Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  They exhibited me at number 188 rue St. Honoré, which had once been the Catholic College of St. Honoré, a convent up until the Revolution destroyed it. Now, part of it was a brothel, and the old wine cellar was used as latrines for the whores. The furnished hotels nearby housed cheap prostitutes who plied their trade amongst the slaughterhouses that filled the district. There were also the gaming houses like the Good Children Gallery, a favorite haunt of my master, which housed all the games of chance: roulette, biribi, passe-deux, trente-et-quarante. Nearby were famous, luxurious cafés such as the Thousand Columns, where my friend Madame Romain presided over the cashbox as “la Belle Limonadière,” empress of the Palais Royal gardens.

  Belle had a lot of competition: Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, Italian marionettes, Chinese shadow plays, live rhinoceros, amazing cutout portraits from black paper made by Monsieur Silhouette, snake charmers, fortune-tellers and double-jointed Siamese twins. Belle also had me, Sarah Baartman, as competition on view six days a week, from eleven to nine, for the sum of three francs per person. I hung in a suspended cage above a wooden stage as if I were a wild animal. An army of paying spectators came to see me as each day, on command, I played my guitar and sang, jumped and danced, felt their breath on me, their eyes, filled with contempt, curiosity, repulsion and amusement. I smelled it. I drank it. I endured it for money, or so I believed. Money which equaled freedom and independence, or so I believed. But why I really endured it, I do not know. Just as I didn’t know why I still remained inert and lifeless in my bath when the door to escape was open. Hung across the façade of the largest exhibition hall in Paris was a life-size banner with the words in block letters:

  THE HOTTENTOT VENUS

  On exhibition here. Direct from the Dark Continent. The HOTTENTOT VENUS, just arrived from the banks of the Chamtoo River, the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, the most authentic and perfect specimen of the race of people called Houswaana. This extraordinary phenomenon of nature is unique in Europe up until now. As extraordinary as she is astonishing, in this Venus, the public has the most perfect human specimen of the race, which inhabits the regions of southern-most Africa. The HOTTENTOT Venus’s name is Saartjie Baartman. She speaks Dutch, English, and her maternal language, in which she sings original songs. Her color is closer to that of Peruvians than that of Africans, whose hair and features she has. Venus wears the dress of her country, with all the rude ornaments worn by those people. Venus plays the Jew’s harp, an instrument that, according to the great explorer Levaillant, is well loved amongst her race.

  Like the inmate of an asylum, I lived that advertisement every day, rain or shine, wet or dry, summer and winter. Except today.

  I studied the dirty, faded walls, scarred with a thousand outrages, age, rain, graffiti, humidity, ticks and roaches that nested underneath the wallpaper and dropped to the floor as soon as the candles were snuffed out. Just like fat ladies, giants, dwarfs, four-legged Siamese twins and onetesticled midgets crept out of the circus as soon as night fell. If I hadn’t been ill and it hadn’t been New Year’s Day and if it hadn’t been my birthday, I too would have crawled out of my bamboo cage in the white stone exhibition hall along with all the other freaks in Paris in the year 1816. I would be playing my guitar or pacing up and down my eight-by-twelve-foot cage for ten hours a day. I would be naked under a tight sheath of flesh-colored silk transparent enough to reveal my tattoos and my apron. High society would wine and dine and gawk until midnight. Men and, more and more regularly, women would poke me with their canes and parasols, make faces, shout gibberish and curses, rattle the cage to make me fall, spit and hurl insults they thought I didn’t understand. Sometimes I noticed a look of pity, even a tear on a spectator’s face. When that happened, my day was unbearable, for only then would I admit that I was still human.

  There were always aristocrats in the crowd, le beau monde, and the clergy came not only to see me but also to have the thrill of mixing with the lower classes and riffraff of St. Honoré, braving the possibility of being robbed, beaten or kidnapped. Elegant carriages parked far away. Bodies were packed so tight that no one could breathe. Fine perfume covered the stench. Fashionable ladies in their transparent, clinging, flimsy dresses fainted. Men drooled. Gentlemen fought their way out of the crowds with walking canes, kicks and swords. Sailors and soldiers swaggered amongst the citizens returned from Waterloo and Tsaritsyn. They all came. Like addicts to opium, they could not stay away nor hide their fascination. And I stood there. Sometimes shaking with cold. Sometimes shaking with rage, and sometimes not shaking at all but still as a mountain lion stalking its prey, listening to the sound of francs falling into Sieur Réaux’s cashbox.

