Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  The Hottentot Venus was the subject of several plays and various caricatures; she will no longer be of interest to anyone except the scalpel of a naturalist and then a few material parts of this divinity will occupy no other Olympus than a jar . . .

  The light died and the lone tree in the Cour des Fontaines shivered under its hoar. I continued to smooth the folds of Sarah’s red riding hood mechanically, like Mr. Taylor’s mad Lady Macbeth trying to wash murder away. The cloak was warm and glistening to the touch, the double-worsted wool soft and thick under the fingers of my Manchester weaver’s hands. In the sad bare room, the incandescent scarlet cape cast its red glow like a lamp. I kept reading the obituaries, letting each sheet that I read fall to the floor, where they surrounded me like sea froth, their curled edges raking my skirt. I rocked back and forth on my heels as I read. I knew all the facts, the dates, the names that were not written, the stories that would never be told and the lies that always followed death. I was surprised Sarah was so famous. There were announcements in the London papers and as far away as Brussels and Amsterdam. But there would be none, I thought, from the Cape of Good Hope. Dunlop would never read Sarah’s obituary in America.

  I thought of the Reverend Wedderburn. I imagined him standing in the middle of Piccadilly Square, this day in the miserable January drizzle, his overcoat whipping around him, reading Sarah’s obituary in the MorningPost or the London Times, his lips moving, tears making it impossible to continue to the end. Paris has now to deplore . . . it would begin. Years ago, we had written a desperate letter to him from Halifax but we never received any reply; if it had arrived, we might already have been on our way to Paris, disappearing from the face of the earth without a trace. What if he had come? I wondered. What if he had come?

  In the dirty gray light illuminating the sordid room, I lined up all the men through whose hands Sarah had passed. I lined them up as one would for a firing squad: the two brothers Peter and Hendrick Caesar, the doctor Alexander Dunlop, the Reverend Freehouseland, the collector William Bullock, the abolitionist Robert Wedderburn, the judge Lord Ellenborough, the actor Henry Taylor, the preacher Joshua Brooks, the animal trainer Sieur Réaux and finally the naturalist Georges Cuvier.

  I tied their hands behind their backs, blindfolded them and shot them dead, walking amongst the prone bodies, executing each with a coup de grâce at the base of their skulls with a long-barreled, ivory-handled Smith & Wesson pistol. As I buried in my imagination each body in the cemetery of St. Clément, I whispered to Sarah’s ghost, This grave is yours. This grave is yours.

  Oh Lord, I thought, had I been her soul’s murderer too? The twelfth apostle? And had I, Alice, like Judas, held her down, pinned her under my own body for twelve pieces of silver, to keep myself and Victor alive? I felt the shadows gathering around me like crouching beasts, slowly turning as the sun turned, as the courtyard darkened with the passing time, as the fog rolled in, blocking the view from inside.

  One day, Sarah had asked me how white women could ignore the slavery of their black servants, their rape and concubinage, the illegitimate and pale children that were regularly born. Were they blind? Or did they think that their servants’ humanity counted for nothing or that their husbands’ and brothers’ and fathers’ honor counted for nothing because a black woman was not worthy of jealousy? I had not known what to answer for I had seen this blindness in others, but had not recognized it in myself. Yet it had affected my sight as well, no matter how much I had loved Sarah. And God knows I had loved Sarah! I hated what men had done to her, all of them, with their locks and their contracts, their penises and their pretensions, their dicks and their diplomacy, their codpieces full of hot air, their wars and their science, their factories and their industries, their progress and their enlightenment, their establishment and their dreams of glory.

  I noticed another piece of news on the front page of the same QuotidienneI held in my hands. It probably would have made the rainmaker, Magahâs, smile. Or at least the purple heron.

  FOREIGN NEWS

  LONDON, JANUARY 1, 1816

  Yesterday, Bonaparte’s famous carriage captured by Prince Blücher’s troops at the Battle of Waterloo was removed to the museum of Mr. William Bullock in Piccadilly Circus, London, where it will be exhibited shortly to the public.

