The Science/Fiction Carnival in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus
p. 199-221
Résumé
This article discusses Barbara Chase-Riboud’s redemption politics in Hottentot Venus (2003) through the prism of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque politics of contestation and reversal. With its dialogical structure of two contesting discourses—the scientific and the fictional—of which the former motivates the latter, the author transforms Sarah Baartman—the repressed object of history and scientific examination—into the subject of narrative. By carnivalesque inversion, the novel fronts the repressed half of the subject/object, master/slave, culture/nature, science/fiction, humanity/animality nexus, demonstrating that George Cuvier’s polygenetic racism that pathologizes African female sexuality is itself primitive and predatory in its scientific pursuit. The pronounced focus on the body, its parts and functions, scatology and obscenities included, transforms the text into a literary carnival, which relies on a general participation in debasing activities. In line with its politics of reversal the novel gives primacy to the cyclical time of rebirth and renewal before the linear time of history and science, demonstrating that carnival time is both progressive (utopian) in its subversive tendencies and conservative in its politics of preservation. The analysis shows how this dual carnivalesque quality functions at the level of the story, genre and textuality at large.
Texte intégral
1As is long since established, the neo-slave narrative draws on its nineteenth century forerunner as history, cultural memory, and genre. Rewriting the past in fiction, possibly with more reverence than pure historiography would dare to show, implies an attempt to redeem the past and its (skewed) ideology, as well as its historical subjects. The process of redemption requires a time lapse to enable a more appropriate perspective to emerge, and thus a better understanding and interpretation of historical events. Redemption and happiness is what we expect from the future, regardless of the fact whether this future is viewed from the vantage point of the present or of the past. Or, as Walter Benjamin proposes, “our view of the past, [...] is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present ones”1 (1999: 245-46). Consequently, just as history and its concomitant redemption, or historical scholarship as redemption, implies an “image” and a “view”, which strive towards accuracy but can never fully claim it, histori-ographic fiction applies a similar method of scrutiny though with fewer pretensions. Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel, in its attempt to redeem the historical subject behind the pejorative designation of Hottentot Venus, scrutinizes the period in which she lived, targeting its paradoxical overlap with the age of reason and the institution of slavery, and their concomitant ideologies and Weltan-schauung. Using her eponymous character as her mouthpiece, the author, who champions irony as her predominant trope and the carnivalesque as her textual politics, perceives in Western expansionism and colonialism the roots of economic exploitation, slavery, and racism.
2If the hallmark of carnival is turning the world upside-down and inside-out, with the aim to destabilize the prevailing cultural norms, standards and values, and challenge the existing hierarchies, then carnival as a trope of cultural change and transformation is both an ideal, albeit utopian model2, and an analytic category.3 What makes carnival, as an institution, an ideal is its apparently revolutionary nature that seems to promise a reversal of power structures: that the low will reign high, that the slaves will rule their masters, and that popular forms will undermine the symbolic order. As a popular and religious festivity, carnival works by consent within a limited time span, which restricts its subversive potential. Working by inversion, it offers a promise regarding unfulfilled desires for cultural and political change. When literature, in turn, adopts it as its modus operandi, it has the reversal of norms, values, and beliefs on its agenda. The carnivalesque in literature is, by contention, sanctioned and delimited in time, and its utopian politics of reversal is short-lived, just as in its extramural model.
3Twentieth century re-visions of slavery set out to question, revise and reverse not only the power relations which have governed ethnic and racial politics, but also narrative, generic and scientific representations. Their aim is to debunk dominant discourses and their concomitant biases, and the rigid set of binary oppositions—subject/object, master/slave, culture/nature, science/fiction—that share a distrust of a transcendental signified. If all power is linguistically, thus socially and ideologically constituted, then the border between the dominant (monological) and subordinate (popular, fictional, vernacular and subversive) discourses is fluid. The ensuing negotiation of positions, spaces, discursive practices, ideologies, and textual and cultural productions has become a matrix for the postmodern novel, thus also for the burgeoning branch of the carnivalesque neo-slave narrative.
