The Venus Hottentot by Elizabeth Alexander
"The Venus Hottentot" by Elizabeth Alexander is a poetry collection that intricately weaves personal narrative with broader social themes, particularly focusing on culture and race. The work is anchored by a central poem that explores the life of Saartjie Baartman, known as the Hottentot Venus, through a dual narrative: one voice belongs to the scientist Baron Cuvier, who objectifies her, while the other is Baartman's own, asserting her humanity and cultural richness. The collection is divided into sections that reflect on Alexander's family heritage, her experiences as a child, and the influences of notable African American and European artists. It navigates a range of topics, from cultural celebrations and personal memories to the painful realities of racial stereotypes and discrimination. Central to the book is the theme of ancestral legacy, with Alexander drawing inspiration from her heritage and the artistic contributions of those before her. The collection not only highlights the resilience of Black women but also serves as a commentary on the historical exploitation of their bodies. Overall, "The Venus Hottentot" stands as a significant work that contributes to the ongoing narrative of African American poetry and the reclamation of Black female identity.
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Subject Terms
The Venus Hottentot by Elizabeth Alexander
First published: 1990
Type of work: Poetry
The Poetry
Elizabeth Alexander’s first book of poetry, The Venus Hottentot, is organized as an oscillating dialogue between the personal and the social spheres, connected through the channels of culture and race. Thus, the second section of the collection concerns her family lineage and her life as a child and teenager, while the third section focuses exclusively on African American intellectual and artistic icons and influential European and Mexican painters. The fourth and final section brings the public and the private together in a series of poems that explicitly ponder the relationship between Alexander’s personal history, particularly as it relates to gender, and that of the larger social and cultural world.
The first section of the book consists of one poem, “The Venus Hottentot,” divided into two parts. Part 1 is narrated by the scientist Baron Cuvier. He celebrates the acquisition of “facts” and knowledge as inextricable from his acquisition of animal and human fossils, including his most controversial prize, the genitalia of the African woman Saartjie Baartman, who was popularly known in nineteenth century London as the Hottentot Venus. In part 2, the Hottentot Venus has the last word, as she articulates her multilinguistic proficiency, her wealth of knowledge and culture, her unimpeachable humanity, and her resolve and strength as an African woman. This poem functions, then, as the overture to a collection that locates Alexander amid cultural icons and social forces that attempt to arrest the progress of the human race.
The collection’s other poems move back and forth, alternating between such topics as the celebration of African American, Jewish, and Brazilian cuisine and drink (“Ode”), sexual awakening (“Nineteen”), parties (“House Party Sonnet: ’66”), and heroic artists (“Omni-Albert Murray”) on the one hand and ruminations on ethnic stereotypes in department stores (“Ladders”) and verbal abuse from racists (“Boston Year”) on the other hand. Because family lineage and cultural transmissions are so important to Alexander’s sense of herself, she can imagine, for example, what it must have been like to dance to the Duke Ellington Orchestra in an upscale Harlem ballroom:
I might have jitterbugged at the Renaissance ’room,
However, at other times Alexander realizes the distance between the suffering of great artists like John Coltrane and her own relatively unscathed life:
this is not enough
Still, the artistry of figures like Duke Ellington and John Coltrane are not the only sources of creative inspiration for Alexander. She begins the book proper (following “The Venus Hottentot”) by celebrating the rich, fertile soil of family history that must augment “book” knowledge:
I know more about Toussaint
These “tales” will serve as her “genie lamps,” which she “fingers,” as though invoking the spirits of the ancestors to empower her as an artist. This inescapable mysticism that nourishes Alexander’s sense of artistic creativity is nothing new, and, indeed, it is a common trope in first books by poets who are either clearing ground for their own work or trying to stand upon the shoulders of those who have gone before them. Taking the latter road, Alexander celebrates not her own unique creativity but its relationship to that of others. Thus, the artists, intellectuals, critics and strong family members that populate Alexander’s poems function as a chorus that echoes the Hottentot Venus’s rebuttal to racist assumptions about those of African descent in general and African American women in particular. These are not, however, poems of rebuttal. In no uncertain terms, Alexander has the title character of “The Venus Hottentot” assert her own indomitable spirit.
