thing they would not say in person. There are many examples where authors, politicians, and musicians have been metaphorically “lynched” by the cyber mob. Though it may seem that the Obamas do not serve as an exception here but rather part of a larger representation of a decline in public civility, I refute this by saying that the attack in Michelle Obama is more than just a civic refusal at etiquette. It is her significance as a black woman in the most prized, powerful position as First Lady; her precedent of visibility and ease that makes the cyber attacks most insidious. 2. See Maria DeLongoria’s unpublished doctorial thesis, “The Stranger Fruit” The Lynching of Black women: The Cases of Rosa Jefferson and Marie Scott.” University of Missouri, fall 2006. It provides an informed discussion around the particularities that defined the lynching of black women in the United States. 3. In many cases there is a fine line between “dancing” and prostitution in the music video industry. Many hip-hop music producers actively seek professional strippers and lap dancers at adult entertainment clubs to participate in their videos (Hobson 2005, 103–105).

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4. Michelle Obama has been on the covers of Time, People, Vogue, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Glamour, Prevention, Conde Nast Traveler, Parade, Radar, O Magazine, Ebony, and Essence. Since its inception in 1974, Vogue (the “Bible” of Fashion) has allowed eighteen black women on its monthly cover. In its tradition of photographing the First Lady within the first few months in office, Michelle Obama was defiant in her direct look at the viewer, baring her well-toned, much discussed arms, rather than the demure First Lady covers that have been the signature of Vogue for years. 5. See Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1985) for a fuller discussion on this dichotomy in American female slaves.

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Notes on Contributors Yvette Abrahams/Khib Omsis was born in Cape Town to struggle parents of mixed slave and Khoekhoe descent and grew up in exile. She is the first Black woman to take a PhD in the Department of History at the University of Cape Town and her dissertation was the first historiography of Sarah Baartman. Post-doctorally, she headed the Herstory Project in the Institute of Historical Research at the University of the Western Cape. Currently, Yvette is the Commissioner at the Commission for Gender Equality, a watchdog body set up under the South African Constitution. Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet and scholar. She has published three collections of poetry, The Dream in the Next Day, The Museum of Ordinary Life and A Hundred Silences. She received her PhD in English at the University of Cape Town, and for 2010-2011 holds a research fellowship in the “Islam, African Publics and Religious Values” Project at the University of Cape Town. She writes on Islam, slavery, race and sexuality in South Africa and teaches Women’s Studies and African and African American Studies at Penn State University. Natasha Gordon- Chipembere holds a PhD in English from the University of South Africa. Her dissertation was entitled “From Silence to Speech, From Object to Subject: The Body Politic Investigated in the Trajectory between Sarah Baartman and Contemporary Circumcised African Women’s Writing.” She has a number of publications, including articles in scrutiny 2, Agenda and Changing English. She was a Fulbright Specialist at Chancellor College, University of Malawi, summer 2010. Her forthcoming book project is an auto/biography with Malawian activist, Catherine Chipembere. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Medgar Evers College CUNY in Brooklyn, New York. Z’étoile Imma is a pre-doctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation examines African masculinities and spatial politics in contemporary African

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feminist fiction and film. She has published essays on gender, the body, sexual violence and representation in African texts. Desiree Lewis is an Associate Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. She has published on feminist theorizing, African women’s writing, South African cultural politics and sexuality. Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean who is currently a doctoral candidate at Stanford University working towards a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature. Her dissertation examines the impact that migration and travel have had in problematizing an otherwise over-simplified political sense of national belonging in Zimbabwe. Siphiwe has an MA in African Studies and an MFA in Film from Ohio State University. While a graduate student, she made a short film entitled “Graffiti” that won the Silver Dhow at the Zanzibar International Film Festival. Siphiwe received her BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing from Emerson College. Ilaria Oddenino completed a Master’s degree in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Turin in November 2006, with a final thesis on Sarah Baartman and contemporary re-readings of her story in fiction, poetry and drama. She is now a doctorial candidate at the University of Turin and her research areas are Postcolonial Literature and Modernism. Karlien van der Schyff completed a Master’s degree in English at the University of Stellenbosch in 2009. She is currently engaged in doctoral studies at the University of Cape Town, focusing on representations of Sarah Bartmann in post-apartheid South African literature and feminist embodiment theory. Sheila Smith McKoy is a critic and writer who is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. Smith McKoy directs the Africana Studies Program at NCSU and is the editor of Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora. Her research and creative work center on the connections among African and African Diasporan literatures and cultures. The author of When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Cultures (2001), her work has also appeared in Callaloo, Mythium: The Journal of Contemporary Literature and Cultural Voices, Obsidian: Literature of the African Diaspora, Research in African Literatures and other journals.

