AKA: Sarah Baartman, The Hottentot Venus, and Black Women’s Identity

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Acknowledgements

Versions of this essay were presented at the 2011 Ford-Turpin Symposium at Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD and at the 2011 English Faculty and Graduate Student Forum at the University of Delaware, Newark, DE. I am grateful for the spirited and passionate conversations that this topic evoked in each instance. Special thanks go to Dr. Dolan Hubbard and Dr. Julian Yates for the opportunity to present it.

Notes

¹ Also see T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Black Venus (1999) where she relates the comments of museum director, Andre’ Langaney at Musee’ de l’Homme. According to Langaney, the plaster molding of Baartman caused such a stir that “one of the female tour guides was allegedly sexually accosted, and the molding itself had become the object of touching and many amorous masturbatory liaisons” (31). Such reactions, I am sure, created an atmosphere that led to this exhibit’s removal from public viewing.

² The creation of Baartman’s public personae, the “Hottentot Venus,” yielded more in this regard then the sum total of materials available concerning her earlier life. Yet, Baartman’s earlier life is crucial to understanding her evolvement into the Hottentot Venus. Humanizing her gives depth to life struggles. And although scholars debate some of the facts of Baartman’s earlier life, this is what has been pieced together. Contrary to popular belief, some speculate that Baartman’s life began a decade earlier than the previously stated time period of 1789 (journalist and novelist Rachel Holmes in her narrative The African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus puts Baartman’s birth year in 1789). Other historical records show that Baartman was born sometime in the 1770s in the Camdeboo Valley, a lush and ancient five-thousand-square-mile area nestled in the swamplands of the Winter Mountains in South Africa. A Khoisan, Baartman’s family were herders, and worked hard to eke out a living among a changing economic environment that saw the Dutch and other foreigners to South Africa assuming more and more control of the land. Upon the death of her father at the hands of cattle bandits, and her mother shortly thereafter, Baartman was sold to the employee of a wealthy Cape merchant. This journey took her to the middle of Cape Town and its burgeoning sex trade. This trade—spurred on by military personnel who arrived from all parts of the world for “port city fun”—helped to rapidly change the cultural environment of the city. It is near this environment that Baartman served as a domestic servant for the well-respected denizen Jan Michel Elzer, who lived a few blocks from a number of brothels and taverns in the hub of Cape Town. By the time Baartman had left the Elzer household, she would have conceived and buried one of her three children born in South Africa. Uncovering Baartman’s tragic entry into motherhood casts a different light on her public personae that needs further critical investigation. Yet at first glance, Baartman’s life mirrors the tragic consequences of poverty and motherhood that haunt some young African American women today.

³ Of course this list of icons/stereotypes is not exhaustive but representative of the standards. For more discussion of “controlling images of black womanhood,” see Hill Collins 65–68.

⁴ Barbara Chase-Riboud reminds us in “The Heroine’s Note” to her novel Hottentot Venus, the word Hottentot, which means stutterer in Dutch, is also considered an insult equivalent to nigger. I, like her, use the term Hottentot reluctantly because of its relevance to the discussions of Baartman’s life. I apologize in advance for anyone I may offend through its use.

⁵ Henrietta Lacks’s story is particularly relevant to this discussion given the recent success of Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Skloot, a white scientific journalist, tours the country speaking about the Lacks case. Although articles as far back as 1976 speak on the HeLa cell phenomenon—this is the acronym given to Lacks’s robust cervical cancer cells—(see Hsu et al., “Genetic Characteristics of the HeLa Cell” in the journal Science, for example), Skloot’s industrial ingenuity has spawned the Henrietta Lacks Foundation, and there is talk of a movie being made based on the book. Ironic indeed given the fact that Lacks’s children are still alive and appear, when they can, on Skloot’s book tours. For interesting critical analyses of the intersections of race and science and the Lacks case, see Weasel or Landecker, among others.

⁶ Here I am reminded of the Duke rape case of 2006 where 31-year-old Kim Roberts openly admits in an e-mail she sent to 5W Public Relations in New York, the agency that represents Lil’ Kim: “Hi! My name is Kim and I am involved in the Duke Lacrosse scandal. Although I am no celebrity and just an average citizen, I found myself at the center of one of the biggest stories in the country. I’m worried about letting this opportunity pass me by without making the best of it and was wondering if you had advice as to how to spin this to my advantage” (Newsweek [May 2006] 47). When the PR agency released this e-mail to the press, Roberts took offense to an Associated Press reporter’s suggestion that she was trying to profit on someone else’s misery. “Why shouldn’t I profit from it? I didn’t ask to be in this position. … I would like to feed my daughter” (Newsweek [May 2006] 47). More than just a shocking revelation of the economic desperation and spiritual deprivation of a woman in need, Roberts’s comments direct attention to the cultural undercurrents that fuel the psycho-sexual dynamics of black womanhood in the new millennium.

⁷ The photo that readily comes to mind is the image of Lil’ Kim gapped legged in a leopard bikini, with clear frontal view of her crotch area. She is one among many who provide such views either in the front … or the back (buttocks). I would like to thank my colleague Julian Yates for his keen insights into what is unveiled and veiled by black women in public settings.

⁸ As Haitian writer Edwidge Danticut suggests in her narrative The Farming of the Bones, the horrifying realities of black life across time has created instances where the razor sharp edges of life’s capriciousness shreds the skin of its possessor. Each cut brings the bones closer to the surface than the day before.

⁹ This is a nod to Toni Morrison’s gifted use of these principles and literary attributes in her novels Beloved and Sula. There, violence and violation so profound that its pain seems to function in an/other language realm become palpable through embodied acts as Morrison has her dead speak—or mature into walking wounds that have pain themselves. See my discussion of the character Beloved in chapter 4 of my book Scarring the Black Body (81–110).

¹⁰ Griffin argues that textual healing is a political move that reconstitutes new ways to imagine black female expression using Audre Lorde’s premise of the poetics of the erotic. For a more detailed discussion of the concept, please see Griffin’s article “Textual Healing: Claiming Black Women’s Bodies, the Erotic and Resistance in Contemporary Novels of Slavery.”