Hottentot Venus

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

  The anatomists passed the bell jar containing my sex from hand to hand. The glass container shimmered. The reverent hands fondled the pristine preparation like a relic. Indeed, it traveled from fingertip to fingertip, all eyes upon it like a Holy Grail, each glance devouring a small bit of the tissue within . . .

  —In conclusion, gentlemen, said the baron over the excited murmur of the audience, I would like to reaffirm, in answer to certain arguments put forth lately, that no Africans, nor Bushmen, nor Hottentots, nor any race of Negroes could have given birth to the celebrated Egyptians, who built the civilization from which we can say the entire world has inherited its principles of law, of science and perhaps even religion! How could the pharaohs, our sublime ancestors, be Africans? he asked, holding high the bell jar with my brain so that all in the amphitheater could see. Then he picked up the head of an Egyptian mummy that lay on the instrument table and held it aloft in the other hand.

  —Look at this head, which I present to you so that as Academicians you can compare it with that of Europeans, Negroes, Hottentots. Bruce yet imagines that the ancient Egyptians were Cushites or woolly-headed Negroes related to the Shangalla of Abyssinia . . . Now that we can distinguish races by their skeletons and skulls and we possess so many ancient Egyptian mummies, it is easy to assert that whatever the color of their skin, they belonged to the same race of men as us; that they had a skull and a brain as voluminous; that, in one word, they made no exception to that cruel law which condemns to eternal inferiority the races whose craniums are depressed and compressed. I have examined more than fifty heads of Egyptian mummies and I can assure you that their heads are of Caucasian origin and not one displays the characteristics of Negroes or Hottentots . . .

  The good doctor had actually raised his hand in emphasis, and again heartfelt, enthusiastic applause followed. He then turned quite suddenly to one of his assistants, who held out a basin of clean water in which he slowly washed his hands.

  When he had cut my heart out, I had realized that the soul was not located in the heart either. For I felt no loss, no pain, no amputation as the baron threw it into the tin bucket where my liver, kidneys and intestines lay. The slop pail holding my internal organs including my heart would be thrown to the pigs.

  The baron now bowed to the crowd, clicking his heels.

  —I now turn our Hottentot and this assembly over to the honorable Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who will complete the maceration of the specimen and excise the Hottentot skeleton, which, once assembled, will be on exhibit here at the museum until further notice.

  The baron turned as the awed audience applauded his back, and walked his stiff-legged stately walk out of the amphitheater, pulling on his black frock coat as he went, drying his hands on the famous initialed towel he always wore attached to his watch pocket.

  I never saw him again.

  At that moment, a cloud darkened the skylight, canceling the ember-red circle in which I lay on a table of stone, surrounded by dark-suited, top-hatted assistants and my own entrails. For a fleeting moment, the amphitheater was plunged into darkness, then the gas-fired chandeliers blazed and a mob of young males rushed down the steps to the wooden balustrades surrounding the dissection table. Like a herd of South African red-legged zebras, they stampeded for a last look at the Venus. As I lay in state, they filed by one by one, peering first at me, then at my pickled brain in its tall bell jar, then my macerated sex. This was the closest I ever got to a Christian funeral, for I would never be buried. My hide would go back to London and into a Scottish lord’s cabinet of curiosities. My genitals and the contents of my head would remain on a shelf in this very museum. My homeless soul was puzzled. Was I free? Or was I still a bondswoman? Was my contract fulfilled at last?

  How come I here? How come I here?