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Hershini Bhana Young is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at SUNY at Buffalo where she teaches classes on African Diasporic literature and art, focusing on sexuality and performance. Her book Haunting Capital: Memory, Text and the Black Diasporic Body (UPNE, 2006) maps the spectral traces of the past that haunt the subject formation of dislocated black women. Her articles include work on criminalization and race in Gayl Jones’ work, mixed race politics in novels by Danzy Senna and issues of pornography and slavery. A South African, her current book project returns home by focusing on issues of coercion and consent that plague the lives of Southern African women in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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Index abolitionists’ trial against Cezar 21, 22, 48, 49 Aborigines’ Protection Society 154–5 Abrahams, Yvette 2, 8, 19, 21–2, 101, 102, 147 on freak shows 156 KhoiSan traditional garden 13 on scientific racism 10 African American women 8 “cult of secrecy and of dissemblance” 67–8 models and music video “dancers” 172 self-injury and infanticide 68 African and Diasporic women 5, 10 media’s negative attachment to bodies 175–6 oppressive stance 172 universal exhibition of 171 Western obsession with genitals of 8 see also black women’s bodies; body African Association campaign 50 law suit against exhibitors 50–1, 55 Macauley’s affidavit 50, 55–6, 116 African Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa 9 African male as “uncivilized and savage” 157 “African privacy” 73 “African Sexuality/Sexuality in Africa: Tales and Silences” (Arnfred) 137 African womanhood 14, 168

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agency 57, 109 beings rendered as objects 62 exploration of 115–16 failed 61 limited 55 notions of 52 personhood and authority 13 reconceptualizing 53–4 retheorizing 51 “revisionist” accounts 117 Aidoo, Ama ata 13, 137, 141–5 Altick, Richard 19, 95 American circus 155 American Museum of Natural History 149, 154 anatomists 10 ancestors 36, 37 animal importation 20 animalized Africans and KhoiSan 138, 168 Anthropological Laboratory, Cambridge 154 anti-racist and anti-sextist projects 66 apartheid 48, 67 racist policies 138 archives 19, 23 deconstructing 28 Dutch Cape Colony records 23–4 escaping the confines of 24–5 limits of 26–7 oblique meanings 74–5 official 73 personal African 75 Arnfred, Signe 137 arts and crafts 41 Association of University English Teachers of South Africa conference 67

6/21/2011 5:24:09 PM

196

Index

Australia 148 authenticity 34 autobiographical narratives 101 autobiographies 76, 77 Axis Gallery, New Jersey 176 Baartman, Sarah 3, 6–11, 19, 29, 87 (also known as “Saartjie/Sarah/ Sara/Sartje”) burial 1, 11, 48, 65, 71, 147, 149 death in Paris 65 healing and homecoming 147 iconic status 148, 149–50, 161 legacy in twenty-first century 172–8 personhood and rituals of purification 92–3 remains returned 47–8, 71 South African icon 147 symbolic icon 157 Baderoon, Gabeba 2, 33–4, 176 private and intimate spaces 13 Baker, Josephine 90 Barber, Karin 75 do-it-yourself archiving 76 elite texts 76 hidden histories 75 tin-trunk texts 75–7 Barnard, Dr. 143 Barnum and Bailey sideshow circus 152, 154, 158, 160 Barnum, P.T. Folies Bergère 148 “Little People” 148 “lovable Earthmen” 150 sideshow circus 148, 150 Bartman, Sarah, see Baartman, Sarah Batswana people 139 beauty and femininity, Western discourses on 11 Becker, Robin 79 Being series (Muholi) 79–80 existence and its complexities 79

