The Heretical History of Robin Coste Lewis's The Voyage of the Sable Venus

Midway through the seventy-nine-page title poem of Robin Coste Lewis's debut collection of poetry, The Voyage of the Sable Venus, which won the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry, readers encounter a series of couplets describing a slavery-era image. Even if they have never seen it, readers might easily envision this artwork:

Nude Black Womanin an Oyster Shell

Drawn by Dolphinsthrough the Water

and accompanied by Cupids,Neptune, and Others.

(73)

The art object to which Lewis alludes is William Grainger's 1794 engraving of Thomas Stothard's allegorical painting, Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies. This painting illustrates Isaac Teale's 1765 poem, "The Sable Venus; An Ode," which appears in the second volume of the third edition of Bryan Edwards's book, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1801). A prime example of iconography as pornography, Stothard's painting reinvents the Venus of Sandro Botticelli in a way that glorifies the middle passage, an effect he achieves by replacing anything recognizable as slavery with the romanticized charm of black femininity. As Lewis told novelist Matthew Sharpe, what struck her about this representation of Venus was the way it is "beautiful and horrible simultaneously" ("I Don't Accept"). As she explained, it is "really compelling if you can wipe from your mind that it's a pro-slavery image" ("I Am an Artist"). In this observation of the work's duality, Lewis begins to identify the intersection of aesthetics with politics that gives a Janus face to museum-housed artworks—The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies is beautiful and horrible, a celebration and a delusion. Although it romanticizes the slave trade, it also captures the black Venus's powerful beauty.

Lewis has explained that Stothard's representation of Venus was the inspiration for her poem by the same name, "The Voyage of the Sable Venus," which she describes as "a narrative poem comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present" (35). This essay argues that Lewis's poem challenges historically entrenched figurations of beauty and femininity, such as those generated and perpetuated by Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies, by mixing and remixing the language that historians and curators have used to title and describe artworks that stage the black female body in Western art history. I argue that Lewis does not simply reproduce the visual-art objects to which she alludes, but rather develops an aesthetic strategy that allows the titles and descriptions to act upon the sense of history that they help to create. In this way, "The Voyage of the Sable Venus" aims to provoke a response to the racial discourse that supplements the popular historical narrative of the West.

"The Voyage of the Sable Venus" comprises eight sections, which Lewis calls "catalogs" to signify the sort of historical periodization commonly used to organize the Western art-historical canon. Following two brief preludes titled "The Ship's Inventory" and "Blessing the Boat," which call to mind the middle passage—a dominant theme throughout Lewis's collection—readers enter the poem's dramaturgical museum by way of a catalog named "Ancient Greece & Ancient Rome." After a taking them through a second catalog titled "Ancient Egypt," Lewis guides readers toward the present in catalogs called "The Womb of Christianity" and "Medieval Colonial." The four remaining catalogs are titled "Emancipation & Independence," "Modern, Civil, Right," "Modern Post," and "The Present/Our Town."

Although Lewis's award-winning collection has been widely reviewed, it has to date received little critical attention from scholars. Describing "The Voyage of the Sable Venus" as a revisionary engagement with the cultural legacies of Ancient Greece and Rome, Tessa Roynon briefly considers Lewis's poetics alongside Bernardine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe (2001) and M. NourbeSe Philip's Looking for Livingstone: An...