  Night was falling. Oh, cry, cry into the barrel of my glistening intestines, sweep away my shit, raise the anchor of my gallbladder. Oh, lift my breeze and return me to the salt lands. Shame my jailers, curse my masters, lift my skirts, match my pride. Oh, great purple heron, wade in the Seine, transport my soul, leave the shepherdess not at their mercy! Throw this herdswoman onto the back of a raging bull, stampede me to deliverance, rescue me from the slaughterhouse of science. Oh, shame, shame, shame on you, masters of the universe. Shame on Dapper and Barrow, Levaillant and Diderot, Voltaire, Jefferson, Kolbe, Rousseau, Buffon, and fuck you, sirs! You are no gentlemen. This is no freak show. I am on display without compensation or compassion, in the name of all mankind and the great Chain of Being. The Hottentot Venus, archetype of inferior humanity. The very last layer of the human pie. Undo all this, sirs. Undo all this. Undo me.

  The mob streamed by me like a serpent, closer and closer, demanding the Holy Communion of my mismeasure, a gang following the baron’s rape. The silence of Holy Communion persisted as the scientists filed from the auditorium. Amongst them was my artist, Master Tiedeman. His eyes were clay red from weeping. He watched as they lifted my mortal remains and wrapped them in a winding cloth, ready for the potash and lye, which would remove the flesh from my skeleton and reveal it, naked, to the world. Only the granite table on which I had lain remained to be washed. A charwomen began to scrub the violet stone with pork bristles until it was spotless. I pronounced my curse once more drawn on my map: Until my ashes float upon the Orange River, until my bones bleach on the shores of Africa, until my soul roams Table Mountain, I vow on the head of my dead infant, no one will have peace, neither Africa nor Europe, neither victor nor victim, neither science nor faith, and no white man, neither dead nor alive. So help me God.

  22

  Isn’t there some glory for man to know that he has broken through the limits of time and recorded by means of various observations the history of the world and the succession of evils that proceeded the burst of humanity?

  —BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,

  The Animal Kingdom Distributed According

  to Its Organization

  December 1819. I had chosen red glove leather for the binding of this first edition of The Natural History of Mammals that Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and I had written and just published. In the soft candlelight of my library, I ran my hands over the smooth exquisite kidskin chased in gold leaf and black. The subscriptions had been tremendous. We had received orders from the four corners of the globe. More than a thousand volumes had already been subscribed. I suppose one would find it ironic that after destroying the Venus, I should guarantee her a place in history by engraving her image in the pages of The Natural History of Mammals for all time . . . I had heard that Venus’s hide had been naturalized and sold to a Scottish lord for his cabinet of curiosities, but I had nothing to do with that and don’t know for a fact if this is true. I do know that, to my knowledge, the Venus was never buried in the cemetery of St. Clément as decreed by law. There was an 1813 police ordinance for the burial of autopsied cadavers: the debris of human remains resulting from medical autopsies was to be buried in the cemetery of St. Clément, Paris. I now exhibit her skeleton, her brain and her sex in the King’s Museum of Natural History, where, along with her wax death mold, she stands in case number 33. She has become since her death a scientific icon and, as this book of animals illustrates, proof of the moral, intellectual and physical inferiority of her race and those races that resemble her; that is, the missing link between animal and human species— the lowest rung on the scale of human existence . . . The great Chain of Being. I stared at the oversized printed velum. The five-volume set was almost two feet square, containing original illustrations illuminated and drawn from living animals, including Mlle. Baartman.

  My eyes caressed the frontispiece. Paris 1819. Printed by the King’s lithographic presses and His Royal Highness the Duc d’Angoulême, 58 rue du Bac . . .

  I turned to Venus’s page. She was preceded by the white polar bear and followed by the spotted leopard. As she stared out at me from the page, the night previous to the dissection came flooding back to me. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hil
aire and I were sprawled exhausted on the stiff furniture, drunk not on the brandy we held in our hands, but on the exploits of the previous night at the morgue. We were being served coffee in this same library by my sad-eyed wife, Clémentine.

  —What luck, said Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, to have the cadaver so fresh and in such good condition.

  —It was your intervention with the prefecture of police that made it possible, my friend, thank you.

  —Réaux’s price was abominable.

  —The Venus is priceless. I would have paid double if Réaux had only guessed it.

  —What a scoundrel . . .