  21

  MONSIEUR THE PREFECT,

  A South African woman exhibited by Mr. Réaux under the name of Vénus Hottentote has just died, Cour des Fontaines. This occasion to acquire new information about this singular race of humankind obliges me to ask permission that the cadaver of this woman be transported to the anatomy laboratories of the Museum of Natural History. Our colleague Professor Cuvier, who instructs in comparative anatomy, assures me that he guarantees all matters of decency, appropriate to the circumstances, will be exactly observed in the interest of the general public.

  —ETIENNE GEOFFROY SAINT-HILAIRE,

  Letter to the prefecture of Paris, January 2, 1816

  Great Eland, the English month of January, 1816. As always, the white man won. The baron looked down his long hawk nose at my prone body, scalpel in hand, as I lay on the marble slab of the dissecting table under the skylight of the amphitheater of the pavilion of comparative anatomy in the King’s Botanical Gardens. It was hard for me to believe that my war with white men was lost. Just like that of the Khoekhoe. But the baron smiled. His eyes held only tender greed as he surveyed the uncharted landscape of this, his utmost desire: my map of Africa. I couldn’t weep because there are no tears in a cadaver.

  He hunched over me, devouring every detail as if I were his most treasured possession, the most precious of his thoughts, the most honorable of his decorations, the most brilliant of his discoveries. The great scientist, who had presented me to Napoleon during his hundred days, was now nothing more in my eyes than a hankering canine, an expert in rapine who had snatched my body from the Paris morgue in hopes of stealing my soul.

  —We will now proceed with the dissection of the female baptized Sarah Baartman, known as the Hottentot Venus, who some of you examined during her appearance here in this very amphitheater on March fifteenth, 1815. The subject before you succumbed to pleurisy aggravated by tuberculosis and alcoholism. She was also found to have had congenital heart disease. Her death occurred on January first, 1816. The subject was twenty-seven years old. The cadaver is fresh and in a perfect state of conservation.

  An African light invaded the amphitheater. Through the skylight it delineated every crease, every cravat, vest, top hat, cloak, frock coat. It molded each beaver hat, shirtsleeve, grain of wood. It invaded my sight-less eye, making me blink, caught every coil of my sprung hair, every pore of my grayed skin. It flooded the strange fierce face of the baron, making a halo around his wild red hair. It flowed over the wooden benches that climbed up the walls, filled with a hundred surgeons, anatomists, naturalists, phrenologists, medical doctors and members of the general public. No one was less than eight yards away from my body. The light produced an exactness that illuminated everything, including the terrible will of one man. The baron stood in the center of this sunlight and pretended to explain me to a world that detested me. He was determined to possess me in death as he had never been able to do in life. For despite those few seconds of war at the duke’s ball, I had had a will that matched his. I had been in charge of the heifer’s milk. Without my permission he could not drink.

  The baron was dressed for work in a voluminous smock, fur cap and a large scarf rolled around his neck. He had on unpolished riding boots. I waited. Once again the Khoekhoe’s herd rode across the circle of the domed sky, dancing, running, stampeding through time, sometimes in quick step, sometimes in slow motion, just like the herds in Magahâs’s cave raced as if trying to escape some catastrophe—a flood, a fire, an earthquake or calamity unknown to its race until now.

  The baron raised his scalpel. It flashed like a bolt of lightning, as if his hand were the hand of God himself. He stood alone in the circle of light; hi
s assistants with their towels and basins stood nearby in the shadows, as if not to mar the perfect aura of godliness.

  As the knife slit me from collarbone to anus, the baron’s voice, light in timbre, kindly and serene, declaimed:

  —There is nothing more famous in natural history than the Hottentot apron, and at the same time, there is nothing that has been the object of so much argument. For a long time many denied its existence; others pretended it was the result of artifice and caprice; and amongst those who regard it as a natural conformation, there are as many opinions as there are authors about the female organs of generation that produce it. This organ is variously known as the female tablier, the tablier égyptien, the Hottentot apron, longinympha, macronympha or, as Linnaeus has named it, the sinus pudoris, the “curtain of shame.”

  —Nicolas de Graaf made the earliest reference to the Hottentot apron in 1640 as “an ornament the women have in certain places consisting of short thongs cut from the body, which hang down.” The phenomenon was then described by William Rhye in 1686 as Feminae hottentice and by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who insisted on the impossibility of the apron and its mythical origins in Hottentotarium Fictitium.

