Venus is a drama play written by African American writer Suzan Lori-Parks in 1996. It is based on the true story of Sarah Baartman’s life. Sarah was an African native, belonging to Khoi people, who are also called Hottentots. Her birth name was Saartjie, but after baptism in Europe she used the name Sarah. She lived in the first half of the 19th century and was a slave of Dutch farmers. Once her owner Mr. Cezar persuaded her to move to London with him in order to perform as a dancer and earn a great deal of money. He and her later owners used her naivety and showed her under the nickname “The Hottentot Venus” as one of the world’s wonders in freak shows. Their reckless and almost cruel behaviour and exploitation of her led Sarah to depression, alcoholism, and finally to death.
The author chose a rather unusual way of writing, reading and understanding this play and it was sometimes very difficult for me. So, I had to find and read some other reviews and, of course, the real story of Sarah Baartman, in order to understand it better. I also watched a French movie about her life called “Venus Noire” or “Black Venus” in English, which was directed by Abdellatif Kechiche and released in 2010, and I compared it to the play. Actually, I realized that neither the movie nor Parks᾽ play is absolutely faithful to the re-telling of Sarah Baartman᾽s life according to what I found out at Wikipedia, though the movie is closer to the truth. Amy Alexander from The Washington Post stated that Parks᾽ “version of Baartman᾽s life intermingled fact with fiction, igniting dual controversies over Parks’ decision to blur the lines between truth and imagination and to portray the African girl as having been eagerly complicit in her exploitation.” She mentioned this work in comparison with another pseudo-biographical book about Sarah called “African Queen: The Real Life of the Hottentot Venus” by Rachel Holmes published eleven years after Venus. I used word pseudo-biography just because nowadays it is almost impossible to find out and capture the very truth as there are no living contemporaries of this significant black woman, who could have known her in person. And although those books may be based on some historical research, they are still more-less only the author’s suppositions about what happened, and no one can confirm them at all. In addition to this I must state that it was difficult even in the time when Sarah did live as a result of her “otherness.” During her life in Europe she was considered to be a stranger, people weren’t very friendly to her, neither were those closest to her, so no one cared much about her feelings and perception of her destiny. Also, during her lifetime, people only knew about her via word of mouth from people who had seen her shows or from her owners, who had a business interest in telling the public what they wanted to hear. Obviously now, over two centuries later, her story is even more difficult to piece together.
But back to the play Venus. As to the structure of it, there were several parts in which one could easily get lost. Alexis Soloski, journalist of The Yale Herald, also noticed this difficulty and immediately after the release of the play, commented on it: “These constant reminders of the plays theatricality and artificiality require great intellectual exercise on the part of the viewer. He or she must consider and analyze the action, rather than just absorb it.” He referred to many disturbing and confusing features, which I will mention and discuss in more detail.
First of all, the strangest thing about the whole book’s structure is the organization of the 31 scenes, which are not ordered increasingly from 1 to 31 as usually, but vice versa from 31 to 1. In the very first scene – Overture – the story starts immediately after the death of The Hottentot Venus when the Negro Resurrectionist announces this news to the crowd waiting for Venus’s performance. Then from scene 31 it continues as a retrospective and tells us relatively chronologically the story of Venus from the moment when she was asked to leave her homeland through her performing at freak shows and her relationship with a French doctor. But in the last scene number 1 the story brings us back to the starting situation after her death. So, the story begins and ends at the same point. The decreasing numbers of the scenes seems to me like counting down the time that remains of her life. It’s very similar to counting down the last seconds before the New Year starts or when a spaceship gets off. Even the Resurrectionist who introduces all the scenes counts their numbers down as if he doesn’t remember which one was already played. For example, in scene 15, page 104. This gives the play a very dramatic feeling of counting down the last seconds of Sarah’s life and makes it all the more sorrowful. In my personal opinion, the author intended this, to display the unavoidable and unchangeable destiny of Sarah which was surely going to lead to some bad end from the very first moment when she agreed to leave Africa.