  The bells of five o’clock mass chimed. It had begun to snow again, lightly. Snow no longer fascinated me as it once had. This winter had been the coldest in memory, or so French people claimed. So cold, the new King Louis had had to feed the starving, freezing and homeless of Paris out of his own pocket. The city’s firemen never slept because fires broke out all over the city from exploding stoves, clogged smokestacks, out-of-control bonfires that spread to surrounding houses. The outlines of the Tuileries Gardens, the Louvre Palace, the Concorde bridge, the paths of the King’s Botanical Gardens, called Le Jardin des Plantes where I had come face-to-face with the Emperor Bonaparte, who was now rotting on St. Helena, softened under a blanket of snow. When the bells ceased, all sound disappeared. There was only stillness.

  I closed my eyes and reached for my pipe. I was not leaving for anywhere. Not even to St. Helena, that harsh and barren island I had passed through when my bones had been supple and young. The dagga my tribe had smoked for centuries had a different name in Paris: cannabis. I lifted my pipe to my lips, preparing to float away on a cloud of forgetfulness. I wanted to forget the walls and the stove and the rats and the humiliation and the crowds and the freaks and the men I serviced for Réaux, and the hunger and the dreams that were now out of my reach even if I had had the courage to flee. Before I could take a single puff, a spasm of coughing seized me, the pain growing like a plant inside me until it burst into a terrible wracking, gurgling sound and a warm liquid rose in my throat. It took me a moment to realize that it was not bathwater but blood. Not the tiny drops that had often spilled from me these past weeks, but a full pumping gush of the proportions of the fountains outside.

  As I reached for a towel to stanch the blood, I overturned the oranges on the table and they rolled across the dirty floor away from me. I tried to call out, and in my panic slipped under the surface of the water, choking and waving my arms. My huge hips and buttocks were held fast, wedged against the sides of the tub. My shape held me prisoner. I couldn’t move. I screamed. But there was no one to hear me. The scream turned to a gurgle as I struggled to rise, twice almost drowning in water and my own blood. Suddenly my flanks pulled free, and with my last strength I rose from the rose-colored water like the Venus of my name, a torrent of blood from my hollow, exhausted lungs clothing my nakedness. Tears of it streamed across my breasts and down my body like Miss Harvey’s hair. In the irregular gray reflection of the windowpanes, which held in them the flickering points of lit candles, I appeared in a way I had never seen myself in the mirrors I so avoided. The horizontal slit eyes with their swollen lids, the high cheekbones, full bottom lip, small neck, heavy breasts, delicate hands, golden color graceful arms, huge haunches and overwhelming buttocks floated towards me.

  Sideways, I was a quivering, trembling, hideous mass of flesh; a peninsula, a continent of ridges and dimples and valleys and craters split by the great divide of my backside, from which extended a foot of bulbous curls and rolls of fat. The small of my back curved up like the neck of a crane. This was why they called me a freak. The same reason they called me Venus. And like the Venus I was, I rose from my bath, standing up without leaving the tub, concealing my apron with my right hand, surprised that I was leaving this world and surprised that I had no thoughts about leaving except to think, Sarah Baartman, you are too yo
ung to die. How could I imagine that death would not end my life? That I, a monster of imagination, not nature, was to begin a posthumous life of such drama and complexity that it would last for centuries? A life even more monstrous than the one I had just quit?

  —How come I here? I asked myself. How come I here?

  Outside, the Seine slid open, snow drifted against the houses along the narrow streets like the foam of ocean waves, a carriage passed, its wheels muffled by the shards of ice that lay everywhere and on my soul. The hooves of the snorting, smoking horses pocked the virgin snow that lay before number 7 Cour des Fontaines, their heads stretched downwards against their harnesses.

