Book Review - NBAF: Politics of racism

In the first 70 pages of Barbara Chase-Riboud's Hottentot Venus, Sarah Baartman — a Khoekhoe woman from South African — sees both her mother and her father decapitated by English colonists; loses her husband to an unexplained gunshot wound; delivers his baby, a preemie who dies; is raped twice by her "masters"; and is finally lured onto a ship bound for England by a con artist who claims he wants to marry her.

And a lot more follows before Baartman begins narration of her own public dissection by a scientist trying to prove that she's the missing link between proper European humanity and orangutans.

It's so much compressed tragedy for one heart to absorb that you want to believe it's not true. But Chase-Riboud's historical novel is based on the life of the real Sarah Baartman, known widely across Europe as the Hottentot Venus. "Hottentot" came from the Dutch word for "stutterer" — the Dutch colonists thought the Khoekhoes' language, which includes several clicking sounds, was animal gibberish. "Venus" referred to her unusually large inner labia, which, as with all the women of her people, had been stretched to protrude extensively from her outer labia, the better to engulf a man's penis during sex.

From 1810 through 1816, Baartman was paraded around Britain and France naked or nearly so as a freak-show attraction, first by William Dunlop, an English ship's surgeon, and Hendrick Caesar, Baartman's Afrikaner master. Later by Sieur Reaux, a French nobleman fallen on hard times. When she died of consumption and complications from alcoholism at the age of 27, her body was sold to Baron Georges Leopold Cuvier, a corrupt and racist scientist who dissected her in public then displayed her skeleton and some preserved tissue (including her genitals) in Paris' Museum of Natural History. She remained there until 2002, when her remains were repatriated to Nelson Mandela's South Africa for proper burial.

In her book, Chase-Riboud — an award-winning sculptor, poet and novelist who will read from her book and discuss the issues it raises at the National Black Arts Festival July 23 — offers no deep understanding of Baartman herself, who narrates most of the story. With the exception of a few brief scenes, Baartman does not examine herself nor the Europeans who exploit her. She reveals little of her emotions and motivations.

Instead, Chase-Riboud has written about the time, places and people who surround Baartman in a time of political and scientific revolutions, and widespread resistance to such. Baartman arrives in England a few years after slavery is abolished there. France is several years after the first French Revolution and a few years into the reign of Napoleon. She is taken to Paris soon after the Restoration of King Louis XVIII, and dies several months after Napoleon's brief return to power.

She witnesses the Luddite workers' revolt and its suppression in Britain during the early days of the Industrial Revolution. She lives in the time after Isaac Newton and the ascendance of the scientific method, but before Darwin removed God and the circles of heaven and hell from biological differentiation.

All around Baartman, people are rising up against their oppressors. The powerful are robbed of their simple "divine right" by science and the democratic movement, so they turn to bastardized biology to clot their noble wounds and preserve their empires. In Baartman, they believe they have found their most compelling justification.

The Dutch, the British, the French: They all stare at Baartman, perverted voyeurs and self-righteous racists, along with a few condescending self-styled saviors. Secretly fascinated by her and publicly disgusted, they poke and prod her, use her body to confirm their most despicable prejudices, calling their methods science and their biased conclusions the "plan of Creation" or the "great Chain of Being." As theater impresario Henry Taylor tells Baartman, they "change nature's smallest quirk into truth based on their own fantasies."

"They cheered and clapped and whistled and laughed," says Baartman, "as if the very meaning of their lives depended on [another freak show performer's] deformity and his sorrow." The people of Europe look at the Hottentot and see an ugly, evil savage, enwombing all their sins like a monstrous sacrificial goat. Through Baartman's eyes, we see that they're staring at their own reflections.

thomas.bell@creativeloafing.com