4Of late, the neo-slave narrative has also engaged with the discourse of science—scientific racism—adopting and adapting it for its textual politics. Thus Ishmael Reed’s paradigmatic Flight to Canada (1976) not only turns history, literary representations of slavery and the big house narratives, the slave-narrative genre, the politics of ethnicity/race, and sexuality into carnival; it also parodies Samuel Cartwright’s racially founded medical science and its afflictions—Drapetomania (a mental illness that affects slaves causing them to run away) and Dysathesia Aethypica [sic] (a pathological insensitivity to physical and mental stimuli)— making them, in Massa Swille’s belief, responsible for the behavior and escape of his slaves4 While Reed’s sporadic parodic reference is the first to inscribe science into the neo-slave narrative, Patricia Eakins constructs The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father and Mother, First and Last (1999) as a “shadow history” of the Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle (1749-1778). The novel’s title character, who follows in Buffon’s footsteps and considers himself his “Apprentice” in animal morphology, questions, revises and reverses Savant’s genealogy of species, hence concomitant issues of race. He records his findings and reflections on the “obverse of the [tea] labels”5, an act by which he indeed becomes the obverse of Buffon’s taxonomy, and his narrative, written in the style of fantastic realism, becomes the obverse of the scientist’s objective and descriptive style. Barbara Chase-Riboud, in turn, creates another shadow history in Hottentot Venus (2003), in which her heroine provides a counter narrative to that of Georges Léopold Cuvier. This intellectual and scholarly follower and revisionist of Buffon, anatomist and paleontologist by orientation, is introduced into the neo-slave narrative as a propagator of polygenism (a belief in different development of races), and, by extension, of the Great Chain of Being and scientific racism. Although it is incorrect to claim that our knowledge of Sarah Baartman relies solely on his annals, for she was after all a nineteenth century icon of racial and sexual difference6, it is nonetheless true that their coupling has produced a series of binaries that have steered our understanding of race and sexuality in the Age of Reason. Consequently, the names of Georges Cuvier and Sarah Baartman came to stand for the science/specimen, culture/nature, and intellect/body nexus, which has been transported into literature, and thus also into Elizabeth Alexander’s poetic work The Venus Hottentot (1990), Susan-Lori Parks’s play Venus (1997) and most recently in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel, Hottentot Venus (2003).
5Little is known of the woman who was considered the early nineteenth century embodiment of African sexuality. Her steae-topygia (protruding buttocks) and the well-hidden female tablier (the so-called “Hottentot apron” or the hypertrophy of external genitalia), made her into a grotesque attraction in sideshows and viewing salons in England and France, London and Paris in particular. Ssehura was born a member of the Khoekhoe nation in the Cape Town region of South Africa, and was orphaned at an early age. Married in her early teens, she was early widowed and left with a child who died in infancy, upon which she abandoned her native land and left for Cape Town. With the move, her name was changed to Saartjie (a Dutch diminutive for Sarah), and before she left the Cape region it was Anglicized into Sarah Baartman. She worked for a Dutch family as a nanny, and eventually signed a contract with her master’s brother, Hendrick Caesar, and a ship surgeon, Alexander William Dunlop, to go to England, exhibit her body of difference, and collect her share in the profit they expected to make. After the six-year contract period, her aim was to return to South Africa.
6Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus, which recreates the life of Sarah Baartman, is not her first novel to focus on a historically verifiable female slave subject and her relation to the white male scientific authority, in whose shadow she stood. Almost a quarter of a century earlier, she fleshed out the story of Thomas Jefferson’s slave and concubine Sally Hemings in her first novel, the title of which bears the protagonist’s name.7 Not only were Sally Hemings and Sarah Baartman contemporaries, but their life stories are seen through the prism of the governing ideology, and of scholarly and political thought of the period in which they lived. Their counter narratives to the official narratives of the men of science are the author’s reconstruction of history from the vantage point of the repressed: what history failed to do, the story amends. This reparative act of writing/righting the wrongs of history appears at first glance radical in that it gives primacy to the voice of the oppressed; yet like the institution of carnival it is restricted in scope. The wished-for change and transgression, although limited in time, are granted by the same structure that provides the norm of power relations. Working by concession, such reversals, which are revolutionary in appearance yet utopian in intent, only confirm the existing power relations which they attempt to subvert. Although they do not bring real change, they disclose the weaknesses of the system in power, thus ensuring with their impotence the perpetuation of the system of oppression. However, as an ideological critique their function is revolutionary, although it does not bring the desired political change. Nevertheless, it brings change in our consciousness and urges us to critically assess the discourse of the past and its concomitant ideologies. Although the carnivalesque empowerment is short lived, it is nonetheless a necessary revisionist historical and narrative tool and strategy of rebuttal.