  —Gentlemen, Sarah Baartman’s apron is not fiction. I have the honor of being the first to dissect and describe in anatomical detail the appearance and function of this celebrated protuberance.

  —At the end of this dissection, gentlemen, I intend to show you exactly and definitively just what it is and what function the external generative organs of this woman are, and their place in the great Chain of Being. Meanwhile, I will describe the anatomical makeup of a species of humanity at the very bottom of the chain of evolution. Somewhere between the human species and the subhuman orangutan . . .

  —Sarah, the specimen before you, measures 1 meter, 39 centimeters or 55 inches. She weighs seventy-five pounds eleven ounces. Her color is yellowish light brown. The nose is small and flat and the face in general is heart-shaped, measures 10 centimeters in length, with high Oriental cheekbones, pointed chin, pulpous lips and a wide interocular space between the eyes, which, characteristic of the Mongol race, are horizontal, and light brown with bluish iris. The high projections of the cheekbones, also typically Mongolian, and the abnormally small ears are her most striking characteristics. The shape of the cranium is dolichocephalic, measuring 16.5 centimeters by 12.5 centimeters.

  The violet granite was cold under my back. The scalpel slid around the circumference of my skull. I screamed but no one in the hall could hear me. Master Cuvier’s countenance had the bright sheen of anticipation as he lifted my brain from its cavity and weighed it on the spot. I realized the soul was not located in the brain for I felt nothing as he dropped it into the bell jar held by his assistant, where it floated in the liquid like coral.

  —The weight of the fresh brain, continued the baron, is 28 ounces and the inner cranial capacity is 15.5 by 11.5 by 11 centimeters. The proportion of the weight of the brain to that of the body equals 1:43.25.

  —As for the Venus’s steatopygia, the height of the fatty cushion (the distance from the vertebral column and the furthest point of the buttock) is 16.5 centimeters. At its thickest part, the steatopygia measures 4.5 centimeters. The fatty mass overlies the regio glutea and sacrococcygea and continues over the regio coxalis. The arrangement of connective laminae tissue presents three superimposed strata which diminish in height as they approach the skin. This structure alone makes possible the fact that the fatty cushion retains its greatest arch upwards despite gravity. The steatopygia therefore consists of fibrous laminae ligamenta suspensoria . . . In other words, I can therefore verify that the protuberance of our Hottentot’s buttocks has nothing muscular or skeletal about it but arises from a fatty mass of a trembling and elastic consistency situated immediately under her skin and which vibrated with all the movements that the woman made.

  —As I have noted earlier, Sarah’s conformation is striking because of the enormous width of her hips, which extend 18 inches, or 45.7 centimeters, and by the predominance of her buttocks, which protrude more than 6 inches, or 15.2 centimeters, the rest of the subject is perfectly normal in the proportions of her body and limbs. Her shoulders, her back, the height of her bosom have grace. The curve of her stomach has nothing excessive about it. Her arms are well made and her hands . . . charming.

  I felt no pain either in my excised brain, my excised sex or my excised fibrous laminae. As the baron cut out my heart, I wondered where, then, resided that soul that could weep for what had come to pass?

  —Gentlemen, I am now going to take up the question of the external genitalia, or the organs of generation, of our Hottentot Venus. I reserve subsequent studies on other aspects of their first inspection here at the King’s Botanical Gardens. Last March, nothing could be ascertained out of the ordinary in relation to their organization. The Venus kept her apron carefully hidden either between her thighs or even more profoundly inside her body. It is only now, after her death, that we can satisfy ourselves as to what she possessed. Our first objective is to study this extraordinary appendix that nature has made, a special attribute of her race . . .

