get everything in the play is going to be someone who is more or less like me in that they would have an education that is not just a school education but an eclectic education that knows a lot about and revels in black culture and black so-called high culture as well as black vernacular culture, both of those working in an amalgam. So I think that’s who is going to pick up the most from the play. (Alexander, in Phillip 1996, 501)
Instead of lamenting the narrowness of who can “pick up” the quick and multiple references of her work, Alexander seems to have a spatial sense of readership, one which is about capacity but not totality. Reference is not meant to alienate but to spread, to educate, but not in a formal or patronizingly instructive way. Instead, Alexander takes herself as an example of a visible, nonsilent subject, assuming the existence and audience of other black cosmopolitan women who could be imagined readers of her work without denying its class-selective breadth.
“The Venus Hottentot (1825),” the opening and eponymous poem of Alexander’s first collection (1990), is similarly invested in this lineage of reference, which is of and for, though not limited to, a cosmopolitan construction of diaspora feminism. The first thing one notices, before the poem itself, is the book’s original cover. If the reader does not “know” the referent, does not know who “Venus Hottentot” is historically, the cover offers the reproduction of a painting of a light-skinned black woman, dressed in modern-day black with an abstract formal quality (i.e., the body is not quite “realistically” drawn or proportioned).5 The back cover tells us that the painting is actually from the collection of Alexander’s parents themselves, and its artist, Charles Alston, was a well-known African American artist during the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts movement. The back blurb, too, asserts that her work “contributes something new to African-American poetry,” self-consciously situating the book as both part of a recognizable cultural genealogy and an “innovation.” Like the Venus Hottentot, the text becomes both exception and example.
If the reader does know the referent to the title’s historical figure, the cover becomes even more dissonant, as the Venus Hottentot is usually characterized as an extreme body in the nineteenth century, one characterized by “what they [European audiences and scientific experts] regarded as unusual aspects of her physiognomy—her genitalia and buttocks, . . . [which] became the central image of the black female in Europe through the nineteenth century. . . . The black female embodies the notion of uncontrolled sexuality” (Hammonds 1997, 172). In locating the Venus Hottentot as ur-figure in the French national-continental literary imaginary, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting points to the construction of the Hottentot as the “master text on black female sexuality” in the post-Enlightenment West (1999, 17), while Sander Gilman’s analysis is echoed in Hammonds’s statement, emphasizing how the construction of black sexuality defined white women’s sexuality as well (2010, 79). Bernth Lindfors (1996) outlines the historical construction of Baartman as a deeply gendered and racialized icon through the Victorian British press’s emphasis on caricature and visual difference. The racially indeterminate, abstract woman with tiny folded hands, light skin, and all black clothes on the cover of Alexander’s book reads as a counter to the nineteenth-century visions of Baartman’s sexuality, including the represented body on the publicity poster circa 1814.6 She is the “silent” partner, the middle-class black woman to Hottentot’s primitivist caricature of black women’s sexuality but also to contemporary narratives of reclaimed authenticity that celebrate the audacious presence of the bottom (Hobson 2005, 2). As Nicholas Hudson (2008) points out, the visual economies of race in its modern forms that Baartman embodied were created concurrently with ideals of visual aesthetics themselves in the Victorian era. It is this merging, the high art contemporary black portrait under/in the name of an exploited racial icon from the nineteenth-century black diaspora, which Alexander employs to hybridize and expand the tonal range of race and sexuality—of “human difference,” as scholar Janell Hobson terms the turn from racial-sexual pathology (2005, 4)—as well as to acknowledge its discursive limits.
To take up Evelynn Hammonds’s genealogy of the Hottentot for a moment, though, Baartman was not just an icon of the “uncontrolled” body—she was the very method of control. Brought to London from Cape Town in 1810, Baartman performed under the draw of nascent sideshow curiosities but also as a “representative” of her racial-sexual identity, marked by her steatopygia, or her supposedly enlarged bottom. Her body was a marker of classification, and her performative value was not because of her anatomy but because of its construction and marketing as being the “common property” of black women. As her recent biographer, Rachel Holmes, articulates, “The success of the Hottentot Venus depended upon a contradiction: Saartjie needed to be perceived as a unique novelty, while absolutely typifying the stereotype of a Hottentot” (2007, 42)—again, exception and example. Anne Fausto-Sterling has traced not just Baartman’s “use” as a racial signifier through comparative anatomy but also other indigenous women featuring in racial typology dating back to the late sixteenth century (2000, 205). More recently, there has been an explosion of work on Baartman through the lens of disability studies (Rosemary Garland Thompson references her as part of the history of display of “othered” bodies in Extraordinary Bodies [1997] and her introduction to Freakery [1996]) and black diaspora studies, both in the realm of her continued visual legacy in drama such as the aforementioned Parks’s Venus and visual artist Renee Cox’s work and in the “return” of her remains to South Africa in 2002 and the subsequent commemoration of her singular legacy in postapartheid South Africa (as noted by critics such as Neville Hoad [2007] and the documentary The Life and Times of Sarah Baartman [1998]). And in 2010, Alexander’s poem prefaced the introduction to Deborah Willis’s edited collection on the legacy of “Venus,” in Black Venus 2010 (2010), the first major anthology work to consider her legacy of representation, from historical, visual, and cultural studies perspectives. As Willis herself notes, much “variation” exists in critical investments and naming of the genealogy of the Venus Hottentot, but as exception and example, she stands with a planetary body of work and reference surrounding her.7
Alexander’s poem itself, “The Venus Hottentot (1825),” is divided into two sections which come to represent this collective cultural impulse to recover lost history and to question that historical representation in any and all of its forms—much as the 2008 Crais and Scully biography suggests in its title: Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. The first section is entitled “Cuvier,” the last name of the French scientist who circulated and did experiments on Baartman, and it tracks the known world, the “biography,” of whom we can only know as a performance through the archive, the Venus Hottentot:
Science, science, science!
Everything is beautiful
blown up beneath my glass.
Colors dazzle insect wings.
A drop of water swirls
like marble. Ordinary
crumbs become stalactites
set in perfect angles
of geometry I’d thought
impossible. Few will
ever see what I see
through this microscope.
Cranial measurements
crowd my notebook pages,
and I am moving closer,
close to how these numbers
signify aspects of
national character.
Her genitalia
will float inside a labeled
