The Mismeasure of a Woman - Review of The Hottentot Venus UNTOLD

Review of The Hottentot Venus UNTOLD

Written, Created, and Performed by Jacqui Du Toit

 

Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman was an Indigenous woman taken from her home in South Africa in the early 19th century to be put on display in human zoos of the Victorian era. The word “Hottentot” is a racist colonial term for a community in South Africa known as Khoi’san. But she was and is widely known as the “Hottentot venus” for the way she was sexually and racially objectified.

 

Ottawa-based storyteller, performer and artist Jacqui Du Toit has created a visceral, contemporary retelling of Saartjie Baartan’s story. It’s a one-woman show that should appear on many stages. But I got to see it on a special small stage in Ottawa, in a venue owned and operated by and for Black performers, the Origin Arts and Community Centre.

 

The story and the story-teller

 

I first encountered Jacqui Du Toit through her bold Ottawa Fringe show about her struggle to become recognized as a bi-racial and multi-talented performer in South Africa and then as a racialized performer in Canada.

 

I first learned of Sarah (Saartjie) Bartman from the lefty scientist Stephen Jay Gould. In the 1980s he wrote about going to the Musee de l’Homme in Paris and seeing jars of dissected body parts. The brains of celebrated white men were on privileged display, but lower down were the other body parts of unknown racialized women. Amongst them were the sexualized parts of Saartjie Baartman.

 

Both Du Toit and Gould wrote about how a talented and intelligent young woman was duped into being exhibited in European human zoos like a caged and shackled animal.

 

Du Toit’s retelling of Sarah Baartamn’s story is entirely faithful to Saartjie’s own story. But it also connects it to the contemporary dilemma of selling yourself to an entertainment industry that can always be exploitative when you’re not in control.

 

The circus and the zoo

 

The show opens with a circus scene, and Du Toit’s beautiful acrobatics remind us about what we all love about circuses. Until we are asked to think about parallels between a circus and a human zoo. The circus performer is a modern stand-in for the exploited performer, often victim to false promises, while making profits for her exploiters.      

Saartjie, Sarah Baartman, was promised that an exhibition trip to England would make her a wealthy woman. 

 

Du Toit reenacts the delighted experience of an upper-class woman of what actually happened, documented by a member of the African Association, a society that petitioned for her release:

 

On being ordered by her keeper, she came out…The Hottentot was produced like a wild beast, and ordered to move backwards and forwards and come out and into her cage, more like a bear on a chain than a human being. 

 

The play moves seamlessly between the excitement of the white upper-class woman who touched the “posterior” of a “savage” and Saartjie’s family who believed she was going to the European “stage” of her own accord, to exhibit her musical talents, not her body. 

 

Apparently so did Sarah Baartman herself: interrogated before a court, in Dutch (a language she spoke fluently in addition to her native language, she also later learned French) she insisted she was not under restraint and understood well she had been guaranteed half the profits. At the same time a number of societies were petitioning for her release from what was clearly a terrible situation.

 

Saartjie did not die a wealthy woman back in Capetown. She was found dead in the streets of Paris at the age of 26, and then the sexualized parts of interest were dissected and placed in formaldehyde bottles in the Musee de l’Homme in Paris.

 

One of the most powerful scenes in Du Toit’s re-telling is through the voice of one of Saartjie’s child descendants. The child celebrates the coming home of Sarah Baartman’s remains to South Africa, which Nelson Mandela requested to repatriate after becoming president in 1994. It finally happened when France's parliament passed an act in 2002 to bring her home.

 

Colonialism and racism

 

This play is incredibly important because it exposes an ongoing colonial legacy. We can be shocked about what the Victorian era found “exciting, exotic or grotesque” in exhibiting Sarah Baartman’s body and the way that she was dissected. But the racist and sexist science that made it possible to completely dehumanize humans may not be entirely behind us.

 

Stephen Jay Gould also wrote The Mismeasure of Man in 1981 and released a new edition in 1996 to counter further modern attempts to find ways to scientifically dehumanize, using “racial” features that have no basis in anything other than in the vestiges of colonialism: modern racism, imperialism, and scapegoating. The current rise in anti-immigrant racism and anti-science could lead to new attempts to dehumanize, and we must resist.

 

Sarah Baartman is a symbol for so many Indigenous and African people who were exploited objects but then became actors in inspiring resistance, even after death. May her memory rise and rise and rise again.