  I heard my mother singing my birthday song in her soft clicks and coos. My name song. Ssehura. I fell forward towards the flash of light. Reaching out blindly, I cried for help in Khoekhoe. I knew only that I was twenty-seven years old this day and I wanted to live.

  2

  SIRE,

  The examination of the organization of a living being and the particular consequences that result in his way of life, the phenomena that he manifests, his relationship with the rest of nature, is what can be called the natural history of that being.

  —BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,

  Letter to the Emperor Napoleon

  on the progress of science since 1789

  Shit moon, the English month of September, 1792. If my story could begin the way the penny posters that advertised my person as Venus began, there would be a watercolor backdrop of sea and sand and coconut trees along a wide, mile-long, white, white beach that stretches beyond sight into invisible whiteness. It would be my third birthday and on the wild empty beach two naked babes, myself and my cousin, would be playing in the sun while two black and white penguins waded in the surf nearby. Watching not far away would be my mother, Aya Ma, a girl not more than twenty-six who had seven children, four males and three females, of which I was the youngest. This is my oldest recollection.

  I am speaking now in Khoe, my maternal language, a language white men have never mastered, a language complex and subtle enough to express anything I have to say in English or Dutch, any line of poetry, any rhyme or proverb or quotation from the New Testament. So you will not hear from me any pidgin Dutch or coy Negro dialect. What is English is rendered in English and what is Dutch in Dutch, and what is Khoe is rendered in Khoe. As I have said, this is my oldest recollection.

  Mother’s soft voice with its clicks and coos would be singing my birthday song, explaining the meaning of my name to me and that I was Khoekhoe, the People of the People who had ruled the lush forests and grasslands of the Cape as hunters and herders from the days of the Great Flood. Perhaps speaking to herself, she would have explained that this long desolate beach was now a war zone. The Khoekhoe were at war with the Dutch, who had arrived years ago and who were themselves at war with the English, who fought us, the Dutch and the Trekboers for possession of what no one really owned: the land.

  The Dutch had set foot on our beaches a hundred and forty years ago and had built a fortress, which was now the Dutch East India Trading Company. Over the years, my mother’s tribe had been pushed back further and further into the interior away from our ancestral grazing lands. My mother’s nation now consisted of small encampments along the beach, and our great herds of cattle were reduced to the few hundred head we drove to the Xhoa market in treks lasting more than twenty days.

  Even after they had taken everything of value—the land, the cattle, the gold—the English still raided our settlements for sport, hunting trophies to hang on their walls or send back to England. Or to punish Khoekhoe men who refused to work for them as miners and slaves. Severed heads were very much prized and bands of riders would raid our camps of mostly women and children while the men were gone and decapitate anyone who stood in their path. They would scatter the herds, whooping and yelling, then pick off the fleeing people with their rifles.

  When I was almost four, my mother was killed in one of these raids. With the eyes of a child, I remember her severed head rolling along the beach and stopping at the water’s edge, then being scooped up by a yellow-haired horseman riding hard as if it were a plaything that he had to retrieve. As Aya Ma tried to outrun him she had taken wing like a heron, her elbows flapping in a futile effort to fly away, her lips jutting out like a beak, her neck outstretched in a bird’s landing position.

  My father had been away at the market in Xhoa and didn’t learn of my mother’s death for almost a month. So it was very hard for him to believe she was dead at all. In fact, he never really believed it. For him, she had only run away and left him alone with seven children. He never took another wife. He divided us up amongst his relatives and left with his herd on long treks north that would last for many moons. But he would always return for his children’s birthdays, and though from then on he was never a real father to me, I always accorded him the honor and respect I owed him.

  Five years after my mother died, he too was killed by the same English landlords for trespassing onto a cattleman’s land while driving his bullocks to market. That year, I was nine. It was my birthday and Daddy had just sung my song. I was with him, helping him herd, when I heard the sound: the noise of a thousand sticks tapping gently upon a tree. Then it grew and grew and I knew it to be the beating hooves of galloping animals. I scrambled under a rock as the sound, which at first was very faint and thin, became louder and wilder with what might have been shouts of warning or screams.