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see also “Nomshado, Queensgate, Parktown, 2007” Beloved (Morrison) 68 “Beyond Booty: Covering Sarah Baartman and Other Tales” (Marasela) 176–7 biographical narrative 102–3 biography and individuals 115 intertextuality 112–13 Western 113–14 Biography, journal article (Durbach) 112 biomythography 32, 33 “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature” (Gilman) 20 black consciousness writings 104 black female images 11 black lesbian, gay and transgender communities 78–9 “self-archiving” 79 black male magazines, semipornographic 172 “blackness” idea of 20 notions of 52–3 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 17 Black Venus 2010: and They Called Her Hottentot (Willis) 2 black womanhood 1, 166 “anomaly of their hypersexual” genitals 5 body dissatisfaction and eating disorders 175 derogatory images 6 derogatory view of their sexuality 66 empowerment 179 gender-fixed idea about role of 177–8

6/21/2011 5:24:10 PM

Index hypersexualized 161, 162 labels 4 ownership over 167 in power 174 textual and visual representations 107 black women’s bodies 58, 66, 95, 104, 107 buttocks and genitals 170 Cuvieresque philosophy 11 historical myths of hypersexualized 172 representation of genitalia 168 resistance 58 sexuality 160 Western representations 11–12, 172 see also body Blanchard, P. 123 bodily performance 19 body African female 137 childhood obesity 179 and commodity 61–2 as consolidation of identity 54 female as sexualized object 158 gendered representations 155, 159 male as sexual superiority 158 “opaqueness” of 23, 27 ownership of 166 plaster cast of 65 primacy of 18–19 race, nation, gender 55 repository for erotic fantasies 121 vocabulary of 54 “body” of evidence 18 of literature 121 Bonaparte, Josephine 90 Bosjemans company 148 Botswana 139 Brantley, Ben 132 Breckenridge, Keith 76–7 tin-trunk literacies 76–7

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197

British colonies 73 Empire in South Africa 89 settlers 87 brothels 91, 160 see also Slave Lodge brown women 18 Brustein, Robert 132 Buffie the Body (rap videos) 12 Buffon 123–4 Bullock, William 48 Burke, Peter 111 Burke, Timothy 54–5 Bylstrom, Kerry 75 Cacadu District Municipality 41 Cadmore, Margaret 140–1 colonial ambivalence 140 Caledon, Lord 49 Callahan, Laura 20, 22–3 campaign for repatriation of Baartman 10, 47–8 Cape Colony 21, 89 Dutch and British government 49 Khoisan-European relations 22 Cape of Good Hope, colonization of 89 capitalism 28, 52 caste systems, hierarchical 139 Center for Remembrance, Hankie 40 see also Memorial Garden Cezar, Hendrick 1, 7, 9, 48, 155 Cezar, Peter 48 Chase-Riboud, Barbara 8, 24 “chorus of spectators” 106–7 Chrisman, Laura 3 Clico, “Wild Dancing Bushman” 13 Clinton, Hillary 167 coercion and consent 56–7, 61 Cohn, Dorrit 114 “psycho-narration” 114 Colligan, Collette on genre of erotica in Britain 87

6/21/2011 5:24:10 PM

198

Index

Collins, Patricia Hills 174 on “controlling images” 174 colonial archive 4, 12 colonial historiography 4 colonialism 67, 69 colonization 28, 49–50 of body 121 Caribbean and Africa by French 90–1 colonized identities 87 colour-caste system 143 “coloureds” 69, 89 South African identity 92–3 South African women 95 commodification 96 commodities 60–1 compliant noncompliance 60, 61 connectedness 39 contractual black labour 51 Cook, Frank 152–4, 160 Cook-Sullivan, Frances 154 Coombes, Annie 148 co-ownership of time 26 corporeal representations 12 court transcripts 24 Crais, Clifton 19, 91, 102, 103, 137, 155 Cross, Heather 174 cultural representations 101 culture food and cuisine 34 impact of scientific thought 144 indigenous 36 Curtin, Philip D. “culture prejudice” to “color prejudice” 52 Cuvier, Georges 4, 6, 7, 22, 65, 88, 104, 154 autopsy 48–9 description of body 128–9 monograph on autopsy 10, 14 published scientific findings 24 racism and science 95–6 science as imperial mechanism 137 cyberspace 171, 174–5