7A carnival enactment requires that the subordinate discourse be related to the official one, be it history, science or genre. Motivated by reverence for her characters in history, Chase-Riboud adopts a politics of suspicion vis-à-vis the history that has neglected and/or repressed their individuality and role. Yet the critique she offers is double edged. While, as already stated, the system which pushed them to the margins of history is her primary objective, the author is also critical of her heroines’ compliance with that system and their unwillingness and inability to act. When I again bring Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings (1979) into the discussion, it is to stress that her first novel provides a thematic and narrative matrix for her latest in staging a dialogue between two competing discourses: the monological discourse of science and its personal counter narrative. Jefferson and Cuvier’s excerpts, which precede each individual chapter in the respective novels (the official, authoritative and authoritarian discourse of science), and the protagonists’ life stories (the subordinate, popular and subjective discourse) compete for verisimilitude; they tell their disparate truths, and although the stories cannot cancel the scientific treatises, they at least challenge the official discourse and the myth of truth as such. Such discourses of the other, which in a manner of speaking represent our cultural treasures, are, in Benjamin’s historical materialist view, indebted to their nameless contemporaries. Among these are, no doubt, the two women that historical and narrative revisionism have finally brought to our attention. Another equally if not more relevant point that needs to be driven home is Benjamin’s equation of cultural documents with brutality (Benjamin 199: 248), which is in our case doubly significant since the two women were slave subjects, whose brutalized personal histories are also overshadowed by brutalizing narratives of power. While Jefferson’s views on the inferiority of non-Caucasian races are only one of the narrative motives in Sally Hemings - the others being philosophical, political and cultural views that relate to social issues at large—the excerpts serve as pillars of scholarly thought which underpin the narrative interpretation of the era in general and the position of female slave subjects in particular. Thus excerpts from Notes on the State of VIrginia, which are imported as epigraphs into Sally Hemings, appear in Hottentot Venus as narrated cross-references, and are by no means out of context. Since Jefferson’s views on race are similar to those of Cuvier, and the novel’s Cuvier is a great admirer of Thomas Jefferson, they figure as ideological pillars on which the novel rests.8 Political philosopher, twice elected president and Father of the Constitution, who penned, “that all men are created equal”, Jefferson not only held but fathered slaves, which potentially undermines his otherwise radical-political and scientific significance. As one of the founding fathers of the US nation, Jefferson is treated with reverence, though with a substantial dose of skepticism and implicit criticism, which characterizes Chase-Riboud’s politics of textuality in general. This is by no means an unexpected strategy in a narrative project whose aim is to lift the two repressed women from the status of historical footnotes to that of agents in history.
8Chase-Riboud’s aim is to give voice and subjectivity to the objectified female slave subjects9 who were exploited as free labor, providers of sexual services, and objects of the voyeuristic gaze of the general public and its medical counterpart, as in Cuvier’s “theatre of anatomy”. Last but not least, the most extreme form of objectification relates to the violation of the body through autopsy in Cuvier’s “slaughterhouse of science”10, where the severing of organs becomes scientific rape and the excision of Baartman’s sex leads to scientific and verbal orgasm, which is crowned with a gratuitous and gratifying discharge: “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” (282). The woman, and particularly her sexual organs that were earlier pronounced “the very object of [the scientists’] desire” (241), in the dissection episode becomes “unexplored Africa, the Dark Continent, dissected, violated, probed, raped by dead white men since Roman times” (281). Freudian allusions aside, this whole scene signifies on the politics of colonization of Africa and its inhabitants’ bodies, the female ones in particular, highlighting the grotesque participation in this carnival of scientific inquiry, in which the speaking cadaver-cum-soul can do nothing but sneer:
This was the intelligentsia born of the Age of Enlightenment: medical doctors, anatomists, paleontologists, alienists, naturalists, evolutionists, [...] God was on their side and the iron fettered weight of civilization (281).
9As in carnival proper, there are no audiences, only participants, and the men of science cast off their academic cloaks and join in the passing around the jar containing her most desired and cherished organ, which they admire and worship “like a Holy Grail” (283).