  —Well, he’s no gentleman, that’s certain. He’s only an animal trainer after all.

  —It’s a pity, just a few months ago, the Venus was alive and well, a living, breathing organism full of vitality.

  —She was sick, Etienne. It was obvious during those days here. She was suffering from alcohol poisoning and tuberculosis amongst other things.

  —Well, we were not there as doctors there to make her well, but to observe her as a monstrosity.

  —Any animal’s death, continued Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, is a sad one, even if one believes that in their ignorance they don’t recognize death and have no consciousness of it, so cannot prepare for it.

  —Do you think that man is any more capable of preparing for death just because he sees it coming, Etienne? Really?

  —We all go blindly into the unknown, you mean?

  —I mean we are all blind. We don’t even know what death is. Is it merely the absence of life? And if so, where in the body does the spark of life reside? The heart? The brain?

  —And do all categories of men go to the same place?

  —We are all God’s children.

  —Poor wretched creature. How I pity her.

  —Pity ourselves, dear Etienne, for she has gone perhaps to a better place, and we are stuck here in this desperate metaphysical struggle for survival.

  —You would change places with her?

  —Well, it would answer all our questions about religion and the hereafter, wouldn’t it? The chaos of the Revolution has only reinforced my great desire for order. All my life I’ve studied in fossils, the results of annihilating catastrophes. It is for that reason that I seek calm and stability . . . it is my nature to prefer destruction to transformation. It is metamorphosis that scares me.

  —Well, it would also solve my problems of celosomia, cyclocephaly, anencephaly, twin monsters, hermaphrodites and answer the question posed by the study of teratology as morally permissible given that God makes monsters. Now wouldn’t it?

  —There’s a difference between physical anomaly and monstrosity.

  —Indeed, there is, and I intend to prove it by fabricating embryonic monsters in laboratory bell jars myself.

  —I look forward to the consummation of these experiments. It is a decisive line of inquiry.

  —Naturalists have a sacred right to consider these questions growing out of men’s physical relations as merely scientific questions and to investigate them without reference to either politics or religion or morality.

  —I am most anxious about our colonies and French nationhood. The secrets of the indigenous people we have conquered must be explored in order to guard and control them in their environment by minute scientific, objective observation—the standards of resistance in occupied territories is, as the late Emperor has said, a matter of scientific and military intelligence. Know the enemy—hence we must delve beneath the surface, bringing the interior to light—the hidden genitalia of the Hottentot and all like her, and come to certain universal conclusions—if we want to be the rulers of the universe . . .

  —These are questions that should be chewed over and ingested slowly, I daresay, from our point of view.

  —The pathology of the underdeveloped races must be digested and execrated in a way that places the habeas corpus of the savage squarely on the spit for all to contemplate and profit by.

  —We need more and more craniums, more and more skulls to measure the capacities of the skull and determine the hierarchy of intelligences . . . said Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

  —We are entering a new era, Etienne, that of scientific anthropology, we no longer have to act on our instinctive knowledge of human nature. We now have machines to measure the cranium volume, the facial angle in relation to the ears, the size of the ears, the texture and length of the hair, the color of the skin, the morphology of the pelvis, the length of the arm and the forearm, all these things will define and buttress our conclusions as to the eternal inferiority of the Negro . . . the eternal inferiority of the Negro . . . the eternal inferiority of the Negro . . . I paused.

  —Classification should proceed from the most complex structure, the brain, to the simplest, the organs of generation. The primary research, I said as I picked up my gold-rimmed coffee cup and popped a chocolate into my mouth, should have as object the extraordinary appendix that nature has made, so to speak, a special attribute of her race . . . Yes, of course . . . her apron.