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Darwinian system of classification 137–8 Dave Meekin’s Pygmies 148 David’s Story (Wicomb) 67, 69, 70, 101 Davies, Carole Boyce 3 death 71–2 de Blainville, Henri 10, 65, 154 Department of Arts and Culture, SA 40 Department of Public Works, SA 40–1 De Veaux, Alexis 32 Diasporic Africanists 54 diasporic or exile studies 3 Diasporic sisterhood 8 dis-membered pornographic image 96 dismemberment 94 dis(remembering) of Baartman 19–20, 28–9 The dis(re)memberment of the Venus Hottentot (Parks) 129 Dlamini, Jacob 77 domination 55, 102 Douglass, Frederick 87–8 Dubow, Saul 138, 144 Duckworth, W.H.L. 154 Dumas, Alexandre 91 Dunlop, Alexander 7, 48, 106 Durbach, Nadja 112 Dutch 49, 89 colonies 73 colonizing of the Cape 3 commandos 7 settlers 87 Dutch East India Company 73–4 “Earthmen” (Barnum & Bailey) 150 Egyptian ancient frescoes Elgin Marbles 85 Ramses’s mummy 85 Elmo 173

6/21/2011 5:24:10 PM

Index English erotic culture 87 judiciary system 9 Enlightenment emphasis on free will 113 European scholars and scientists 144–5 philosophy 115 Envisioning the Worst: Representations of “Hottentots” in Early-Modern England (Merians) 5 erotic desire, hidden 170 “ersatz pornography” 124 “ethic of care” 22, 23, 24, 28 “ethics of exploitation” 25, 27 ethnological oddity 90 eugenics, discourse of 156 Eurocentric historical narratives 5 European male translators 9 European texts 4 European women “à la mode” dresses 127–8 “cul de Paris” bustles 128 exclusion, policies of 73 exhibitions 148–9 of “Bushman” at holiday fair, Germany 148 and commodification 20–1 exile African, and exploitation 147 experience 31–2 exploitation 150, 155 Fanon, Frantz 17 female images, black 11 femininity, Western discourses on 11 feminists accounts by 117 Western 176 Ferrus, Diana 1, 17, 22, 35–6 “First Lady Got Back” (Kaplan) 173–4 flagellation and sexual pleasure 87 food and cuisine, see under culture

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199

For the Love of the Venus (Parks) 125–33 Foucault, M. 54 biopower 54 genealogy 54 France 10 see also Paris freak shows 155 European travelling shows 148 show and sideshow 155–6 “Free Blacks” 105 “free labour” argument 51 Gamtoos River 39, 87, 96 gardens 38–9 Green Garden agenda 167 and poetry 38 sweet thorn tree (Acacia karoo) 44–6 White House Garden 178–9 see also Memorial Garden Geertz, Clifford 111 anthropological value of “thick description” 111–12 gender disparity in exhibitions 13 and exhibition spaces 166 gender-based violence 41 genocide 168 Gilman, Sander 19, 20, 49, 91, 95, 101, 102, 127 on sexual otherness 156 Gomez, Jewelle 32 Gonaqua 109 Gonaqualands 110–11 “Gone Astray in the Flesh: Kara Walker, Black Women Writers, and African American Postmemory” (Keizer) 68 Gqola, Pumla Dineo 3, 66, 70, 107 “theoretical industry” around Baartman 70 gravesite of Baartman as tourist attraction 94, 96 vandalization 94 Griqua people 168

