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2. It’s Lonely at the Bottom: Elizabeth Alexander, Deborah Richards, and the Cosmopolitan Poetics of the Black Body

She never went into battle armed like the rest, but received the bullets of the enemy that were aimed at her, and returned them with fatal effect, in a manner of which decency forbids a nearer description.

—Herbert Thomas, Untrodden Jamaica (1890)

I longed for lovers or children or

invented dreams to fill the hollow

sleepless nights

(the pumpkin seeds that overnight bore

fruit to feed us was one, the bullets

that I caught between mi legs and threw

back at the enemy was another)

—Honor Ford-Smith, “A Message from Ni” (1996)

Jamaica’s mythic folkhero Nanny of the Maroons—famed for a story of catching colonial bullets in her bottom and, as described in the first epigraph, returning that fire—stands as a contemporary postcolonial and national hero through this fabulist, if indecent, narrative. The fantastic nature of her story lies in the apparent ridiculousness of its site, its centering on the magical bottom of Nanny. Nanny’s “notorious” bottom produces her as a public and political icon, allowing her to enter into the discourse of local, official, and transnational histories.¹ This chapter argues that this material and narrative bottom has come to embody the range of possibilities for black women as cultural figures and producers, even as it accents the necessary limits of that range of representation; as one of the few visible woman “heroes” of the postcolonial struggle, Nanny’s historic success points to the presence of multiple diasporic failures to consider black women as political agents, particularly apart from their spectacularized bodies and sexuality. Like Jackie Kay’s recasting of Bessie Smith—the heir apparent to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom²—Honor Ford-Smith represents Nanny’s body as both hopelessly in the “past” and constantly signaling toward “a future / I could not vision” (1996, 15). The “bottom” stands, then, as a familiar place for the discourse of and on black women’s representation. But as populated as it is, it remains an isolating and even exceptional experience to reference, beyond “nearer description,” in Jamaican constable-turned-travel-writer Herbert Thomas’s 1890 words.

This double signification of physical bottoms acts as the sign of both success and excess for black women’s cultural significance, the vehicle by which black women as icons are made visible and rendered fantastic and tragic simultaneously in the lineage of Western representation. In what Difficult Diasporas attempts to theorize, lament for the loss of “real,” and hence “ideal,” models for uplift and respectability across the black diaspora are telling, if limited, scripts to entertain the function of black women’s sexuality in popular historical discourse. Starting at the “bottom” can do more than account for exploitation or its converse celebration—of bodies or of the capital gains and losses that the bottom may mark. The previous chapter explored queer and feminist displacements of diaspora genealogies of location through mixed generic form. This chapter explores the complex relationship between the longing for nonexploitative historical visibility of black women’s bodies and the poetics of diaspora representation—and critical reception of that representation—that codes race and gender into their corporeal presences. These competing but interrelated desires demand, in the work of contemporary poets Elizabeth Alexander and Deborah Richards, the invention of aesthetic practices that can account for both impulses. Their work employs a poetics of the body, strategies of reference which explore the “bottom” as a rich if dangerous terrain for remembering black women’s public cultural histories, whether it is in a repurposed modernist tradition of interior monologue in the voice of Saartjie Baartman, a.k.a. the Venus Hottentot, or in a series of long poems using the nonnarrative structure of tables, text boxes, and quotations as references to black cinema star Dorothy Dandridge.

Through an innovative poetics of representation, and of referencing the “unseemly” bodies of black women’s representative and performative histories, Alexander’s and Richards’s texts disrupt the epistemological practices that have grounded mainstream critical discourse about black culture and history in the latter half of the twentieth century. The bottom, as both the flesh (the material locus of nineteenth-century racial and gendered difference)³ and taboo (the reference itself unspeakable or outside recognizable social limits and cultural imagination), acts as the most compelling organizing cite for Alexander and Richards to negotiate the form and the content of black women’s cultural (dis)appearances from both official and unofficial memory. In the breadth of their work, they reference bottoms to signify both range and limitation, the examples of the exceptions to the “rules” of racialized and gendered representation across the transhistorical diaspora. Poetic form, with its currency in signifying interiority and moving away from sites of narrative history, allows them to navigate this difficult territory without merely falling into the teleology of the bottom.