  Thinking back now, as I reread my text, I notice I failed to describe accurately a certain aura of innocence, of purity about Sarah, as if indeed this child of Africa had come to us straight from Eve’s garden. This impression persisted even in her most sordid and degraded situations. It surrounded her like an armor or a grail. I have no scientific or rational explanation for this odor of sanctity except to consider it that part of her that was human. Or perhaps, the part of her that was nature, the link between man and the Creator. Nevertheless, I am surprised by the sudden tears that fall now on her image, for truly and sincerely, I have no regrets.

  23

  Sire,

  The moral sciences start beyond this limit: they demonstrate how a particular idea is born from these repeated sensations, and from the comparison of these generalized ideas, a combination of ideas, judgments; and out of these, reason and will . . .

  —BARON GEORGES LÉOPOLD CUVIER,

  Letter to the Emperor Napoleon

  on the progress of science since 1789

  Little Eland, the English month of December, 1860. Master Tiedeman made his way across the Jardin des Plantes and entered the stone façade of the Museum of Natural History. He had done so every month since my installation as exhibit number 33 nearly forty-five years ago. Master Tiedeman was still handsome, but his red hair now was bone white, his hands shook and his step was stiff and faltering. He was an old, old man. It was a cold winter’s day. His long, wet woolen cloak hung in stiff folds like an Oriental skirt and his walking stick struck the polished wood floors of Salle number 6 like a drum. He always came late to see me to avoid the crowds that came to stare at the collection of stuffed wild animals, trophy heads and mummies. As he approached, he frowned on finding himself not alone. There was another tall figure standing in front of exhibition case number 33. He stood shoulder to shoulder beside the stranger who was obviously an English gentleman of means. Master Nicolas removed his hat, as he always did before my skeleton. It hung from a hook like a strange fruit beside the glass cage, which contained my death mold. Then, he recognized the other man.

  —Sir, are you Charles Darwin, the evolutionist and author of the newly published On the Origin of Species? I would recognize you anywhere!

  The other man simply smiled that strange English lifting of the upper lip and nodded shyly. For almost fifty years I had observed all the specimens in this museum and all its visitors and I had never seen a white man who so resembled an ape. The jut of the jaw, the flat nose, but above all the slanted, protruding brow over the tiny round black eyes gave him that appearance. The gentleman too had removed his hat and his bald pate shone in the overhead light, accentuating the enormous slope of his prominent forehead, which completely overshadowed his fiercely intelligent but simian eyes. His thin, chimpanzee-like lips were surrounded by a magnificent white beard of great thickness which ran into his small ears.

  This famous book of his had provoked a great war
amongst the naturalists who frequented the museum and discussed such things in my presence, on which, as a good servant, I eavesdropped. They had over the years, divided themselves into two groups: the monogeneticists and the polygeneticists. The theory that man was not created by God, but evolved from lower animals, had caused a furor in the Reverend Brooks’s Church of England. And here was its author, staring at my skeleton as if his life depended on it. For a while, the two white men stood silently in front of my case. After his outburst, Master Tiedeman pretended to read its label, which he already knew by heart and which was as explicit as the old circus posters. I eavesdropped on the following conversation.

  —The Hottentot Venus offers certain particularities that are more strongly marked than they are in any other race, but it is well known that these characteristics are not constant, remarked Darwin.

  —The great writer Gustave Flaubert comes here often to see her, old Master Nicolas said, quoting the famous writer by heart:

  . . . and his whole soul would swell before nature like a rose blooming under the sun; and he would tremble all over, under the weight of an inner exquisite delight, and his head in his two hands, he would fall into a lethargic melancholy . . . his soul would shine through his body, like the beautiful eyes of a woman hidden behind a black veil.

  These forms so unattractive and so hideous, this sickly yellow complexion, this shrunk skull, these rachitic limbs, all of these would put him in such an air of delight and enthusiasm, there was so much fire and poetry in these ugly monkey eyes that he would seem then as violently moved by a galvanism of the soul.

  Master Tiedeman fell quiet. The silence of the two neighbors lasted a long time as each man was lost in his own thoughts, not thinking of the other man standing beside him, or why one of them had spoken.