  Then I heard gunshots in the distance. Cattle were moving. Guns were firing. There was nothing to do except hide. My excitement was fierce although fear ate into my brain. The sound of tapping on trees grew louder and louder until it became a rumble mixed with an echo that was like distant thunder. As a herdswoman, I knew this was not thunder but the bellowing of desperate animals, mixed with the screams and shouts of the shepherds as they approached. I saw a lone koodoo buck that had somehow gotten mixed up with the herd. It flew past me like a flash of lightning, foam on its lips, its tongue hanging out, followed by a raging bull so large he blocked out the light.

  Then, the stampede arrived—a countless heaving mass, it seemed to my small person crouching trembling beneath a boulder. They flew at me, plunging down a steep incline nearby: cows, bulls, calves, heifers, bullocks, oxen, even a zebra all mixed together, all snorting, bellowing, crying and running. They were all different colors, their long horns flashing. The thunder was fearful, the sight bewildering as they rushed by me, a mighty moving mass so tight I could have walked on their backs. Calves got swept off their feet and were carried forward by the moving bodies of their mothers or other heifers. At the very last moment, the herd swerved and passed, avoiding the rock under which I hid, for no wall, no fence could have saved me. Trees snapped in their wake and were stamped into a ravine as they turned as one. The shouts and curses of the shepherds mixed with the cries of the animals.

  Then I heard a new sound, of horses’ hooves and the snap of pistols, rifles and whips. The Khoekhoe herders were being shot with rifles, cut down with cowhide whips or decapitated with broadswords. They had only their crooks, which they flung down as they ran for their lives. An English voice shouted,

  —We’ve got them all! Not a Hottentot left!

  The riders began to beat the bush now that the herd was scattered, looking for dead or hiding Hottentots, trampling the high grass under their horses. A band of horsemen were still chasing my father. He and a handful of survivors were running as fast as they could towards the ravine. But they could not outrun the horses. Their heads rolled as one by one they were seized by the hair and beheaded or caught in the lash of a bull-whip which lifted them from the ground, twisting their heads off their shoulders as they ran, leaving their legs still pumping. I heard another white voice, breathless and choking with dust.

  —Halt at the ridge and round up the herd, forget the niggers!

  A red-haired rider waved his gun wildly above his head, then turned his mount in a circle before p
lunging into the ravine at full gallop. Below perhaps thirty Englishmen were firing upon the whole village. Some villagers had spears, some, arches and arrows, some were completely naked, having run their leggings and lappas off their bodies. As they stumbled and were cut down, a great cry, which was a mighty curse, rose from them, to which I added my voice. The herders who had not been killed made a last stand, turning back and charging the mounted horsemen. It was the beginning of a massacre. The whole tribe, women and children, fell as one, packed as close together as the stampeding cattle had been, snarling like beasts, howling and yelling while the white men shouted.

  —Kill the niggers.

  And they shot into them at point-blank range, moving them around with their mounts like sheep to the slaughter until the Englishmen’s arms were so tired that they couldn’t hold their guns up to aim. The tribe’s first rush had taken the whites by surprise and had driven them back at first. The spears and knives of the armed villagers slashed the flesh of their horses, causing them to buckle and throw off the riders, who, once on the ground, found themselves fighting hand to hand with no room to use their guns. But a second band of whites rode to the rescue, wielding ropes, whips and rifles, driving off the remnants of the defending cowboys, leaving in their wake the dead and the wounded and taking with them all the heads they could find as trophies. Amongst those dead was my father.

  The massacre is all I remember of my father. Yet from time to time, other recollections rise to the surface. I recall he was a small man, perhaps five feet with a pale yellow complexion and braided hair to his waist. He had killed a mountain lion once and wore the skin as a dappa until the day he died. When they found him, his dappa had disappeared along with his head. I often wonder if he wasn’t just as happy to die. After the murder of my mother, he lost the taste for life and left our welfare to his brothers and sisters, escaping her memory on long cattle drives to the interior as if fleeing the reality that he had lost her. Only our birthdays were sacred and I wept because despite all, he had sung to me for my ninth birthday.