6/21/2011 5:24:10 PM

200

Index

Guha, Ranajit 28 “dominance without hegemony” 28 Harris, John 154–5 Hartman, Saidiya 57 Haupt, Clive 142–4 see also heart transplant Head, Bessie 13, 137, 138–41 heart transplant 142–5 apartheid legislation 143–4 foreign headlines 143 Time magazine article 143 Hepston, Morris “Paddy” 151–2, 154, 157 (also known as Captain Epstein) Herbert, Dorothy 159 Hine, Darlene Clark 67–8 hip-hop music videos, American 11, 172 “As Nasty as They Wanna Be” 172 “Baby got Back” 172 pornographic exhibition of bodies 172 historical biography 108–9 historical writing 113 history 18, 37, 87 The History of Mary Prince 88 HIV/AIDS anxieties about race, sex and 93 and sex with virgins 93 Hobson, Janell 7, 27, 170 on Cuvier’s porno-erotic agenda 175–6 on female subjectivity 174 Holmes, Rachel 102 revisionist claim 117 hooks, bell 91 Hottentot Apron 6, 8, 90 “Hottentot Code” 49, 50 “Hottentots” 20 description of skin colour 53 female and prostitute link 91 study of 88 “Hottentot Venus” 1, 6, 10, 19, 47, 48, 147, 169

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advertisements for show 23–4 European collective imagination 121 example of scopophilic instinct 124 as hyper-corporeal “other” 101 as individual and human being 115 London and Paris 65 show manager, see Cezar, Hendrick as symbol and icon 115 as symbolic Other 161 Hottentot Venus (Holmes) 102 “The Hottentot Venus or the Hatred of the French Woman” (show) 10 human complexity and ambiguity 102 hypervisible figure 66 “I’ve Come to Take You Home” (Ferrus) xi–ii, 1, 22–3, 35 Imma, Z’étoile 2, 13 imperialism legacy of 48 white masculanist 28 imperial native policy 49–50, 52 imperial racism 148 indigenous knowledge systems 41 indigenous people of Southern Africa 168 individual(s) 102 acts and will 116 and collective divide 76 humanist thinkers 113 “self” of 113 subjectivity 73 “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden” (Walker) 178–9 institutions 102 insurrection in settler society 74 Isaacson, Maureen 112 Islam 74 Jackson, Michael 173 Jamaica 150–1

6/21/2011 5:24:10 PM

Index Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival 149 Jardin du Roi, Paris 10 Johnson, Walter 59–60 Kaplan, Erin Aubrey 173–4 Keizer, Arlene 68 KhoeKhoe people 35 Khoe pharmacology 39 KhoeSangoed (Helichrysum petiolare) 38 KhoeSan people 35, 90 (also known as “San,” “Nama,” “Griqua,” Khoesan”) Baster communities 90 continuity and change 43 life and spirituality 43 mission station 41 mixed racial heritage 90 !nau 37, 39, 40 !nau rituals 43–4 “performers” 150 positioning of genitalia 147 tradition 43 women 86, 89–90 see also Memorial Garden Khoikhoi people ethnicity 21 literature on 53 Khoi people 168 “Khoisan-ness” 3 KhoiSan people 3, 5–6, 137–8, 139, 145, 168 (also known as “Bushmen,” “Hottentots”) dehumanization by European imperialists 139–40 meditative construction 5 sexual slavery and victimization of women 89 subject to British colonial rule 89 see also plants Kirchner, J. 154 knowing, way of 27–8 Kouga Municipality 41

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201

Kristeva, Julia 127 essay on abjection 127 Lalu, Premish 70 language 13, 34 of fashion and entertainment 178 of race and racial development 138 of racism and sexism 14 and representations 166 “La Venus Hottentote” 91 La Venus Hottentote, ou haine aux françaises, vaudeville 121–7 le Fleur, Cecil 6–7 Leggett, Ted 93 Leibovitz, Annie 175 lesbian and gay life in South Africa 77–8 narratives of violence 78 Lessing, Gotthold 168 le Valliant, François 90 Lewis, Desiree 2, 13 on “documentary dialect” 78 Lindfors, Bernth 95 “ethnological show business” 148 Linnaeus, Carolus 88 genus categorization 88 racial hierarchies 88 Lorde, Audre 24, 27–8, 31 love letters 76–7 Macauley, Zachary 154 see also under African Association campaign magazines African American male’s 11 women’s 177 Magubane, Zine 7–8, 19, 20, 66, 69 diasporic methodology 53 on misanalysis 161 race, class, gender study 53 Malawi college students 11 Malherbe 158–9 Mandela, Nelson 10, 92

