The Venus Hottentot

“The Venus Hottentot” by Elizabeth Alexander was published in her first collection, the critically acclaimed The Venus Hottentot (1990). This collection featured poems from the point of view of historical Black people. In this poem, Sarah Baartman, the original Hottentot Venus, speaks, describing her life as a racist exhibition in London and Paris during the early 1800s before her death at the age of about 25. Her genitalia and other body parts were preserved by Georges Cuvier and displayed in museums for decades. This poem is Alexander’s most well-known and well-regarded works.

By choosing this woman as her subject, Alexander comments on the racial and sexual violence Black women have experience and continue to experience. The poem is broken into two sections with two different narrators. First, Georges Cuvier speaks about scientific advancement. Then, Baartman herself speaks about her life and experiences.

Alexander published this during a time of significant change in academia, of which Alexander was a part as both student and professor. Third-wave feminism was beginning to coalesce, with a focus on intersectionality. The Canon Wars were heating up, with multiculturalism becoming a focus. The poem reflects Alexander’s interest in representing the Black experience, and especially a Black woman’s experience.

Poet Biography

American poet Elizabeth Alexander was born on May 30, 1962, in Harlem, New York City, New York. When she was a toddler, her family moved to Washington, D.C.

Alexander’s family is very involved in American politics in Washington, D.C. She is the daughter of Clifford Alexander, Jr, a former United States Secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chairman, and Adele Logan Alexander, a writer and professor of African American women’s history at George Washington University. Her older brother, Mark C. Alexander, was a senior adviser to the Barack Obama presidential campaign and a member of his transition team.

Alexander received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1984, a Master’s in Poetry from Boston University under Derek Walcott in 1987, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.

In 1990, she published her first work, the poetry collection The Venus Hottentot. This collection was widely praised. During this time, she taught at Haverford College from 1990-1991. Her verse play, Diva Studies, premiered at the Yale School of Drama in May 1996. For this play, Alexander won a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship. In 1997, she published her second collection, Body of Life, followed by her third collection, Antebellum Dream Book, in 2001.

She also wrote a collection of essays titled The Black Interior, published in 2004. These essays discuss Black life, stereotypes, and art. She discusses other notable Black artists like writers Langston Hughes and Anna Cooper, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Michael Harper, and actor Denzel Washington. Her essays also touch on current events and pop culture, for example discussing O.J. Simpson’s murder trial and the Rodney King case.

Her next collection, the 2005 American Sublime, was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for the year. In this same year, she was awarded the Jackson Poetry Prize. She also edited The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks.

In 2007, she published another essay collection titled Power and Possibility: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. Living in Chicago at the time, Alexander met and married artist and chef Ficre Ghebreyesus, with whom she had two sons.

On January 20, 2009, Alexander recited her poem “Praise Song for the Day” at the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama. She became the fourth poet to read at an inauguration, after Robert Frost in 1961, Maya Angelou in 1993, and Miller Williams in 1997. Her delivery and the poem itself were received poorly by critics and the wider public, though the selection of the poet herself was widely praised.  

In 2012, her husband died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 50. This tragedy heavily informed her 2015 memoir, The Light of the World. This work was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2018, she began her work as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest arts, culture, and humanities funder in America. Alexander’s most recent book, The Trayvon Generation (2022), considers art and culture’s ability to reveal America’s continuing problem with race. Alexander was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2022.

Alexander has taught widely, including at University of Chicago; Smith College; Yale University, where she taught for fifteen years and reinvigorated the African American Studies department; and Columbia University.

Alexander’s poems, short stories and essays have been widely published in journals and periodicals like The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and The Washington Post. Her work has been anthologized in over twenty collections.

Her other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, three Pushcart Prizes, and the George Kent Award. Alexander received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry in 2010.

As of May 2022, Alexander is a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board, and co-designed the Art for Justice Fund.

Poem Text

Alexander, Elizabeth. “The Venus Hottentot.” 1990. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem is divided into two sections with two different speakers. French anthropologist, naturalist, and zoologist Georges Cuvier speaks in the first part. He describes his enthusiasm for the natural world. He lists the various natural objects he examines under his microscope during his research: “insect wings” (Line 4), “a drop of water” (Line 5), and “Ordinary // crumbs” (Lines 6-7). He remarks on how he is one of the few with this ability.

Then, he focuses on the data he is collecting in his current research, the “[c]ranial measurements” (Line 13) of a human skull in his collection, likely the skull of Sarah Baartman. He hopes to use this data to support his research to create a racial hierarchy based on scientific racism to “signify aspects of / national character” (Lines 17-18). He then comments that her “genitalia / will float inside a labeled / pickling jar” (Lines 19-21) next to “Broca’s brain” (Line 23) in a museum. For Cuvier, her dissected body will provide “[e]legant facts” (Line 25) in his research of “[s]mall things” (Line 26). 

The second section of the poem, though not specifically named, is the Venus Hottentot herself, Sarah Baartman. After describing her current work in a “cage” (Line 29), Baartman tells the story of how she was tricked into coming to London with a “promise” (Line 36) of a “boon” (Line 38). She then describes the squalid working conditions and the other acts around her, which include both humans and animals.

At this point, the narrative jumps forward in time, though it is never explicitly noted in the poem. The speaker now references an engraving of another woman working as a Hottentot Venus, though the speaker refers to the engraving’s subject as herself. The Hottentot Venus is portrayed as animalistic amongst the rich and elegant upper class of France.  

Shifting back to Baartman’s narrative, she describes how Cuvier “investigates” (Line 75) her genitalia. She finds the experience degrading, as he complains about her smell and insults her in a language that he does not think she speaks. This prompts her to list the languages she can speak, emphasizing that she knows “languages Monsieur Cuvier / will never know have names” (Lines 85-86).

Now, Baartman is both physically sick and homesick. She misses her home environment and food. Reflecting on her misguided hope that she was leaving for a better future, Baartman declares that she “was certain that this would be / better than farm life” (Lines 93-94).

As her “own genitals are public” (Line 100), she seeks to make “other parts private” (Line 101). By being silent, she can reclaim her own body parts. Rather than be presented as a stereotypical African woman, she can style herself as a powerful Black woman.

By the end of the poem, time has shifted again. In the last stanza, Baartman’s body lies on Cuvier’s dissection table. Even in death, Baartman still speaks, as she has “not forgotten” (Line 110) her native language. Enraged at how she has been treated, Baartman imagines how she would take her revenge if she could. She would “cut out his black heart” (Line 116) to preserve it in a jar like he has done to her genitalia. When the heart is put “on a low shelf in a white man’s museum” (Lines 118-119), everyone could see how his heart was “shriveled and hard, / geometric, deformed, unnatural” (Lines 121-122).