This chapter uses the metaphor of the bottom to reference three levels of critical engagement: first, the emphasis on black women’s bodies and sexuality as the central site of their subject formation in Western modernity; second, the narrative of black experience which takes as its poles exploitation and respectability, or exploitation and resistance, as the clear and opposing options for reading these public histories; and third, the critical discourse which relegates certain black women writers, particularly those deemed “formally innovative” within a postmodern framework, to the margins of visibility and, as such, the margins of “authentic” black culture. In Alexander’s and Richards’s differently accessible poetics, one of modernist legibility and one of radical literacy, the two writers engage the “bottoms” of the Black Atlantic, its uneven historical borders and interdisciplinary methodologies, not to mention its complex geographic routes. Referencing the persistent global circulation of these bottom-dwelling contexts offers, in the work of these contemporary authors, new critical and aesthetic practices of reading race and gender in a genealogy of cosmopolitan desire and discourse.

To make the metaphor more direct, this chapter considers diaspora as bottom—as that visceral plane of traumatized flesh and as the lyric category that threatens to contain too much meaning, from too many sources. Like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Nanny’s mythic weapon of colonial resistance, diaspora always acts as a distinct site and moving target, circulating outside of its purportedly “fixed” historical trajectory, even of assumptions about the very history of black women’s bottoms, usually traced back solely to the display of the Venus Hottentot. Alexander and Richards attempt to perform this tricky genealogy, one that both is documentable and exceeds the archival frame, in their own version of “difficult diasporas.” Following on Ian Baucom’s suggestion of a politics of cosmopolitan “interestedness” that exposes and charts the myth of reciprocity, their poetic practices attempt “to recover . . . the negative, the singular, the exceptional, or the evident not as a sort of lost foundation but as something that emerges on the far side, and in consequence of, the dialectical operation, a relational poetics, or the act of setting to work” (2005, 232, 229).

As Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo argues about the fraught terrain of black cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, “people of African descent’s approaches to public self-representation were born, in significant part, of the Atlantic power structure’s attempts to deny them access to cosmopolitan subjectivity,” which she defines as “the definition of oneself through the world beyond ones own origins” (2005, 10, 9). Kwame Anthony Appiah further defines cosmopolitanism as “the idea that we have obligations to others” with whom we share no direct familial or national ties as well as the respectful acknowledgment of our particular difference from those same “others” (2007, xv). Far from fearing the too-capacious object of a burgeoning diaspora studies, Alexander’s and Richards’s poetry recasts these challenges and tensions in iconic, isolated figures, figuring a critical “loneliness” and lone-ness as both myth and method. This aesthetic unevenness pushes the incommensurability between origin and the physical and emotional impossibility of locating any pure original source. Alexander and Richards reflect on this constant tension through a cosmopolitan poetics, exhibiting the vast variety and incompleteness that shadows diaspora and its critical narratives of gender.

Alexander’s and Richards’s (and Ford-Smith’s) critiques of the burdens of representation shift against the growing order of their forms or, as Meta Jones so aptly terms it in referencing Alexander’s poetics, against both poets’ practices of “syntactical restraint” (2011, 108). This poetic form mirrors the “narrative restraint” that Saidiya Hartman both performs and calls for in taking up subjected black bodies—in particular the body of the Venus Hottentot—as the subject of history (2008, 12). Such a tactic again invites the move to “a discourse on black alterity. . . . This discourse of ‘other blackness’ (rather than ‘black otherness’) has recently begun to move into a larger discussion of multiplicity and dissonance—the flip side of unity or homogeneity—of African American cultures and identities” (Mullen 2012, 68). What Harryette Mullen marks as poetic “dissonance”—the musical emission of hybridity or hybrid bodies of text—is the ordered, conscious, purposeful, and yet disordered body that Alexander’s and Richards’s cosmopolitan poetics come to represent—as breaks with what had been subsumed under the rubric of the “real,” what has limited the genealogical lines available to construct black identity in the face of divergences and differences such as location, education, class status, sexuality, or other “somatic presence[s] of alterity” floating in the world of blackness that they map (H. Young 2006, 16).

