Black Venus 2010: They Called Her "Hottentot"

Introduction: The Notion of Venus

DEBORAH WILLIS Introduction The Notion of Venus Bottoms were big in Georgian England. From low to high culture of all forms, Britain was a nation obsessed by buttocks, bums, arses, posteriors, derrieres, and every possible metaphor, joke, or pun that could be squeezed from this fundamental cultural obsession. From the front parlor to Parliament, to prostitution and pornography, Georgian England both exuberantly celebrated and earnestly deplored excess, grossness, and the uncontainable. Much of Saartjie’s success was a result of a simple phenomenon: with her shimmying, voluptuous bottom, she perfectly captured the zeitgeist of later-Georgian Britain. —Rachel Holmes, African Queen This anthology of art, critical writings, poetry, and prose on and around the subject of Sarah, or Saartjie, Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus,” has been a long time coming. The contributions in this collection are scholarly and lyrical, historical and reflexive, capturing the spirit of a new body of literature about Baartman. In 1991, I first read an article in the Village Voice titled “Venus Envy”1 by Lisa Jones, and since then I have been intrigued with Baartman’s life story. I began to create artwork about her and the notion of beauty in an effort to find a way to expose this story to a wider audience. This book began as a dialogue with artist and writer Carla Williams, my coauthor on The Black Female Body in Photography: A Photographic History, and with a number of friends and colleagues who were researching, writing, and making art about the body, all of whom had referenced Baartman in their work. Although Baartman has become a focal point of reference for contemporary black artists, particularly women—from playwright Suzan-Lori Parks to novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud to photographer Carrie Mae Weems—few books have been written about her with regard to issues of representation.2 Working closely for a number of years with Carla Williams, I initially became interested in organizing a collection about Baartman, her memory in our collective histories, and her symbolic history in the construction of black women as artists, performers, and icons. Nearly two hundred years after her death and four years after her “homegoing” burial in South Africa, I have noticed a number of new books and films about Baartman. They include Zola Maseko’s mesmerizing films The Life and Times of Sara Baartman and The Return of Sara Baartman and the riveting and informing books African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus by Rachel Holmes and Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture by Janell Hobson. 4 Deborah Willis Over the years I have been enriched by discussions in the classroom as Baartman’s story continues to be written and as more and more writers and artists discover her and respond to her image. It is important to place Baartman in context within a discussion of images of women of African descent, particularly in Western culture. The inspiration behind this volume came from a wide variety of sources, some discovered while researching The Black Female Body: A Photographic History and others emerging more recently in images of the so-called video vixen in music videos. In 2002, at a reading and book signing for The Black Female Body at the Studio Museum in Harlem, performance artist and curator Rashida Bumbray, then a graduate student in my class at New York University , opened up the event with a presentation. For a class project, Bumbray had choreographed a performance to Jill Scott’s 2001 poem/song “Thickness,” in which Bumbray takes the “stage” (an overturned box) and slowly disrobes, “displaying” her full body à la Baartman as Scott sings/speaks about the sexual objectification and exploitation of a physically mature adolescent black girl. It was a provocative and powerful performance; Bumbray’s courage in positioning herself as a physical spectacle challenged the contemporary viewer to imagine what it would be like to live in her skin, in her body, in a culture that persistently degrades her image. Who was Sarah Baartman? The facts of her life have been distorted and mythologized , and misinformation abounds surrounding the details of Baartman’s short life. To begin with, no one can really agree on the spelling of her name, though assuredly virtually none of the versions in use reflect her given name, which remains unknown. They include Ssehura (thought to be closest to her given name); Sartjee, Saartje, Saat-je, Saartji, Saat-Jee, and Saartjie (all derived from the Afrikaans pronunciation, diminutive forms of...