6/21/2011 5:24:10 PM

202

Index

A Mantis Carol (Van der Post) 150–4 life story of Hans Taaibosch 150–4 map 33 liberatory history as 32 of Otherness 121 Marasela, Senzeni 176–7 Marche D’Esclave, engraving 57 in Le Commerce de l’Amerique par Marseille 57, 62 Maru (Head) 13, 138–41, 145 Marxist accounts 117 masculinist and white racist desires 107 masculinity and animalistic tendencies 175 Maseko, Zola 101, 102 “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (Lorde) 24 Maxwell, John 53 Mbeki, Thabo 1, 69, 92–3 funeral oration for Baartman 94–5 Mbembe, Achille 25–7 McClintock, Anne 126 McKoy, Sheila Smith 2, 13, 89 “The Meanings of Sara Baartman” colloquium 77, 79 media 174 analysis 170 and black femininity 166 and blog space 173 coverage of burial 149 language of deviance and hypersexuality 173 see also Obama, Michelle medical and anthropological discourses 7 Meintjies, Sheila 170 Memorial Garden dignity of womanhood 44 notion of circularity 42–3 phases of the Moon 42, 43

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Sarah Baartman Legacy Project 40–4 water as symbol 42–3 Merians, Linda E. 5 metaphorical kitchen 32 “Michelle and the Media” (Williams) 174 mineworkers’ compound communities 77 Moffett, Helen 94 Mohanty, Chandra 52 morality and humanity 169 and self-representation 169 Morgan, Jennifer 168 Morrison, Toni 68 Morton, S.G. 168 “Mother Africa nationalist icon” status 1 motherhood, radical black agenda of 178–9 Muholi, Zanele 70, 77–83, 176 complexity of African lives 83 Musée de l’Homme, Paris 4, 10, 49, 70–1, 91, 138 skeleton, brain, genitals exhibited 65 Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris 10 Museum of Natural History, Paris 154 music industry 172 Muslim slaves 74 myth-making 108, 110 My Tongue Softens on the Other Name (Baderoon) 33–4 Namibia 90 narrative, emplotment in 109 The Narrative of Frederick Douglass (Douglass) 88 national healing and homecoming 162 national identity 69 nationalist accounts 117

6/21/2011 5:24:11 PM

Index National Khoisan Consultative Council 6–7 “National Mother” 161 of “new” South Africa 162 National Women’s Day 11, 48, 69, 92–3 nation building discourse on 149 and national healing 147 Native Nostalgia (Dlamini) 77 naturalists 10 European discourses 169, 171 Ndlovu, Siphiwe 2 “an ethic of care” 4, 12–13 “Negritude 2.0: Modern Day Hottietots” (Reynolds) 11–12 The Neverending Story, 1820–2002 (Ferrus) 17 New Yorker magazine 171–2 Ngubane, Dr. Ben 147 Niewijk, Alexandria 143 noble savage, idealized image of 123 “Nomshado, Queensgate, Parktown, 2007” (Muholi) 79–83 photograph 80 North American slavery and sexual assault 67 Nuttall, Sarah 75 Obama, Barack 166, 167 Obama, Michelle 5 and black personhood 168–9 culture discourse 165–7 defiance 179 disruption of dehumanization 167 fashion prowess 173, 177 Green Garden agenda 167 iconic status and pop culture fame 173 “Let’s Move” program for fighting Childhood Obesity 167, 179