The strategy for both poets is to claim the full stakes of representation “within state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subject-predication, on the other—[these two senses of representation] are related but irreducibly discontinuous” (Spivak 1988, 275), not through history but through poetry. Representation here references, both directly and indirectly, a genealogy of black women’s performative bodies, “bottoms” which are/have been disciplined by colonial history. But then there is also the body of text itself (not mutually exclusive from reference but different nonetheless), the structure of the poetry, the form it adopts, which acts as a historiography, an education which may not look like pedagogy, history, or genealogy. In this, the (poetic) body “as a form of memory is also a difficult thing,” as Hershini Young articulates in her study of diaspora women’s novels, and also an aesthetic thing (2006, 6). Alexander and Richards read race and sexuality into a history of the aesthetically generative sites of poetic reeducation, keenly aware that the difficult poetic work is to recognize the great variance and simultaneity that the black body claims as its historical and cultural geography.

As Honor Ford-Smith’s contemporary version of Nanny/“Ni’s” bottom suggests, this chapter also critiques attempts to move from the burden of visibility to a space of subjective interiority. In Ford-Smith’s imaginative rendering, poetics allow Nanny to both acknowledge and dismantle the narratives surrounding her historical tops and bottoms, engaging in a discourse of loneliness or longing for recognizable interaction with and in social and cultural narratives—“lovers or children or invented dreams”—to characterize this ambivalent critique. In taking up iconic cultural figures and forms, Alexander and Richards also take on this other “burden” of giving voice to the consciousness of their subjects. Both choose to expose this practice of representing interiority as an equally tempting and problematic surface, a narrative practice no less “invented” than colonialist representations of black women. As Jenny Sharpe articulates in her discussion of Nanny, to study iconic black women is a “paradox,” in that they are “the most prominent” but “also the most invisible in the archives” (2003, 1). Official narratives and historical records compete with oral tradition and post-Independence and Civil Rights referents. As several modern critics of race and aesthetics note, the two need not compete for “good” representations of black women’s bodies: Janell Hobson (2005) locates both ongoing trauma and aesthetic revaluing in the legacy of Baartman, for instance, while scholar Meta Jones sees an impulse in contemporary black women’s writing to “engage[] in a subversive revision of the black literary tradition” (2011, 7), adopting and remixing history simultaneously. Ford-Smith’s “Message from Ni” dramatizes this tension between narrative play and corporeal historical materialism, indicating that “surface,” like “bottom,” need not be read as irrelevant, negative, or something to get beyond/over but instead may be read as a critical space to inhabit. This chapter reads the formally challenging poetics of Alexander and Richards as attending to the gaps between the transmissions of history and memory in the black diaspora through the interactions between consequential bodies and the surfaces—the images, sounds, and texts—in which black women’s bodies are frequently and publicly remembered.

Bottoms Up(lift)!

The general “problem” of (late-capital) practices of reference is one of correspondence, between the linguistic sign and “any actual object,” as Linda Hutcheon articulates (1988, 143–44). But what can we make of poet Elizabeth Alexander’s use of diasporic reference, her postmodern recasting of nineteenth-century performer Saartjie Baartman, “The Venus Hottentot,” and her infamous bottom: “in this newspaper lithograph / my buttocks are shown swollen / and luminous as a planet” (1990, 5)? The surface of Alexander’s poem could be read as a correction of the referent or, at the very least, the reproduction of the shock of racial and sexual exploitation to right the historical representation—marked by the date in the poem’s full title, “The Venus Hottentot (1825).” But in choosing a date nearly ten years after Baartman’s documented death, Alexander’s referential world grows beyond the discipline of chronological history, into the realm of the posthumous power which references to race, gender, and sexuality signify. As the lines just quoted demonstrate, these excesses of historical reference include those circulated by print and empirical culture. And though Alexander’s poem speaks to modes of resistance, it dwells most frequently in lyric engagement with and in the bottom. If Baartman is a science experiment, she figures on a large scale; her most famous referent, her bottom, metaphorically corresponds to a poetic world of value unto itself, one infused with narratives of shame and inferiority as well as intellectual curiosity and cosmopolitan desires of and for diaspora engagement.⁴