  The baron had arrived at last at the place in Africa he wanted to be, most wanted to possess. Not the Congo nor Ethiopia, not Sierra Leone or Sudan or even Egypt, but Cape Table. I listened to him murmuring like the litany Liberty, equality, fraternity, the litany Prepuce, pubes, pudendum,lavishing the skill of a sculptor and the heart of a butcher to excise the mysterious apron he was now free to explore without my consent. Over my dead body. His mind seemed to race ahead of his words. His hands probed deep into my uncharted cadaver while uttering the sighs of a man in the throes of overwhelming passion. The long nose held a drop of perspiration; the azure-blue eyes either burned with intensity or closed in ecstasy as he continued his meticulous ravishment. My cadaver became the unexplored Africa, the Dark Continent, dissected, violated, probed, raped by dead white men since Roman times.

  The scarlet rays of the setting sun stole over my yellow-gray skin. They leapt from wall to benches to return to the circle where the baron fucked the Venus, inventing the dogma that would rumble through History as Truth. This time, my audience was not the braying, giggling, merry mob of Piccadilly. This was the intelligentsia born of the Age of Enlightenment: medical doctors, anatomists, paleontologists, alienists, naturalists, evolutionists, who sat around the baron’s podium as around a campfire, their haunches cramped on hard wooden benches, their pens raised in the sign of benediction, the Christian cross. God was on their side and the iron-fettered weight of all civilization.

  The baron’s scalpel completed the extraction of my sex and anus and held it high like a flag.

  —Prepuce, pubes, pudendum, he exhorted as he put the organs in another jar. The audience rose as one, applauding wildly.

  —Gentlemen, I have the honor to present to the Academy the genital organs of this, my Venus Hottentot, prepared in a way that leaves no doubt about the nature of her apron . . .

  —Ahhh, a strangled cry like that of an excited baboon erupted from the baron’s thin lips.

  —The great Chain of Being. The great Chain of Being! The great Chain of Being, he cried out as he ejaculated, his hand deep in my entrails. He was stuttering like a Hottentot. M-m-my pri-pri-primary research, he babbled, has as its subject this extraordinary appendix which nature has made, I can verify, a special attribute of Sarah’s race. We soon ascertain that it is exactly as the naturalist Péron drew it. Although it is not possible to adopt his theory. Effectively, the apron is not, as he maintained, an organ of particularly extreme size. It is the development of the nymphae, the inner lips of the vulva, to a length of about four inches.

  —The labia majora presents a semicylindrical protuberance, about four inches long, of which the lowest extremity gets wider, branches off to form two thick wrinkled petals, two and a half inches long by one inch wide, each rounded at the end, their bases widening along the internal edge of the labia majora and t
urning into a fleshy crest which ends up at the lowest angle of the lip.

  —If we raise these two appendices, they form together a heart shape, the center of which would be the place of the opening of the vulva.

  —Gentlemen, what you have before you is a fantasy creature without language or culture, without memory or consciousness, who has entered our consciousness as the epitome of sexual power: a Venus. Before you lies Sarah Baartman, a Hottentot, who arrived in London in 1810 and Paris in 1814 to extraordinary success with the public in circuses and exhibition halls, almost a mythological figure like a mermaid. What does she mean to science—a connection to the lower species of humankind, a reminder of our civilized progress towards rationality and away from animalosity. Before you lies the Hottentot, notorious as early as the fifteenth century as the ultimate savage. The first explorers came upon this species even earlier, fascinated with its language, whose impossibility to comprehend has contributed to the Hottentot legend.

  —In the great Chain of Being that credits the Hottentot as being the missing link between animal and human realms, Sarah Baartman is the true transitional figure between man and ape.

  —The chimpanzee corresponds closely to the lowest degree of man . . . from this lowest degree, emits the brutal Hottentot, and from her Reason and Science advance . . . The great Chain of Being . . . The great Chain of Being . . . repeated the baron reverently.

  So, I thought, the soul is not located in the sex, for I feel nothing now that it is gone, floating in a jar, labeled Hottentot Venus, that circulates amongst the savants.

  As my girl’s soul searched for an exit, I contemplated each organ as it emerged from my body, dissecting my own anatomy as the baron went on to read me. I marveled at the beauty I found in these glistening, vibrant, multicolored, invisible inhabitants of my body—full of tiny stones and veins, threads and filigree of diamonds of surpassing wonder within which human life lay balanced between fragility and resistance. It was all there, before my very eyes. Greatness. Goodness. Godliness.