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203

media images and blog spaces 13, 170, 171–4 metaphorical lynching of 170–2 women’s magazines 171–2, 173–5, 177–8 obedience as strategy of resistance 58 occupation, political and territorial 121 Oddenino, Ilaria 2, 13 oppression 58, 94–5 Other 58, 162 and “knowable and visible” 121 and objects 137 “savage” 123 sexualized female 124, 147 Othering 5–6, 23, 24 genealogy of 20 narrative 26–7 racial 92 racist, patriarchal 172 Otherness 7, 157, 169 map of 121 racial and sexual 155, 156 Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections of a Blackeyedsquint (Aidoo) 13, 138, 141–5 Oyewumi, Oyeronke 52 Paris 4, 10, 49, 65, 70–1, 90 brothels (“maisons de tolerance”) 91 Palais Royal exhibitions 91 Parker, John 60 Parks, Suzan-Lori 8, 13, 102, 103–8, 121–2, 124–33 Parsons, Neil 148, 149, 150 pathology of hypersexual disorder 93 patriarchal assumptions 161 patriarchal perceptions of the corporeal 159, 160 patriarchal stereotypes 161 patriarchy 28 Peterson, Bheki 73

6/21/2011 5:24:11 PM

204

Index

Piccadilly Circus exhibition 1, 4, 89 Pieterse, Jan 168 plants 34–8 Buchu 35–6 compost 37–8 herbs 39 of home 35 poem (Abrahams) 36–7 see also gardens “plundered art and antiquities”, value of 85 and Hottentot Venus 85 poetry 38 political power 52 politics 19, 20 contemporary identity 23 race and gender 25 pornographic-erotic desire 176 pornography 88, 131 dis-integration of as legacy of 94 and erotic desire 13 Internet 93 race-based 92 post-apartheid South Africa 92 Baartman as “National Mother” 147 “post-Black”/nonracial sensibility 167 power 88 access to 69 workings of 58–9 Prince, Mary (Antiguan female slave) 88 “privacies” 74 privacy definition of 66 rethinking the private 72–3, 75 use of term 72 “privatizing” 75 prostitution, enforced 73–4 pseudoscientists 21, 22 psychic survival of black women 68 psychological impact of slavery on descendants 67 systemic violence 67

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“psycho-narration” 114 public private sphere 75 Quena people 168 Qureshi, Sadiah 19, 20–1, 169–70 race 20, 88 de-centring 21 and gender systems 52 power and consent 143 pseudoscientific obsession with 156 and sex, notions of 67 and sexuality 19 white supremacist discourses 137 race-based pseudo-science 91–2 racial and social paradigms 96 racial difference 21 codified 7 devalued racial type 169 European categories 10 measurement of value of life 142 racial heterogeneity 74 racial prejudice, scientific codification of 52–3 racial superiority 88 Rainbow Vice: The Drugs and Sex Industries in the New South Africa (Leggett) 93 “Rape and the inner lives of Black women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance” (Hine) 67 rape of women 94 Reaux, S. 9–10, 48 Refiguring the Archive (Peterson) 73 relationships 102, 110 Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition (Samuelson) 69

6/21/2011 5:24:11 PM

Index repatriation media coverage 93 and return to home 92–3 resistance 60–1 acts of 61 culture of 68 performative modes of 58–9 recollection of 69 Reynolds, Mark 11–12 righting/writing the wrongs 23, 25–6 Roach, Joseph 56 Roberts, Christiaan Willem 151, 155 Royal Geographical Society 50, 53 rural South African women, eating disorders 11 Said, Edward 5–6 Saint-Hillaire, Ètienne 154 Salon magazine 173 Samuelson, Meg 69, 70, 107–8 “spectacle of nation building” 147 San people 168 Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Crais & Scully) 102, 108–17 “Sarah Baartman Redress Series” (Marasela) 177 Sarah Baartman Remembrance Center 13, 94 scholarship failure of 21, 26 regarding Baartman 22 Schrire, Carmel 102 science 18, 137 dehumanizing African people 145 and pornography 96 racial/cultural classifications 52 racialized 89 and racism 95 scientific apartheid 145