Alexander’s iconoclastic method traces what critic Joseph Roach calls “genealogies of performance” (1996, 25) that engage in ongoing public histories and collective memory to garner and disrupt social power dynamics. From Ford-Smith’s imagined “children” to Alexander’s “imaginary / daughters,” the genealogy of the bottom contains a progressive promise not just of/for material or remembered bodies but for performances of the social imagination itself. As several transnational feminist theorists contemporary with Alexander have also marked, these imaginative progeny signify the relational quality of “histories” and representation. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty (1997) name these convergences “feminist genealogies” and mark their “dislocations” as well as their diaspora presences. Connections between popular performances marked by the nexus of gender and race are not just “covered” but rewritten into the lineage of the aesthetic and intellectual practices of a diaspora feminism.

Such acts of genealogical engagement occupy a type of spatial relationship to Alexander’s poetics. As a critical frame, genealogy offers within the structure of “reproductivity,” or exhaustive knowledge of documented heterosexuality and inheritance that excluded blacks in the New World, a set of deconstructive acts in its quest for thoroughness, its inevitable uncovering and description of the bottoms of “illegitimate” diaspora connection (Mirza 1997, 5). In Alexander’s taking up of Baartman, she imagines the failures of colonial imagination in the construction of racial difference, the “bottoms” of Western racial discourse. “Bottom” implies hierarchy, a play of power not lost on Alexander, or on Joseph Roach in his formulation of the concept of genealogies of performance, which finds its roots in Foucault: “Genealogies of performance attend not only to ‘the body,’ as Foucault suggests, but also to bodies—to the reciprocal reflections they make on one another’s surfaces as they foreground their capacities for interaction” (1996, 25). Roach goes on to suggest that the concept can “also attend to ‘counter-memories,’ or the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences” (26).

Alexander’s work is instructive, then, in the same way that the bottom’s value itself operates—not as a site of reproduction but as a near reference to sex itself, in both proximity to primary sex characteristics and the site/sight of desire. As such, referencing the bottom points to its capacity as a recognizable sign. Its “vulgarity,” or its obviousness, aligns with what Carolyn Cooper recasts as a literacy of the body, a text of “popular taste” (1995, 5). To claim the bottom, for Alexander, is not just to claim the significance of working-class culture but to stage the kinesthetic “performance intelligence” of hypervisible bodies as “a graphic metaphor for alternative aesthetics” (Chatterjea 2004, 24, 19)—as a reference to both the training and typology that characterize the relationship between diaspora political consciousness and aesthetic practices. How those aesthetics are read by critics and by varying audiences is Alexander’s imagined classroom scenario, “swarming with cabbage-smelling / citizens who stare and query, / ‘Is it muscle? Bone? Or fat?’” (1990, 5). The bottom, too, has its interiority, inextricable from its materiality in Alexander’s rendering. The diasporic practices of representation employed by her poetry engage what Hutcheon calls “the yearning for order” not to find, finally, correspondence but instead to map the inquiry into race, gender, and diaspora itself (1988, 157). Rather than the “dominant markers” of self and other, “leaving and arriving,” that Sneja Gunew claims as the false idols of diaspora practice, the referencing of the bottom engages in “an endless process of traveling and change” (2004, 107).

Elizabeth Alexander’s body of work challenges, through various levels of engagement with black diaspora culture, a “limited imagination” of iconic figures, local cultures, and familial drama usually associated with blackness and its public circulation (2004, x). These contested signs of blackness, gender, location, and desire become unruly yet highly conscious formal strategies that remap the multiple lines of subjectivity made possible in the histories of black women’s textual and corporeal embodiment. Alexander, as compared to many of the authors discussed in Difficult Diasporas, is not a radically formally innovative poet. She is, however, a part of “recent black poetry that has been enabled by theoretical discourse and avant-garde practices” (Mullen 2012, 69). So while her bodies of text are on the borders of the recognizable (“accessible”), these boundaries are nonetheless stretched with a range of challenging “incorporations” that we might identify as the “intertwining of abstraction and representational modalities, . . . impressing the sheer impossibility of making such monumental histories of suffering intelligible much less legible” (Miranda and Spencer 2009, 923). Sitting on the cusp of what Elisabeth Frost refers to as “hybrid avant-garde poetics” (2003, xxvii), Alexander can be framed not just in terms of what she works out in specific reference or debts but also her formal strategies. “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” finds itself at the axis of redress, or what Saidiya Hartman identifies as a practice of “counterinvesting in the body as a site of possibility” (1997, 51). The poem’s cosmopolitan redress explores “the import of the performative, . . . the articulation of needs and desires that radically call into question the order of power and its production of ‘cultural intelligibility’ or ‘legible bodies’” (ibid., 56). Thus, Alexander is comfortable with the assertion “that the question was never ‘either/or’: either form or content, either black or avant-garde,” as well as being even more directly and playfully committed to challenging the discrete literacies that are assigned “as part and parcel of ‘identity,’ . . . pigeonholed by particular expectations for form and content” (Schultz 2001).