10With the body’s silent screams that accompany the perverse dissection and the ensuing stories of the individual organs relating how they were pickled or dropped into the slop pail, the narrator displaces the abject onto the participating crowd of scholars, who join in her ravishment and voyeuristically devour her body, which eventually ends up at the Musée de l’homme in Paris. (The remains of Sarah Baartman were finally repatriated and cremated in 2002.) Chase-Riboud underscores an almost two-hundred-year-old transgression against the humanity of this Khoesian woman in the novel’s Epilogue, in which the protagonist tells her bell-jar story of imprisonment as museum exhibit number 33, and of her ultimate emancipation. As an exhibit, Baartman is both the object of the spectatorial gaze of her new set of audiences, but also the “subject” of the gaze as “a spectator to the twentieth century’s dance of death” and a literal embodiment of “the body politic of Africa’s intercourse with Europe” (312). The prevalent physical imagery, with its pronounced focus on bodily facets, further enforces Chase-Riboud’s politics of carnival as an appropriate critical approach to the story of a destiny that should never have been allowed.
11Thus, the Epilogue highlights the author’s redemption project that pieces together the fragments of Saartjie Baartman’s life story in a similar manner to that in which her remains were finally assembled and laid to rest in her native South Africa. This fictional articulation of the past is doubly embedded in the present. On the one hand, the past is available only through the present from which the author examines it. However, this present extends beyond a historical present to what Benjamin terms Jeztzeit: an eternal and mystical present, a phenomenological entity that escapes articulation and simply is (Benjamin 1999: 253). This timeless present that is associated with God—and, by extension, with the Word and naming—erases the difference between races and cancels, in Chase-Riboud’s narrative universe, the designations “Hottentot” and “white” in the name of humanity (xi). On the other hand, time present is the hic et nunc of history, so time as theme provides a contextualization of the novel’s denouement. This present is the year 2002 of the novel’s Epilogue, the time when the French National Assembly passed the bill that demanded the release of Baartman’s remains from the National Museum of Natural History and their return to the land of her origin. With the body’s extradition and the burial ceremony, the novel returns full circle to Baartman’s beginnings in Africa.
12Baartman’s historically verifiable trajectory replicates the narrative movement in which the past (her early African experience) merges with the present (the death scene in Paris) with which the novel opens. With memory as a bridge between the two times, loci, climates, cultures and mores, Chase-Riboud seems to suggest that time, just like carnival time, is revolutionary (progressive) on the one hand, and conservative (regressive, repetitive, cyclical) on the other. The latter seems to suggest stability as biological and natural life, thus renewal and revitalization as its inevitable results (Bakhtin 1968: 25), while the historical or linear time aims at radical change. Although the metaphor of birth implies one-directionality, as in “the past giving birth to the future” (Bakhtin 1968: 412), it subsumes cyclical displacements, and thereby what may appear as disparate temporal qualities. Revolution as repetition is a quality of carnival that promises change, which is cancelled when carnival time is over. The change that the novel claims is at the level of political consciousness, demands a reevaluation and revision of the past. While the politics of the carnivalesque may be progressive, carnival time is limited: it frees the spirit, though not necessarily the body. Baartman’s dying scene is, beyond doubt, an apposite example.
13Suffering from pneumonia in the freezing winter climate, the protagonist takes a bath to keep her body warm, warming her insides with gin and cannabis that help her forget her humiliation, exploitation, and illness, and transport her back to Africa. Although her guardian has left the door unlocked to enable her escape, she is too ill and too intoxicated to leave, and her body shape impedes her from getting easily out of the tub. When she eventually rises out of the blood tainted bath froth, she finally earns her Venus attribute. Chase-Riboud’s eckphrastic depiction of black Venus is an inversion of Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. While the white Venus, the goddess of love, symbolizes beauty, femininity, chastity, and spiritual enhancement, her darker sister, the alleged embodiment of carnal love and animal-like sexuality and sexual availability, stands in the white imagination for all that is “ugly, savage, uncivilized, brutal, deformed, reprehensible” (6). The white public’s abjection and stigmatization of her body, declaring her “the missing link between beast and man” (5, 105, 212, 238, 311), provides an ironic textual refrain which not only fixes her status in the white world, but enforces her negative self-image and her experience of herself as “the thing-that-should-never-have-been-born” (3, 5, 7, 101, 102, 105, 150, 161, 185,188, 193, 263, 265, 269). This stigma that she has psychologically adopted is the English translation of the name of the Khosian rainmaker! Naeheta Magahâs, whom she sees as an embodiment of the abject, and whose attempts to dissuade her from leaving her native land make her, in Ssehura’s view, even more repulsive.
