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  • Witnessing and Wounding in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus
  • Stacie McCormick (bio)

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus (1997) ends in the same way that it begins. The audience is informed that “thuh Venus Hottentot iz dead” (3).1 The Venus then revolves counterclockwise so that she can be witnessed from multiple angles. However, in viewing her body on the stage, the audience has to reconcile the idea that it is witnessing a woman who is at once both alive and dead. Audience members are then admonished to “[t]urn uhway” and cover their eyes (4). By opening with this moment, Parks creates tension related to the act of looking and immediately suggests to the audience that it is not engaging in a benign witnessing. Taking this destabilization even further, Parks employs the literal and figurative meanings for beginning at the “[t]ail end” (5) of the story to reference the longstanding fascination with the buttocks of Sara Baartman (the “Hottentot Venus”).2 Parks uses this play on words as an opening to tell the larger story about Baartman and her experience of being exhibited in London, Paris, and posthumously in the Musée de l’Homme. In her initial problematizing of the act of looking, Parks creates a dynamic that requires the audience to shift its perspective constantly and to think continually about its participation in the spectacle. In doing so, Parks also provides a larger context for her subversive depiction of the complex relationship between the gaze and pain in the work.

The role of the gaze in inflicting pain has a long history, particularly in the West where black bodies were often the subject of white scrutiny or voyeurism. This is particularly true in the spectacle of the auction block in slavery or the scripted torture of black bodies in lynching.3 The exhibition of Baartman in Europe in the early nineteenth century took place concurrently with the auctioning of slaves in the United States; this simultaneity allows us to view Baartman’s display in a transnational framework and to think about the multiple ways that black bodies suffered under the white gaze. Cassandra Jackson examines how images of wounding create specular moments that mediate power relations between the seers and the seen (3). With respect to the play Venus, the body of Baartman and the depiction of the pain she experienced during her exhibition function as figurative wounds or woundings for the audience to witness. Baartman’s body is represented at times as abject, diseased, and wounded, [End Page 188] thereby creating specular moments in which power relations between Baartman and spectators are negotiated. By presenting this imagery and admonishing the audience early on to look away, Parks presents the act of witnessing as an act with many consequences for both the seer and the seen. In this sense, Jackson’s discussion of the multiple implications of witnessing a wounded body offers an important context for how Parks represents the notion of witnessing in her play: “The power to look is also the power to police and govern that body [the body under scrutiny], imbuing it with an erotics of control” (5). Jackson also makes clear, however, that this is not a static exchange and that in some cases, the viewed can retain agency (3). It is precisely this slippery relationship that I explore through Parks’s representation of witnessing in Venus. Parks scrutinizes the kinds of voyeurism and historical violence to which blacks in the West have been particularly subject while also overturning that voyeurism to reveal and potentially restore a sense of Baartman’s personhood and agency in this dynamic.

In an interview with Shelby Jiggetts published in 1996, Parks expresses fascination with the multiple levels of watching that occur in theater and admits that this gets translated into Venus: “[T]here’s a lot of watching in Venus. In Venus, the doctor is watching Venus, and the Resurrectionist is watching everybody. Then actually at the end he becomes the watch, the death watch on Venus. So, it’s all this kind of looking. There’s a whole lot of looking going on” (313). Parks also acknowledges that much of this looking is culturally based...

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