Poetic genealogy, as such, marks Alexander’s practices as innovative within a frame of recognizability: postmodernism with social memory, ludic performances of political reference. Alexander uses strategic reference, or the logic of naming, to cast a wide net in terms of what gets assigned meaning in her work, via references in poetry. Alexander’s texts join the ranks of those which are “fostering both cultural and formal hybridity to demonstrate the ‘mongrel’ nature of contemporary culture and avant-gardism itself, . . . seek[ing] a diverse lineage of its own” (Frost 2003, 138). The logic of naming, of invoking the proper (and improper) objects of diasporic black cultures, does the complex work of genealogy in that it attempts to syncretize multiple and various “lines” of black cultures through the nexus of Baartman’s legacy. Such a task is necessary to revaluing the curriculum—in the sense of an epistemological program—of Black Atlantic public culture and aesthetics.

Elizabeth Alexander’s wide sense and command of history opens up this theory of genealogical interrogation; Michel Foucault poses genealogy as a practice of history which, like Alexander’s work, depends on abundance of reference material:

Genealogy, consequently, requires patience and knowledge of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material. Its “cyclopean monuments” are constructed from “discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method”; they cannot be the product of “large and well-meaning errors.” In short, genealogy demands relentless erudition. Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for “origins.” (1977, 140)

Foucault’s “relentless erudition” seems gracefully taken up in Alexander’s own poetic practice, which examines the remainders and underpinnings of other historical methodologies, in particular those which produce “large errors.” Her work on the representations of disparate cultural spheres collected in her texts similarly neither seeks blind progress narratives nor works backward to locate any authentic source of black aesthetic and/or culture. Instead, her genealogies are spatial in terms of relationships to history and audience, thinking broadly about who and where constitutes blackness, and the surprising relations of race and cultural expression.

Alexander’s work on Baartman embodies, then, what critic Angela Davis classifies as the three spheres of revision to black subjectivity and culture postslavery in the United States: travel, sexuality, and education (1998, 4). Such a revision comes in the form of “collective” culture for Davis and for Alexander. Alexander, speaking of her play Diva Studies in Callaloo, performs her knowledge of the politics of audience:

I think certainly the person who would really get everything in the play is going to be someone who is more or less like me in that they would have an education that is not just a school education but an eclectic education that knows a lot about and revels in black culture and black so-called high culture as well as black vernacular culture, both of those working in an amalgam. So I think that’s who is going to pick up the most from the play. (Alexander, in Phillip 1996, 501)

Instead of lamenting the narrowness of who can “pick up” the quick and multiple references of her work, Alexander seems to have a spatial sense of readership, one which is about capacity but not totality. Reference is not meant to alienate but to spread, to educate, but not in a formal or patronizingly instructive way. Instead, Alexander takes herself as an example of a visible, nonsilent subject, assuming the existence and audience of other black cosmopolitan women who could be imagined readers of her work without denying its class-selective breadth.