14The rainmaker’s resemblance to “an antique, dilapidated baboon” (25) may seem to support Baartman’s stigmatization and negative identification, although it is the narrator in the guise of young Ssehura who provides the comparison. There is no doubt a connection between the grotesque figure and the missing-link reference that sticks with the protagonist, which the narrative establishes and repeatedly subverts. Declared “a monster of imagination, not nature” (12), Baartman refuses sympathy and rejects or disbelieves the empathy that the fictional Jane Austin, abolitionist Robert Wedderburn and painter Nicholas Tiedeman offer. However, apart from her servant, teacher and keeper Alice Unicorn, Tiedeman is the only white person she is able to relate to in the theatre of anatomy, in the autopsy scene, and finally in the museum. It is he, the white artist, who raises a question regarding the ethics of science and stigmatization in his conversation with Charles Darwin— “Why is it [...] that white freaks are always exhibited as oddities, the exception that proves the rule, while black freaks [...] are exhibited as typical of their race?” (302)— that, due to its rhetorical nature, receives no answer. While there is no single answer to the enigma, its roots are to be found in the binary, hierarchical way of thinking in the Western world. The encounter between the scientist and the artist before Baartman’s remains forty-some years after her death, reawakens the discussion of humanity, slavery and the Great Chain of Being. Darwin’s presence, as indeed needs be, implies a focus shift on the mono-genetic theory of race of which On the Origin of Species is indisputably a major revolutionary document. In line with its politics of reversal, the narrative topsy-turvies the earlier views, which equate the African with the ape and depict the white man as a racially and intellectually superior being, by focusing on Darwin’s appearance. The now aged Tiedeman, who was originally commissioned to sculpt Baartman during her medical examination and later autopsy and who still continues to pay his respects to her at the museum, is appalled by Darwin’s resemblance to an ape. When the fictional Darwin declares that his cranium is “the exact replica of the Neanderthal’s man” (299), and that Abraham Lincoln is not far behind him, readers reenter the world of carnival, where the origin and the target of laughter and ridicule merge. By refusing to be a detached scientist-observer, Darwin joins in the circus of history and deems himself worthy of a place in its museum. With Baartman’s skeleton as their audience, the subject/object, observer/observed fuse, and the three “figures”, which obviously respect one another and perceive the paradox of history and science that has split them into two camps, bow their heads in valediction. The reverence they show stands in stark contrast to the bizarre dissection scene and the passing around of Baartman’s body parts “like cotton candy at a country fair” (302), where only her brain and sexual organs (the measurable signs of difference) are pickled and preserved for posterity. The heart is an anatomical enigma because of its constancy of shape and weight in all human beings, thus representing, in Darwin’s view, a “metaphysical” quality, which Tiedeman sees as the scientists’ “heartlessness” (295), which he witnessed in Cuvier’s laboratory of anatomy.
15The novel’s pronounced focus on the body, body parts and bodily functions, scatology included, juxtaposed with the obscenities which are associated with her viewing audiences and circumstances surrounding her showing, confirm her vitality as (the legend of) black Venus. Her humanity supersedes the alleged humanity of her voyeuristic audiences, whose appetite for the exotic and erotic titillates their imagination and seeks gratification. The rainmaker’s original warning against the white world outside the Khoe territory, which bordered on a prohibition, was her futile attempt at dissuading Ssehura from leaving. While it was fueled by the old woman’s vision of her never returning home, the warning has had little effect on Ssehura; she sees no future in her colonized land where the usurpers have deprived her of her family through slaughter. Neither the white man’s conquest of her people, nor Naeheta Magahâs’s analysis of the white world as a place that is “not made of human beings. Yet they are not beasts either” (26)11, nor even the sad-eyed heron— the incarnation of her hunted-down mother, who physically tries to block her way, thus prevent her from leaving—offer strong enough motivation for her to stay. The path from the open and free skies of the Cape area to being a “prisoner in [her] own country” (40), and finally a slave is short; so short that Ssehura literally manages to walk it. Yet, as already indicated, her objectification, exploitation and manipulation, which are initiated in Africa and augmented in Europe, also continue posthumously:
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? (12).