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205

scientific experimentation 139–40 scientific racism 13, 48–9, 137–8, 144–5 European discourse 147, 166 scientists, English and French 14 Scully, Pamela 19, 91, 102, 103, 137, 155 self conception of 69, 109 of individual 113 making of the 76 self-representation 117, 169 Semenya, Caster 167 sex, race and anatomy 86 sexual and racial alterity 19, 25–6 sexual artifact 86 sexual desire and eroticized violence 87–8 sexual economy 94 sexual enslavement 96 sexual exploitation, strategies against 68–9 sexual fetishes 90, 91 sexuality 7, 21 African 123 of black women 169 masculanist, colonial discourse 10 race and labour discourses 53 see also race sexual lewdness 49 sexual oppression and gender inequality 86 sexual vice in South Africa 93 sex workers 93 shame ambiguities of survival 69 slavery and colonization 72 suppressed 68 “Shame and the Case of the Coloured” (Wicomb) 67, 69 Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean 24, 124 Shell, Robert 102 Slave Lodge 73–4

6/21/2011 5:24:11 PM

206

Index

slavery 3–4, 28, 67, 69 England and British empire 9, 48 and free labour 49 and oppression 13 slaves auctions 52, 57 buyers 57–8 as human commodities 60 legal codes and surveillance 74 male and female 73–4 resistance 54 for sale 47, 54, 60 subjectivities 74 trade 20, 52 traders of 60 social relations 20 social structure 102 Sources of the Self (Taylor) 72–3 South African War 151 Statutes of India 74 stereotypes 133, 156 St. Hillarie, Geoffrey 10 storytelling 101, 107, 109 mode 110 partisan 108 perspectives on reality 118 subjectification 104 subjectivity 113 subjugation 59, 104 Submerged Gallery, USA 176 substance abuse 41 Sunday Independent review (Isaacson) 112 supremacy, global white 144 surrogation, violent network of 56–7 surveillance and domination 75 history of 75 techniques 74 Taibosh, Franz 151–4 (also known as Hans Taaibosch/ Taibos) advertisement for show 157–8

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“Clico, the Wild Dancing Bushman” 152 dance performance 157 “dancing Bushman” 151, 155 infantilization 153 plaster cast of 149 Taylor, Charles 72–3 television, Ugandan and South African 11 “Top Ten Plundered Artifacts” (New York Times) 85 Touw’s River (River of Women) 39 traditional healers 41 Tratradouws Pass (Women’s Door) 39 Treatis Memorie du Musée d’Histoire Naturelle (Cuvier) 137 truth, uncertainties about 117–18 Ubangi women in sideshow 158–9, 160 unknowability about Baartman’s life 66, 70 “un-mirroring” 174 urban African youth 11 !Urisan (white people) 38 Van der Post, Laurens 150–4, 160–1 Van der Schyff, Karlien 2, 13, 166 Van Jong, Hendrik 110 Venus (Parks) 13, 102–8, 121–2, 124–33 “The Venus Hottentot,” history of 87 “Venus Hottentots” womanhood 92, 96 see also “Hottentot Venus” Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (Hobson) 7 “victim” and “agent” dualism 105 victimization 61, 101–2, 115

6/21/2011 5:24:11 PM

Index violence accusation of women’s complicity 67 and dehumanizing impact of racism 139 emotional, physical, epistemic 18 gender-based 41 homosocial 57–8 sexual, during slavery 67–8 visual art 66 Visual Sexuality 77 Vogue magazine 175 Voyage de F. Le Valliant dans L’Interieur de L’Afrique 90 Walker, Alice 178–9 Walker, Kara 68 “cut-out” silhouettes 68–9 Warner, Sara 106 Western racist/sexist scientific memory 171 What is Slavery to Me? (Gqola) 70 “(Not) representing Sara Bartman” 70 When Whites Riot (McKoy) 89

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White, Hayden 102–3, 109, 113 white men 18 Wicomb, Zoe 67, 69, 101, 103 “Shame” essay 69 willfulness and domination 56 Williams, Zoe 174 Willis, Debra 2 will-lessness 53 of Baartman and diasporic slaves 53 Wiss, Rosemary 169 Witbooi, Benjamin 42 Wood, John 88 Worden, Nigel 74 “wretched” Africans 169 writing 66 see also storytelling Young, Hershini Bhana 2 acts of agency and slaves 13 Young, Jean 104, 118, 131–2 Zami (Lorde) 31 as “biomythography” 32 zoologists 10

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