“The Venus Hottentot (1825),” the opening and eponymous poem of Alexander’s first collection (1990), is similarly invested in this lineage of reference, which is of and for, though not limited to, a cosmopolitan construction of diaspora feminism. The first thing one notices, before the poem itself, is the book’s original cover. If the reader does not “know” the referent, does not know who “Venus Hottentot” is historically, the cover offers the reproduction of a painting of a light-skinned black woman, dressed in modern-day black with an abstract formal quality (i.e., the body is not quite “realistically” drawn or proportioned).⁵ The back cover tells us that the painting is actually from the collection of Alexander’s parents themselves, and its artist, Charles Alston, was a well-known African American artist during the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts movement. The back blurb, too, asserts that her work “contributes something new to African-American poetry,” self-consciously situating the book as both part of a recognizable cultural genealogy and an “innovation.” Like the Venus Hottentot, the text becomes both exception and example.

If the reader does know the referent to the title’s historical figure, the cover becomes even more dissonant, as the Venus Hottentot is usually characterized as an extreme body in the nineteenth century, one characterized by “what they [European audiences and scientific experts] regarded as unusual aspects of her physiognomy—her genitalia and buttocks, . . . [which] became the central image of the black female in Europe through the nineteenth century. . . . The black female embodies the notion of uncontrolled sexuality” (Hammonds 1997, 172). In locating the Venus Hottentot as ur-figure in the French national-continental literary imaginary, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting points to the construction of the Hottentot as the “master text on black female sexuality” in the post-Enlightenment West (1999, 17), while Sander Gilman’s analysis is echoed in Hammonds’s statement, emphasizing how the construction of black sexuality defined white women’s sexuality as well (2010, 79). Bernth Lindfors (1996) outlines the historical construction of Baartman as a deeply gendered and racialized icon through the Victorian British press’s emphasis on caricature and visual difference. The racially indeterminate, abstract woman with tiny folded hands, light skin, and all black clothes on the cover of Alexander’s book reads as a counter to the nineteenth-century visions of Baartman’s sexuality, including the represented body on the publicity poster circa 1814.⁶ She is the “silent” partner, the middle-class black woman to Hottentot’s primitivist caricature of black women’s sexuality but also to contemporary narratives of reclaimed authenticity that celebrate the audacious presence of the bottom (Hobson 2005, 2). As Nicholas Hudson (2008) points out, the visual economies of race in its modern forms that Baartman embodied were created concurrently with ideals of visual aesthetics themselves in the Victorian era. It is this merging, the high art contemporary black portrait under/in the name of an exploited racial icon from the nineteenth-century black diaspora, which Alexander employs to hybridize and expand the tonal range of race and sexuality—of “human difference,” as scholar Janell Hobson terms the turn from racial-sexual pathology (2005, 4)—as well as to acknowledge its discursive limits.

To take up Evelynn Hammonds’s genealogy of the Hottentot for a moment, though, Baartman was not just an icon of the “uncontrolled” body—she was the very method of control. Brought to London from Cape Town in 1810, Baartman performed under the draw of nascent sideshow curiosities but also as a “representative” of her racial-sexual identity, marked by her steatopygia, or her supposedly enlarged bottom. Her body was a marker of classification, and her performative value was not because of her anatomy but because of its construction and marketing as being the “common property” of black women. As her recent biographer, Rachel Holmes, articulates, “The success of the Hottentot Venus depended upon a contradiction: Saartjie needed to be perceived as a unique novelty, while absolutely typifying the stereotype of a Hottentot” (2007, 42)—again, exception and example. Anne Fausto-Sterling has traced not just Baartman’s “use” as a racial signifier through comparative anatomy but also other indigenous women featuring in racial typology dating back to the late sixteenth century (2000, 205). More recently, there has been an explosion of work on Baartman through the lens of disability studies (Rosemary Garland Thompson references her as part of the history of display of “othered” bodies in Extraordinary Bodies [1997] and her introduction to Freakery [1996]) and black diaspora studies, both in the realm of her continued visual legacy in drama such as the aforementioned Parks’s Venus and visual artist Renee Cox’s work and in the “return” of her remains to South Africa in 2002 and the subsequent commemoration of her singular legacy in postapartheid South Africa (as noted by critics such as Neville Hoad [2007] and the documentary The Life and Times of Sarah Baartman [1998]). And in 2010, Alexander’s poem prefaced the introduction to Deborah Willis’s edited collection on the legacy of “Venus,” in Black Venus 2010 (2010), the first major anthology work to consider her legacy of representation, from historical, visual, and cultural studies perspectives. As Willis herself notes, much “variation” exists in critical investments and naming of the genealogy of the Venus Hottentot, but as exception and example, she stands with a planetary body of work and reference surrounding her.⁷