16The life-and-death cycle and the reeling of time that lie at the core of a revisionist and reverential project like Hottentot Venus, are also at the crux of carnival time with its repetitions, renewals, and reversals. The reverential element that carnival cultivates concerns the body and the vernacular that the official discourses of history, religion and science tend to suppress. The cyclical politics of memory that mentally recycles life and history becomes, in Chase-Riboud’s novelistic universe, a politics of textuality. The narrative repeatedly returns to its beginnings—both historical and geographical, and, as will become evident, also narrative—as if trying to emphasize that the case of Sarah Baartman’s exploitation is the case of many, and that repetition as a drill does justice to the nameless multitudes. For reasons of clarification, I would like to focus once more on the novel’s beginning, which provides a key to its end.
17 While the already discussed image of Venus, which Baartman embodies in her death scene, is a Western symbol of rebirth, there is a resonant scene at the end of the novel following Baartman’s death. That scene, I would suggest, is equally, if not more, pertinent to the recovery of this subject of history. Although Baartman is gone, she is present in her good-bye letter and in the sea of obituaries that curl around Alice Unicorn’s feet “like sea froth” (274). With Alice apparently standing in Sarah Baartman’s stead amidst the curled paper, it is possible to believe that their roles have been changed, whereas in fact, the obituaries announcing Baartman’s death bring her to life—in words. Many stories, episodes, dates and names are omitted from them, Alice notices, but the novel appears to recover them by becoming a Venus as text. For it is Sarah Baartman, the fictional black Venus, who tells her story, thus creating for herself a new life in language.
18That cyclical carnival time does not stop here is underscored by the narrative with its repetitive return to its (and Baartman’s) beginnings. The alleged dates of the protagonist’s birth and death, 1 January, are narratively construed to coincide12, which neatly translates her life cycle into a historical measuring unit of time and its seasons. Thus the first day of the year completes one cycle and initiates a new cycle, which is what Baartman’s life and posthumous stories require. The repetition of the death scene in its chronological story-line position merges the past and the present, as already indicated. The protagonist’s final memories go back to her mother singing a birthday song in Khoe, by which the narrative underscores Ssehura’s return home, to her native tongue “of soft clics and coos” and to the name that her mother gave her (12, 265).
19The present-past nexus that is enacted at the various levels of the story is, moreover, reflected at the level of the narrative at large. Before returning one last time to Chase-Riboud’s carnivalistic science/fiction poetics, there are some questions that Hottentot Venus leaves begging concerning its form. The neo-slave narrative, like its slave-narrative forerunner, conflates the social-economic system with the generic one, producing a format that is not only predicated on the former system, but is equally rigid and encapsulating. Recognizing in its form the embodiment of a master-slave dialectic, James Olney has ironically labeled its constraints “Master Plan for Slave Narrative”13. He sees a paradox between the former slave subject’s escape from slavery and his embracing of a proscribed, rigid (enslaving?) system of narrative requirements. Among these are a white frame, consisting of an abolitionist preface and a postscript, whose function is to guarantee the narrative’s authenticity and the slave subject’s identity, as well as to reveal the abolitionist political agenda. In line with the genre’s enslaving format, Charles Johnson requires the manumission of the first-person narrator14, whom he lifts up from the status of the “first person universal” (Johnson 1988: 153) to that of the subject of his own narrative. My contention is that the manumission of the narrator also entails the manumission of form, which is confirmed by the text’s inflected format, which adopts parody and the carnivalesque as it raison d’être.
20In line with its textual politics of rebuttal, the neo-slave narrative reverses the preexisting norms, starting with the form. Thus, what was the abolitionists’ preface and postscript in the original slave narrative becomes in Hottentot Venus “The Heroine’s Note” and “Epilogue”, both penned by “the protagonist-narrator”— posthumously. While the original slave narratives’ white frame served as an authentication of the former slave subjects and their stories (Olney 1984: 50), Sarah Baartman needs no validation, least of all white. As the object of study in medical annals and a subject of literature, Baartman is the only possible guarantor of her own “subjectivity” and humanity, which the white, so-called civilized world has claimed to stand for and has deprived her of.
