Sarah Baartman

Sarah Baartman (1789 – 1815)

I heard about the movie by Abdel Kechiche’s Black Venus, and forgot about it till recently when I was looking through the DVD’s at the public library. I had already done some reading about her and being pleased by the idea, thru or not, that she caused the fashion named Cue de Paris that gave fashionable ladies a huge derriere. Next I found out and was satisfied that she saw herself as an artist and an entrepreneur, not a slave. So I felt we should regard her as today we look at an exotic dancer, or a belly dancer, or like any artist who’s main attraction by choice is her looks. Perhaps not a career we want for ourselves, daughters or sisters, but exotic dancers are today an accepted fact of life. Female sexuality has been liberated too, we all have seen Madonna and Lil’Kim strutting their stuff, touching themselves and doing all the things that must have horrified the patriarchs of old. So I do not feel we should take the moral road when assessing the Baartman case.

After carefully watching the movie, admiring the fantasy and playfulness of the filmmaker, my first feeling was that human misery was well depicted. The comment on human sexuality was quite ironic, especially how the sex scenes in the brothel were depicted. Baartman ending up a prostitute selling the very thing she did not like to show to people from the beginning. When she saunters bare assed out of the institute it’s even funny. The actress herself looks her best in out door scenes. Was the real Baartman also scowling all of the time? Is this to hide the actress’ inexperience? Was she smoking and drinking all the time? This makes her very real, as some people are just like that. Prostitutes are often addicts to booze, gambling or worse. These aspects should not distress us, nor detain us.

The movie tells her story in long takes and spun out scenes that can be tiring. I did not like the drinking contest in a bar that shows how Baartman was part of a bawdy, folksy type of live, and show business. The contrasts with high, cultured society was poignant. I was moved by the part about a libertine club, with elder women showing their breast and acting sexual. Scenes were the Europeans were also positively exited by her, her movements, her dancing, participating in the spectacle as human to human pleased me the most. As I come from Suriname I know something about big derrieres and large breast, so this part did not face me. Nor can I imagine that the Europeans who saw her never before saw a fat woman or a large behind or huge breasts. The scenes at the ‘science’ Institute where her skull is measured are supposed to be the most harrowing part of the story, but her refusal to show her genitals is comic. They are played like a bunch of horny old goats trying to turn a young, and chaste woman in showing them her exceptional love organ. The movie achieves what I aim for, is defusing the pain, by not focusing on sordid aspects or making this a story about Blacks or only about racism and misogyny.

But the part that should really be our business, that is black People’s business, is the assertion that her elongated labia minora are akin to those of some apes. For ‘scientist’ then apes were degenerated humans and Baartman was like a missing link. They were not moved by personal malice towards her. Now we know Blacks are not apes, anybody who has spent time with Blacks knows we are no apes. And many Blacks looking at whites, may agree that among whites there are as many cases resembling apes as among Blacks.

The questions should be: when, why and how did it become so common to equate Blacks with Apes. These are the angles I want to explore with this thread.

http://www.southafrica.info/about/history/saartjie.htm#.UKZbsuRReuI

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Hott.html

http://icarusfilms.com/new99/hottento.html

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/191312549

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/433712387

http://web.mit.edu/racescience/in_media/baartman/baartman_mbekiletter.htm

http://www.filmtotaal.nl/recensie.php?id=20345