Alexander’s poem itself, “The Venus Hottentot (1825),” is divided into two sections which come to represent this collective cultural impulse to recover lost history and to question that historical representation in any and all of its forms—much as the 2008 Crais and Scully biography suggests in its title: Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. The first section is entitled “Cuvier,” the last name of the French scientist who circulated and did experiments on Baartman, and it tracks the known world, the “biography,” of whom we can only know as a performance through the archive, the Venus Hottentot:

Science, science, science!

Everything is beautiful

blown up beneath my glass.

Colors dazzle insect wings.

A drop of water swirls

like marble. Ordinary

crumbs become stalactites

set in perfect angles

of geometry I’d thought

impossible. Few will

ever see what I see

through this microscope.

Cranial measurements

crowd my notebook pages,

and I am moving closer,

close to how these numbers

signify aspects of

national character.

Her genitalia

will float inside a labeled

pickling jar in the Musée

de l’Homme on a shelf

above Broca’s brain:

“The Venus Hottentot.”

Elegant facts await me.

Small things in this world are mine. (1990, 3–4)

It is a short section, in the first person, with couplet lines that enjamb themselves, giving the effect of strain or a failing order. The “Cuvier” section lays out a particularly contained narrative of the genealogy of black women’s bodies; “Science, Science, Science!” the section begins, repeating the frame of reference lest we “miss” it. Cuvier’s narrative is one of objects, “small things” which make up an exacting but completely exterior world. Things are “blown up”—“insect wings,” “cranial measurements,” “genitalia”—things are preserved to be “seen” by Cuvier and by a future viewing public. His genealogy is one of moving “closer” in order to go further, to the museum, and so on. His narrative, as Alexander imagines/constructs it, is one of assigning reference, naming. It is the part, the artifact, which is named, “her genitalia” in a jar given a referent but “her,” the body and subject, left unmade. Of course, Alexander’s reverse act is to name/construct “Cuvier,” to limit him to these contained lines, to a “small” body of ownership, of knowledge, a small lineage (3–4). Her appropriation of his voice takes Alexander’s knowledge and reframes the referent under Hottentot’s name, rather than the conventional genealogy that would locate Cuvier, then Baartman. Alexander’s use of historical detail and multiperspective interior monologue to remake narratives of race and sexuality marks her’s intervention into the patterns of reference that identify Baartman’s meaning, a failing series of parts standing in for what was always a performative, constructed whole or, in Gilman’s words, the “specimen” acting as “pathological summary of the entire individual” (2010, 86). “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” is a critique of taking from the specifics of historical detail a compulsory narrative of gendered and racialized subjectivity, the “tragic case” repeated, imminently and endlessly.

If Cuvier’s historiography is relegated to the limits that Alexander imposes on his referents, then her wish to inhabit or rewrite the genealogy of the Venus Hottentot reads as expansive, not as a recovery project for a “ghost,” per se. And indeed, it is not the “fact” of Venus’s bottom, nor scientific discourse alone, that gives the bottom, as sign, its historical and cultural weight: “Bottoms were big in Georgian England,” Baartman biographer Holmes tells us, as was public debate about Baartman’s status as either “slave” or “free agent” in the emerging capital market, one that marked her ability to, for instance, speak several languages as a skill set that implied consent perhaps even more than her corporeal presence did (2007, 43).⁸ Alexander herself references this move in her Callaloo interview when asked about her interest in Hottentot:

Hopefully what the poem gives her also is an intellectual range. When I say intellectual, I don’t mean book stuff but a rich and textured inner life that belies the surface exploitation and presentation. I guess that’s what I’m most interested in. It’s a very interesting black-people-character question because our surfaces are so wildly distorted in Western culture. Therefore, to go into the inside, there is all this contrast and distance frequently with how we are seen and who we are inside. (Phillip 1996, 502)