21The introductory Note launches a carnival of reversals by staging the tension between the eponymous character’s Khoekhoe nation—the People of the People—and the three colonizing powers who have subdued it—the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English. The “Once upon a time” opening underscores the First Nation’s idyll, which foreign intervention in the name of civilization disturbs and destroys with its side effects: “syphilis, smallpox and slavery” (xi). The white man’s expansionism in the name of progress becomes its obverse, and irony becomes the text’s predominant trope. The People of the People, whose very name underscores their humanity, are one with nature, being nomads, gatherers and herders, and for them the land is a source of livelihood and belongs to one and all. In addition, they believe in the equality of their members, all members, unlike the white man’s system of “castes and categories” (xi), that sees everything in terms of power relations, including, among others, language. Othered by her white oppressor, the narrator adopts his language and naming ( “Hottentot”) in order to reach him, but she does not accept its stigma, and thus its ideological lining, but reverses it, and makes his weapon—hers. Language and naming equal power, the Note stresses, and this claim is supported semantically (through different stages of named oppression), grammatically (in the form of the passive voice), and narratively (by producing the history’s counter narrative). Yet the power of the word as a deadly weapon, which the rainmaker had taught Ssahura before she left her tribal territory, is disclosed only in the final chapter when Saartjie Baartman’s curse “kills off” her oppressors and those who have contributed to the subjection of African peoples. The word’s supreme power, however, resounds in the Epilogue, which brings us to the present: to the petition by South Africans for the repatriation of Saartjie Baartman’s remains, and to the bill of 29 January 2002 which granted their return. While Baartman’s recently freed compatriots have voiced their plea for the return of her remains in a foreign tongue, her final return to the shores of her childhood becomes the final return to her mother tongue, to a Khosian “click of [the] tongue” (317); to the tongue which had originally earned her the pejorative designation of Hottentot, and which she now puts back into her mouth to command the women of her land to remember her.
22The memory of Baartman, as already stated, is doubly encoded in the novel, and the protagonist comes to life as the subject and object of (hi) story and science. That dual role, however, is granted at the level of story, and figures only latently at the level of text at large. Chase-Riboud’s textual universe comprises a polyphony of voices that highlight the author’s ideological positioning. These voices resound both inside the narrative proper and as notional pillars that carry the weight of ideology in the form of epigraphs, which precede each of the three parts of the novel and each individual chapter. These purloined letters, by being evenly and systematically distributed throughout the body of the text, stand both inside and outside of it. They are inside due to their incorporated presence, yet they are also outside because they are not related to the course of narrative events, with the exception of Georges Cuvier. None of Cuvier’s excerpts-cum-chapter-epigraphs are taken from his autopsy report on Baartman, nor do they in any way directly refer to her. Nevertheless, they play a central role in fronting his view on racial difference, which motivates the narrative course and highlights Chase-Riboud’s politics of redemption. The carefully selected Cuvier excerpts appear in the novel as a chain of signifiers to which Chase-Riboud allies fictional and unstable signifieds. By replacing the bar that links the signifier and the signified with an open space that separates and joins the two discourses, the author provides a fluid border that visually signals a deferral and fluidity of meaning. In other words, by refusing science the status of mastery over the subjective discourse of a woman who happens to be a slave, if only metaphorically, the author deconstructs the master/slave dialectic; she rewards her disempowered protagonist by giving her the last laugh and allowing her to soar the African sky after her funeral ceremony.
23The novel’s utopian outcome is in line with its successful politics of carnival, which demands general participation in the process of turning the world upside-down (Bakhtin 1968: 7). Cuvier, the conceited “Napoleon of Intelligence” (220) who soars in the recounted scenes, becomes the carnival’s dethroned king in his attempted rape of Sarah Baartman, at which point he embodies the primitivism that he associates with non-Caucasian races in his scholarly work. A similar politics of reversal occurs at a ball in Paris, where the socialites gather to view “Hottentot Venus” and her “primitive” shape, and expect her performance to prove her racial inferiority; yet they become “a troop of baboons [...] scavenging in garbage” (255), transforming themselves in their culturally motivated attempt to prove their racial superiority. While the fictional Baartman’s awareness of the whites’ inadequacies and weaknesses may be morally uplifting, it can in no way alter her destiny. Despite its inability to provide any immediate or radical change, the novel’s carnivalesque politics becomes a strategy of rebuttal, if only at the level of discourse. If, as the novel demonstrates, the word kills—it was Baartman’s curse which killed her enemies—it is the word that will always bring her back.
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
Format
- APA
- Chicago
- MLA
Works cited
10.4324/9780429355363 :Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1968.
10.5040/9781350392632 :Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. London: Pimlico, 1999: 245-258.
Chase-Riboud, Barbara. Hottentot Venus. New York: Anchor Books, 2004.
Cuvier, G.C., “Extrait d’observations. Faites sur le Cadavre d’une femme connue à Paris et à Londres sous le nom de Vénus Hottentotte”. Memoirs du Museum d’histoire naturelle 3. Paris: G. Doufour, 1817: 259-274.