Critical Context
When the thirty-four-year-old Elizabeth Alexander’s interview appeared in the journal Callaloo as part of its focus on emerging women writers, it was clear that a whole new generation of relatively young African American women had been writing for years before they were noticed. Since then, a new group of African American women poets—including Erica Hunt, Natasha Tretheway, Harryette Mullen, Duriel Harris, Tracy K. Smith, Patricia Smith, Nikky Finney, and Crystal Wilkinson—have emerged to varying degrees of acclaim. While Alexander and Tretheway have received the most sustained critical notice, all are significant writers in various communities and to their quite different constituencies.
Inspired by older writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, and Rita Dove, these African American women poets continue what appears to be a century-long project of recovering the black female body from its historical function as spectacle and stereotyped site of unrestrained sexuality. Having been influenced by the Black Arts movement, particularly its insistence on the adoption of cultural idioms—language, dialect, metaphors, and so forth—as the organizing principle for all black creative forms, these poets attempt to articulate the experiences of black women from all walks of life. Thus, despite the differences and influences that permeate their work—from the Language Writing of Hunt and Mullen to the folk dialect of Finney and Wilkinson—these poets constitute a significant part of the ongoing tradition of African American culture in general and African American poetry in particular.
The Venus Hottentot would have been valuable for its title and opening poem alone. After Stephen Jay Gould published his archaeological study of the Hottentot Venus in the latter part of the twentieth century, this South African woman displayed as an attraction in Europe became a lightning rod for feminists in general and in particular for black women, who saw in her travails a symbol of the suffering of all women. At least one play about the Hottentot Venus, Venus, by Suzan-Lori Parks, has been written and performed. Barbara Riboud-Chase’s novel, Hottentot Venus, is probably the most sustained and intricate re-creation of the life of Saartjie Baartman, who would be named the Hottentot by her detractors. Finally, the science fiction author Paul di Filippo incorporates her story in The Steampunk Trilogy (1995).
Bibliography
Alexander, Elizabeth. “An Interview with Elizabeth Alexander.” Interview by Christine Phillip. Callaloo 19, no. 2 (Spring, 1996): 493-507. Interview deals primarily with Alexander’s first performed play, Diva Studies, the difficulty of and differences between writing for the stage and writing poetry, and Alexander’s ideas on the relationships among feminism, writing, and black women.
Austin, Doris Jean. “The Woman in the Sideshow.” Review of The Venus Hottentot, by Elizabeth Alexander. The New York Times, September 30, 1990. Focuses for the most part on the title poem, “The Venus Hottentot,” and its connection to the real historical figure of Saartjie Baartman. Tends to summarize Alexander’s poems without offering critical commentary.
Johnson, Judith E. “Deep Noticing.” The Women’s Review of Books 14, no. 10 (July, 1997): 128-130. Reviews seven books of poetry published by women, including Alexander’s second collection, Body of Life. Links that work to the poems in The Venus Hottentot, demonstrating how the motifs of “race and character” continue to inform Alexander’s writing.
McElroy, Colleen J. “Review: Seductive Histories.” The Women’s Review of Books 9, nos. 10/11 (July, 1992): 25-26. Reviewing three books by women poets, McElroy offers praise and criticism for The Venus Hottentot. Approvingly notes Alexander’s construction of a “montage of voices” and her deployment of “rich imagery.” Sees this first collection of poems as “typical,” however, and the lionization of African American and other historical and cultural figures as predictable.
Yenser, Stephen. Review of The Venus Hottentot, by Elizabeth Alexander. Poetry Magazine 158 (July, 1991): 214. Focuses on the historical figures that Alexander writes about in her book, noting her invocations of a “café of voices” from critic and novelist Albert Murray, photographer James Van DerZee, and painters Frida Kahlo and Romare Bearden. For Yenser, Alexander demonstrates not only the diversity of her own family and cultural upbringing but also that of the entire American hemisphere.