The Bottom of Desire in Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus

The Bottom of Desire in Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus GREG MILLER No, we have 1I0t yet reached that dec%niza/ion of thought which would be, over and above a reversal of that power, the affirmation of a difference, and free and abso/lde subversion of the spirit. There is there something like a void, a silent interval between the fact of colonization and that of dec%nization. Not that. here and there, there aren't subversive and responsible words which break forth and are elaborated, but something choked and almost lost remains unspoken, does not assume the power and the risk. Abdelkebir Khatibi (qtd. in Alloula xxii. emphasis in original) We save ourselves, we become minor, only by the creation of a disgrace or a deformity .... Gilles Deleuze ("One Less Manifesto" 243) The real Saartjie Baartman, the flesh-and-blood woman who was designated the Venus Hottentot and hideously transformed into a freak show's centerpiece , is presumed missing from the very beginning of Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus. Though the dramatis personae lists her as "Miss Saartjie Baartman, a.k.a. The Girl, and later The Venus Hottentot," the audience never knows her as Baartman. After the overture, we see her scrubbing a sparkling floor in southern Africa while a shady entrepreneur ("the Brother") negotiates her purchase . He asks "the Man" for her name so that he may order her to dance: THE MAN Her - ? Saartjie. "Little Sarah." THE BROTHER Saanjie. Lovely. Girl! GIRL!? (13) This short exchange manages to erase the identity of Saartjie Baartman. In its absence, under the ceaseless gaze of the spectator, she becomes "Girl," an appellation that will stick until she joins the London freak show and becomes even further (and irrevocably) removed from "Saartjie." Modem Drama, 45:1 (Spring 2002) 126 GREG MILLER Parks's elision of the real Baartman in Venus has proven controversial. In an article entitled "The Re-Objectification and Re-Commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus," for example, Jean Young argues that Parks's cavalier treatment of history subverts Baartman's voice, resulting in a play that "reifies the perverse imperialist mind set" (700). Young especially takes issue with Parks's representation of Baartman as an accomplice "in her own exploitation" (699), and she concludes that Parks and her critics have, in effect, re-victimized Saartjie Baartman. Young's historicized reading of the play suggests that Parks's artistic license has softened the actual events. For instance, whereas in Venus' second half the Girl is brought to Paris by the Baron Docteur and displayed at the Academy, in actuality she was overseen by an animal trainer, who displayed her in a shed every day, from 11:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., for fifteen months (705); and while the real Baartman became an alcoholic, Parks displaces this addiction in favor of chocolate. "You don't believe in history." So says William in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, and this remark serves as an epigraph to Venus. History, endlessly interrogated and never stable, seems to be Parks's central preoccupation . Plays such as The Death ofthe Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1989-92) and The America Play ([99-93) offer an audacious, often hard to distinguish mixture of pain and humor as they present AfricanAmericans struggling to position themselves within a sick society. Both plays were controversial, yet Parks's abstract, wildly experimental style seems to have shielded them from the moral outrage that Venus, with its comparative straightforwardness and its unrelenting focus upon a single, historically factual character, provokes. With hindsight, we can see Venus as a gateway play for Parks, wherein she begins to inch toward the more realistic style of her most recent work (In the Blood, Fucking A, and the celebrated Topdog/Underdog). Venus begins in 1810, the year that the real Baartman was brought over to London. Lured by promises of wealth, Parks's Venus assumes that her role in the Mother-Showman's freak show will be only a temporary degradation. She soon becomes the star attraction of the "9 Human Wonders," aT, as the MotherShowman sometimes calls them, "the 9 lowest...