Eakins, Patricia. The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father and Mother, First and Last. New York: New York UP, 1999.
Gilman, Sander L. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature”, in Race, Writing, and Difference. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986; 223-261.
Johnson, Charles. Oxherding Tale. 1982. New York: Plume, 1995.
Johnson, Charles. Middle Passage. New York: Plume, 1990.
Magubane, Zine. “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus’”. Gender and Society 15: 4 (December 2001): 816-834.
Olney, James. “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature.” Callaloo 20 (Winter 1984): 46-73.
10.17077/0021-065X.1868 :Reed, Ishmael. Flight to Canada. New York: Scribner, 1976.
Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus. Sexual Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1999.
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986.
Yochelson, Ellis L. “Mr. Peale and His Mammoth Museum.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 136: 4 (December 1992): 487-506.
Notes de bas de page
1 Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (London: Pimlico, 1999): 245-258.
2 Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1968): 256.
3 Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986): 6.
4 Reed, Ishmael, Flight to Canada (New York: Scribner, 1976): 18.
5 Eakins, Patricia, The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father and Mother, First and Last (New York: New York UP, 1999): 34.
6 Gilman, Sander L., “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature”, in Race, Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986): 223-261; 232. Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Black Venus. Sexual Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, N.C. : Duke UP, 1999): 24.
7 Her earlier work—Echo of Lions (1989), whose subject matter is the Amistad mutiny; The President’s Daughter (1994), a direct follow-up to her first novel relating the life story of the alleged daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his slave companion, Sally Hemings; and in a wider sense, her captivity narrative Valide: A Story of Harem (1986)—demonstrates her commitment to the history of slavery in and outside of the US.
8 The fact that Jefferson was a great admirer of Cuvier, whose views and methodologies he in part endorses in his Notes on the State of Virginia [Yochelson, Ellis L., “Mr. Peale and His Mammoth Museum”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 136: 4 (December 1992): 493], merits our attention and enforces this argument.
9 Sarah Baartman was a slave for only a short period of her life, and she was manumitted before she turned thirteen, after which she became an indentured servant. Nevertheless, I would argue for her status as a slave, not on legal grounds but on the basis of her economic and sexual exploitation and treatment by different owners. For alternative views see Magubane 2001.
10 Chase-Riboud, Barbara, Hottentot Venus (New York: Anchor Books, 2004: 285). Subsequent page references to the novel will be provided parenthetically in the text.
11 One can, no doubt, recognize cultural and philosophical correspondences between the People of the People and the imaginary Allmuseri tribesmen, whose transcendental philosophy figures most prominently in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (New York: Plume, 1990). With the tribes’ inherent humanism and environmentalism, Chase-Riboud and Johnson critique western materialist and dualist thought.
12 Although the date of her birth is unknown and that of her death is 29 December 1815 (Cuvier, G.C., “Extrait d’observations. Faites sur le Cadavre d’une femme connue à Paris et à Londres sous le nom de Vénus Hottentotte”, Memoirs du Museum d’histoire naturelle 3 (1817): 34), the author invents the former and adjusts the latter to 1 January 1816 to conflate her life cycle with a measurable time cycle of the year that collapses progression and repetition.
13 Olney, James, “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature”, Callaloo 20 (Winter 1984): 46-73; 50-51.
14 Johnson, Charles, Middle Passage (New York: Plume, 1990): 152.
Auteur
University of Bergen, Norway
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
À la rencontre de la différence
Traces diasporiques et espaces de créolisation
Robin Cohen et Olivia Sheringham Elise Trogrlic (trad.)
2020
L’androgyne dans la littérature britannique contemporaine
Métamorphose d’une figure
Justine Gonneaud
2020
Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean
Cultural and Literary Perspectives
Markus Arnold, Corinne Duboin et Judith Misrahi-Barak (dir.)
2020
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 1
Diasporas and Cultures of Migrations
Judith Misrahi-Barak et Claudine Raynaud (dir.)
2014
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 2
Diaspora, Memory and Intimacy
Sarah Barbour, David Howard, Thomas Lacroix et al. (dir.)
2015
Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ 3
African Americans and the Black Diaspora
Corinne Duboin et Claudine Raynaud (dir.)
2016
Ethics of Alterity, Confrontation and Responsibility in 19th- to 21st-Century British literature
Jean-Michel Ganteau et Christine Reynier (dir.)
2013