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The 'Hottentot Venus': A Stunning Figure of Her Time

By Amy Alexander,
the author of "Fifty Black Women Who Changed America,"
and whose reviews appear monthly in Style
Tuesday, January 30, 2007; Page C07

AFRICAN QUEEN

The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus

By Rachel Holmes

Random House. 161 pp. $23.95

It is tempting to apply a contemporary critical lens
to historic events. Was Catherine the Great, for
example, an early exemplar of feminist autonomy or an
accidental monarch who failed to safeguard her
nation's imperial standing? Did Margaret Mitchell
perpetuate hurtful racist stereotypes, or did she
romanticize widely held beliefs among white
Southerners with her 1936 blockbuster novel, "Gone
With the Wind"? Both parts of those equations are
often true, since what one takes away from the
historic record inevitably is colored by our present
experience.

Yet our seemingly insatiable hunger for historic
touchstones that parallel our current condition can,
at times, lead writers to make huge leaps of logic or
lethal stylistic blunders. How else to explain the
dense, distracting presence of postmodern critical
language and analysis that bogs down an otherwise
intriguing historic biography, "African Queen: The
Real Life of the Hottentot Venus"?

Written by Rachel Holmes, a former English professor
at the University of London, "African Queen" bills
itself as the first historically accurate biography of
Saartjie Baartman. Holmes chronicles, with painstaking
documentation, the legendary story of a young
descendant of the Cape Khoisan people who was spirited
from her rural South African home in 1810 and put on
display in Georgian London.

Owing in part to the unique contours of Baartman's
physique -- in particular, a posterior much larger
than anything her European minders had ever seen --
she quickly became a commercial sensation on the
tawdry circuit of freak shows, pseudoscientific
oddities and ethnographic "wonders" that flourished in
London at that time. Certainly Baartman's saga is
compelling in its own awful right. But rather than
allowing the historic record to speak for itself,
Holmes succumbs to academic fashion, which is to say
the propensity to indulge in thoroughly modern
critical deconstruction of people and events better
explored in their original contexts.

These efforts invariably come off as patronizing or
not a little bit dotty. In the appropriate setting,
postmodern treatments can be effective and
provocative, such as the 1996 play "Venus," by
Suzan-Lori Parks. That version of Baartman's life
intermingled fact with fiction, igniting dual
controversies over Parks's decision to blur the lines
between truth and imagination and to portray the
African girl as having been eagerly complicit in her
exploitation. Holmes refrains from such genre
hybridization but nevertheless does readers a
disservice by clubbing them with 21st-century academic
jargon.

Gaps in the historic record make a certain amount of
speculation and supposition necessary -- Holmes
inserts words such as "perhaps" and "one can only
imagine" in describing Baartman's state of mind. But
such understandable leaps are distinct from Holmes's
heavy-handed sociological comments.

For instance, following a brief opening chapter
depicting Baartman's debut in a Piccadilly auditorium
-- where she appeared in theatrically primitive garb,
"got up like a fetish and performing like a showgirl"
-- Holmes flashes back to Baartman's beginnings in the
verdant Gamtoos Valley. After describing various
conflicts and alliances between indigenous and
European communities there, and the violent raid that
led in 1807 to the deaths of Baartman's father and her
fiance, Holmes drops into the action one of her many
lead balloons of annoying deconstructionist analysis:
"The murder of her father was the defining event of
Saartjie's youth. Henceforward, the wishes of men
dominated her life, because they held her in the grip
of their economic and social power."

She writes that throughout her short life, "Saartjie's
relationship with paternalistic figures was shadowed
by her unresolved attachment to an idealized father,
snatched from her at the point she most needed and
respected him, and before she had cause to rebel
against him."

Still, readers who manage to put up with Holmes's
distracting affectations are rewarded with a stunning
adventure story, a historic tragedy worthy of
Shakespeare or Dickens. Drawing on 18th- and
19th-century census reports from South Africa and
Britain (in which we learn that as many as 20,000
Africans resided in greater London in the early
1800s), as well as vividly written accounts from the
"penny press" and other late-Georgian sources, Holmes
tracks Baartman's path from the blood-soaked hills
outside Cape Town to the exhibit halls of metropolitan
London.

Baartman's trajectory -- beginning with the horrific
deaths of her parents and fiance at the hands of Boer
"commandos" who decimated the Khoisan tribespeople,
and ending with her death in France in 1815 --
encompasses the rise of the abolitionist movement in
Europe, as well as the peculiar cultural rituals that
characterized England at that time. Holmes connects
the public's fascination with Baartman to, among other
prevailing expressions of racist and sexist beliefs, a
climate in which "bottoms were big in Georgian
England. From low to high culture of all forms,
Britain was a nation obsessed by buttocks . . . and
every possible metaphor, joke, or pun that could be
squeezed from this fundamental cultural obsession."

"Much of Saartjie's success," Holmes writes, "was a
result of a simple phenomenon: with her . . .
voluptuous bottom, she perfectly captured the
zeitgeist of late-Georgian Britain."

Extrapolating from the two interviews Baartman gave
during her life, Holmes emerges with a picture of a
smart, strong-willed young woman who eventually
buckled under the emotional humiliations of displaying
herself, for hours on end, before leering, often
grabby audiences.

Holmes's descriptions of Baartman's increasing
dependence on alcohol to soothe herself are especially
effective. Baartman's tragic fate became something of
an international political hot potato in recent years,
as activists and anthropologists in her home region in
South Africa sought to have her remains returned for
proper burial. Her brain and genitals had been
ghoulishly dissected after her death at age 26, by
French scientist Georges Cuvier; they were found
during the 1980s by the American paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould in jars shelved in rooms adjacent to
the Museum of Natural History in Paris. In 2002,
Baartman was given a state funeral and buried on a
hillside on the Eastern Cape.

Had Holmes relied more on the written record and less
on her own postmodern analysis -- "The Hottentot Venus
arose in London as the very apotheosis of Europe's
invented Africa, the dark continent of feminized
impenetrability and crude potency" -- "African Venus"
would stand as a remarkable work of historic
excavation with deep social and political
implications. Burdened as it is, though, with Holmes's
thick academic ponderings, it achieves something short
of greatness.

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I was reading about this a few years ago.

Last edited on Monday February 26th, 2007 05:20 by sunnyflower

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Last edited on Tuesday February 27th, 2007 17:18 by Apedemak

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Last edited on Tuesday February 27th, 2007 20:18 by BlackBrainChild

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Last edited on Tuesday February 27th, 2007 20:17 by BlackBrainChild