Though the rationale sounds perhaps seductively sentimental, notice that Alexander describes her process here not as a corrective measure but as a descriptive one; she, as her Venus Hottentot does in the next section in the poem, is describing the terrain in which she writes on race, gender, and sexuality. The “interior” is the bottom, full of “contrast and distance,” unresolved for her poetic genealogy. Like Alexander’s conception of her audience, her relationship to constructing Saartjie Baartman as reference is a question of narrative capacity or range, not a reproduction of “the illusion of realism” and “mastery” that characterizes nineteenth-century engagement with Baartman or the narrative that locates her as a model of resistance (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 6). Her mapping does not deny even as it seemingly conflicts with surface signs of meaning. Alexander’s poem and the collection it frames contest the constructed conflict between sexuality and intellectual production as a false split between exterior and interior.⁹ “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” shifts poetic genealogy to questions of moving into rather than moving over to something larger than such “small” objects. It insists not on the sum of their representative parts but on their reclassification, or their re-collection, into different analytical and referential frames which can recognize black women’s material bodies as modes of diaspora intellectual practice, and vice versa (as in the previous chapter’s reconsideration of Bessie Smith through Jackie Kay).

As the second section of the poem begins, untitled, we recognize the voice not as Cuvier’s but as that of the Venus Hottentot of the title. The speaking subject is not passively placed but locates herself within London, as a traveling/traveled body, one who is decidedly doing “work,” like Kay’s Bessie Smith, including the intellectual work that Alexander attributes to her in her interview:

There is unexpected sun today

In London, and the clouds that

Most days fit into this cage

Where I am working have dispersed.

I am a black cutout against

a captive blue sky, pivoting

nude so the paying audience

can view my naked buttocks. (1990, 4)

This first eight-line stanza, too, offers a containment, but of a different sort. If Alexander’s reference to Cuvier was sparse, direct, and limited, then these expansive stanzas offer a blunt but thoughtful version of histories of display. Hottentot as speaking subject is a theorist, critically reading her surroundings and referencing the visible structures in/of her display: “this cage,” “paying audience,” and so on.¹⁰ She is both naming and, as she continues, named, the referent and the one capable of referencing.

Her ideological reference point, however, is neither science nor shame, the dominant modes of characterizing black women’s sexuality in the discourses of typology and respectability. The awkward articulation of the word “buttocks” at the end of the stanza marks the turn to official terminology within poetic construction, the wish to codify “where I am working” with a certain halting banality in place of the “double entendre” of “vulgarity” (Cooper 1995, 141).¹¹ For Alexander, it is the labor of reference, as the reader stumbles over the sound and the sign of the bottom, “buttocks,” that is emphasized. It is also the resistant timing of the speech, its specificity—“today”—and its posthumous address, that manages to escape the predetermined narrative of epic tragedy.¹² This is the quotidian existence of the cosmopolitan subaltern, the work that representation continually does not just in the lexicon of domination but in the too-quick preoccupations generalized categories in diaspora and transnational feminist studies.¹³

This ability to read the “surfaces,” distorted though they may be, offers Alexander’s Hottentot a capacity that obviously complicates the narrative of her legacy in Western discourse, on display at the Musée de l’Homme, in parts and jars. (In 1825, she would be posthumously speaking.)¹⁴ She, too, can construct lists of “small things,” like Cuvier, things that she would acquire in her diasporic performative work, things that Alexander repossesses to her:

I would return to my family

A duchess, with watered-silk

Dresses and money to grow food,

Rouge and powders in glass pots,

Silver scissors, a lorgnette,

Voile and tulle instead of flax,

Cerulean blue instead

of indigo. My brother would

devour sugar-studded non-

pareils, pale taffy, damask plums. (1990, 4)

This list could continue: a family, a home, an understanding of material, of color, of food. The “small things in this world” are not, of course, for the speaking subject but are part of an unfulfilled narrative of reciprocal desire for cosmopolitan legitimacy (4). Such desire for ownership, these references to commodity culture and the good life, shifts the raced and gendered paradigm by making everything cosmopolitan. This Venus Hottentot assesses not only her given name but those of her sideshow “neighbors,” her own animal-like presentation, as well as her “planet”-ary status (5). Baartman is large, in Elizabeth Alexander’s text; she is her own world, her own system of reference, even as she is limited by another set of meanings.