Reading Representations of Race with Masochism: The 1990s and Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus

Its not that we love          what we do but we do it we look at the day we just gotta get through it. We dig our ditch with no complaining Work in hot sun, or even when its raining And when the long day finally comes to an end We'll say: "here is a woman who does all she can."¹

So sing Hester, an abortionist, and Canary, a prostitute, in Suzan-Lori Parks's 2000 play Fucking A. I begin my essay on masochism and Venus with this quote because it seems to encapsulate a reoccurring theme in Parks's oeuvre: economic depravity encouraging people to act against their own best interest. Hence, Hester and Canary's claim that they are "digging [their] ditches without complaining" seems an apt line to describe Parks's larger view of the economic system, with its roots firmly in the slave trade, both requiring and inspiring people to participate in it. This is so, even as taking part means that they are digging themselves deeper into trouble, or harming themselves in some way. While in the context of Fucking A's fable it is easy to understand that the abortionist and the prostitute are doing "all [they] can," the similarities to the main character in Parks's 1996 Venus have escaped most critics. Yet, The Venus, as Parks names the character loosely based on the historical Saartije Baartman, a.k.a. The Hottentot Venus, is also in many ways "doing all she can."

Venus has educed much commentary, most often concern for the political ramifications of Saartjie Baartman's implied complicity, as imagined by Parks. Baartman was a young South African woman brought to London in 1810 to be exhibited in a freak show. Her value as a freak show attraction had to do with her (by European standards) unusually big buttocks. Only a few years later, after having been exhibited in France by a circus animal trainer, Baartman died in Paris. Before her death, she drew the attention of French anatomists, including Napoleon's surgeon Baron Georges Cuvier. A famous anatomist and paleontologist, Cuvier led the group who, after Baartman's death, dissected her body, carefully measured and analyzed it, and used the published results as scientific proof of the inferiority of African races. As a result, a model of Baartman's skeleton and her pickled genitalia and brain were put on display in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, where they were exhibited until 1974 and subsequently moved to storage. It was only in 2002, after years of petitioning, that her remains were given to representatives of her Khoisan tribe, who buried them in South Africa.

By the mid 90s, Baartman had become what Sara L. Warner, in her recent essay "Suzan-Lori Parks's Drama of Disinterment: A Transnational Exploration of Venus," calls a "global image of . . . a victim cum national hero."² A number of studies and works of art based on Baartman's life were published during the 90s, many of which attempted to give her a voice the nineteenth century Europeans had denied. Parks's representation of Baartman differs from these other accounts considerably. Rather than as a victim or a hero, Parks imagines Baartman—played by a scantily dressed actress with heavily padded buttocks—as a chocolate-eating, money-hungry, love-starved woman, who cooperates with the Europeans who put her on display, an image that perplexed, initially even angered, many commentators. It seems that, on one hand, Parks's way of depicting Baartman is upsetting because it seems to bring back the degrading images of the past, the same images the 60s and 70s cultural movements fought hard to make disappear. On the other hand, Parks's Baartman doesn't quite read as an ironic take on racial stereotypes either because the portrait is, albeit at fleeting moments, psychologically a little too believable. But to call Parks's portrayal of Baartman "absurd," as Warner goes on to do, seems to overlook what I interpret as Parks's radical challenge to the...