Broca’s brain:
“The Venus Hottentot.”
Elegant facts await me.
Small things in this world are mine. (1990, 3–4)
It is a short section, in the first person, with couplet lines that enjamb themselves, giving the effect of strain or a failing order. The “Cuvier” section lays out a particularly contained narrative of the genealogy of black women’s bodies; “Science, Science, Science!” the section begins, repeating the frame of reference lest we “miss” it. Cuvier’s narrative is one of objects, “small things” which make up an exacting but completely exterior world. Things are “blown up”—“insect wings,” “cranial measurements,” “genitalia”—things are preserved to be “seen” by Cuvier and by a future viewing public. His genealogy is one of moving “closer” in order to go further, to the museum, and so on. His narrative, as Alexander imagines/constructs it, is one of assigning reference, naming. It is the part, the artifact, which is named, “her genitalia” in a jar given a referent but “her,” the body and subject, left unmade. Of course, Alexander’s reverse act is to name/construct “Cuvier,” to limit him to these contained lines, to a “small” body of ownership, of knowledge, a small lineage (3–4). Her appropriation of his voice takes Alexander’s knowledge and reframes the referent under Hottentot’s name, rather than the conventional genealogy that would locate Cuvier, then Baartman. Alexander’s use of historical detail and multiperspective interior monologue to remake narratives of race and sexuality marks her’s intervention into the patterns of reference that identify Baartman’s meaning, a failing series of parts standing in for what was always a performative, constructed whole or, in Gilman’s words, the “specimen” acting as “pathological summary of the entire individual” (2010, 86). “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” is a critique of taking from the specifics of historical detail a compulsory narrative of gendered and racialized subjectivity, the “tragic case” repeated, imminently and endlessly.
If Cuvier’s historiography is relegated to the limits that Alexander imposes on his referents, then her wish to inhabit or rewrite the genealogy of the Venus Hottentot reads as expansive, not as a recovery project for a “ghost,” per se. And indeed, it is not the “fact” of Venus’s bottom, nor scientific discourse alone, that gives the bottom, as sign, its historical and cultural weight: “Bottoms were big in Georgian England,” Baartman biographer Holmes tells us, as was public debate about Baartman’s status as either “slave” or “free agent” in the emerging capital market, one that marked her ability to, for instance, speak several languages as a skill set that implied consent perhaps even more than her corporeal presence did (2007, 43).8 Alexander herself references this move in her Callaloo interview when asked about her interest in Hottentot:
Hopefully what the poem gives her also is an intellectual range. When I say intellectual, I don’t mean book stuff but a rich and textured inner life that belies the surface exploitation and presentation. I guess that’s what I’m most interested in. It’s a very interesting black-people-character question because our surfaces are so wildly distorted in Western culture. Therefore, to go into the inside, there is all this contrast and distance frequently with how we are seen and who we are inside. (Phillip 1996, 502)
Though the rationale sounds perhaps seductively sentimental, notice that Alexander describes her process here not as a corrective measure but as a descriptive one; she, as her Venus Hottentot does in the next section in the poem, is describing the terrain in which she writes on race, gender, and sexuality. The “interior” is the bottom, full of “contrast and distance,” unresolved for her poetic genealogy. Like Alexander’s conception of her audience, her relationship to constructing Saartjie Baartman as reference is a question of narrative capacity or range, not a reproduction of “the illusion of realism” and “mastery” that characterizes nineteenth-century engagement with Baartman or the narrative that locates her as a model of resistance (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 6). Her mapping does not deny even as it seemingly conflicts with surface signs of meaning. Alexander’s poem and the collection it frames contest the constructed conflict between sexuality and intellectual production as a false split between exterior and interior.9 “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” shifts poetic genealogy to questions of moving into rather than moving over to something larger than such “small” objects. It insists not on the sum of their representative parts but on their reclassification, or their re-collection, into different analytical and referential frames which can recognize black women’s material bodies as modes of diaspora intellectual practice, and vice versa (as in the previous chapter’s reconsideration of Bessie Smith through Jackie Kay).
As the second section of the poem begins, untitled, we recognize the voice not as Cuvier’s but as that of the Venus Hottentot of the title. The speaking subject is not passively placed but locates herself within London, as a traveling/traveled body, one who is decidedly doing “work,” like Kay’s Bessie Smith, including the intellectual work that Alexander attributes to her in her interview:
There is unexpected sun today
In London, and the clouds that
Most days fit into this cage
Where I am working have dispersed.
I am a black cutout against
a captive blue sky, pivoting
nude so the paying audience
can view my naked buttocks. (1990, 4)
This first eight-line stanza, too, offers a containment, but of a different sort. If Alexander’s reference to Cuvier was sparse, direct, and limited, then these expansive stanzas offer a blunt but thoughtful version of histories of display. Hottentot as speaking subject is a theorist, critically reading her surroundings and referencing the visible structures in/of her display: “this cage,” “paying audience,” and so on.10 She is both naming and, as she continues, named, the referent and the one capable of referencing.
Her ideological reference point, however, is neither science nor shame, the dominant modes of characterizing black women’s sexuality in the discourses of typology and respectability. The awkward articulation of the word “buttocks” at the end of the stanza marks the turn to official terminology within poetic construction, the wish to codify “where I am working” with a certain halting banality in place of the “double entendre” of “vulgarity” (Cooper 1995, 141).11 For Alexander, it is the labor of reference, as the reader stumbles over the sound and the sign of the bottom, “buttocks,” that is emphasized. It is also the resistant timing of the speech, its specificity—“today”—and its posthumous address, that manages to escape the predetermined narrative of epic tragedy.12 This is the quotidian existence of the cosmopolitan subaltern, the work that representation continually does not just in the lexicon of domination but in the too-quick preoccupations generalized categories in diaspora and transnational feminist studies.13
This ability to read the “surfaces,” distorted though they may be, offers Alexander’s Hottentot a capacity that obviously complicates the narrative of her legacy in Western discourse, on display at the Musée de l’Homme, in parts and jars. (In 1825, she would be posthumously speaking.)14 She, too, can construct lists of “small things,” like Cuvier, things that she would acquire in her diasporic performative work, things that Alexander repossesses to her:
I would return to my family
A duchess, with watered-silk
Dresses and money to grow food,
Rouge and powders in glass pots,
Silver scissors,