To stay at the Overture, another thing that was very confusing for me was the division of characters. I am still not sure how many actors the writer counted on when she was writing this play. At the very beginning she made a list of the characters and almost all of them have double or even triple roles in the story. So, there are 4 performers but 9 roles plus the chorus which changes its role several times even within one scene. There is only one character with whom I understand the change of roles. It is “Miss Saartje Baartman” also referred to as “The Girl” and “The Venus Hottentot”. Her role changes are reasonable because in different stages of her life she had different statuses and so different roles. But it’s absolutely clear that it is still the same person. There are two others. First, there is “The Man” who later becomes “The Baron Docteur” and also “The Man’s Brother” who becomes “The Mother-Showman” and also “The Grade-School Chum” that I don’t understand. For example, at the second one I know that all three roles are played by the same actor, but I don’t entirely understand why. It could be that the same character has a different status just like Venus or it could be that every role represents a different person and the only reason why they are performed by one actor is that they have some common characteristics. Firstly, I thought it was the first possibility, but after I saw the movie Black Venus, I changed my mind for the second possibility. However, a small worm came to my mind and I thought out that it might have a more practical reason: Miss Parks worked on the play in cooperation with its later director Richard Foreman and who knows, maybe a lack of actors led to these triple roles. I soon rejected this foolish idea because they are both quite well-known in their branch of business, so this could never happen. Therefore, I attached myself to the idea of different people conjoined in one character by the same characteristics and behaviour.
Consequently, the multiplicity of roles within one actor was sometimes rather confusing. Mainly in the Overture, when all the characters were coming to the stage and introducing themselves. And not only to the audience, but they were also introducing themselves to each other, so everyone said not only his own name but, later, even names of all the other characters. It was just a big mess for me and I got lost in it. After the first time I read it I had absolutely no idea what they were doing and which one was who. I was so disgusted by this that I didn’t feel like reading it again and examining it more carefully to find out. Truly, I still can’t imagine how these changes of roles would work out in the theatre, although I saw a short excerpt from the play on the Internet. But that was just 5 minutes from the Overture where there had been no change of roles yet.
But during the play some of the actors do change their character. For example, let’s have a look at the above-mentioned performer of The Brother at the beginning, who becomes The Mother-Showman in the fifth scene, and finally turns into The Grade-School Chum in scene 12. One could easily get misled that it is still the same character, if the actor did not wear a completely different costume for each role. But as I investigated the play more closely and set my attention to this problem, I realized that there is enough time to change the costumes between performances of different roles of the same character. Hence, I came to the conclusion that during the performance at the theatre the spectators won’t be confused and they may nicely distinguish that the actor has three different roles. The only problem I noticed was the Chorus, who sometimes suddenly changes its roles within the same scene. For example, in the Overture it has one utterance as The Chorus of Eight Human Wonders, but the very next utterance it says as The Chorus of Eight Anatomists (Parks, 1995, p. 15). Also, in scene 27 they turn from Human Wonders into Spectators, however this time the author clearly states this change in the text: “The Girl stands in the semi-darkness. Lights blaze on her. She is now The Venus Hottentot. The Wonders become The Chorus of Spectators and gather round.” (Parks, 1995, p. 45) This may constitute quite a big problem for the audience to understand the sudden change, for there is no time in between to change the costumes of the Chorus and there is no straight caution about it. Moreover, it represents a great deal for the eight actors. They need to make a notable difference in their performance of the different roles of the chorus by their behaviour and way of speaking so that the audience can realize and distinguish the changed roles. While I haven’t seen the theatre performance of the play, I can’t guess how Miss Parks or the director expected the actors to cope with this problem. And this fact uncovers a new dimension of Venus. As I mentioned earlier, Miss Parks decided on a rather new and atypical way of writing the play so it is a great challenge to perform it on a theatre stage. I’m sure that all actors, whether they are new to the business or old skilled professionals all they can and really do is learn from this play.
Although Venus is a drama script it lacks some more specification and commentaries on the action and movement of characters. On one hand, this gives more freedom to directors and actors who try to make it come to life on the stage, which is a great advantage. I saw on the Internet two different realisations of Venus’s Overture. Neither of them was the original play from Richard Foreman, who was the first to perform it. They were performed by less known local theatre groups and also because of this they were a little contracted. In their performances the actors dismissed a couple of lines, a page or almost two, which they considered not to be so important. The first performance was directed by Jaclyn Biskup in 2007 and took place on a real theatre stage. In this version, it all started under something similar to a circus tent, Venus was on the top of it. The introduction of the characters was done under it, actors were lighted from inside of it and only their shadows were visible on the wall of the tent. Then they came out of it and introduced the Venus who afterwards came down and uncovered the front half of the tent. The others put her into a wire shape of big bottom and breasts. The Chorus was labelled with charts hanging down from their necks on which the word “Chorus” was written. Venus was there displayed more emotionally as a self-confident person who moved on the stage according to her free will. Of course, not literally as in a theatre play all the movements of actors are carefully planned, but it made such an impression that Venus can do whatever she wants as a free human being. The second performance was made by members of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts during “The Summer Educational Theatre Project” and was produced by Dance Theatre Etcetera. It was released on 26th August 2011 at Dance Theatre. Nevertheless, the place where it was performed looks to be under improvised conditions. I can’t exactly explain why, but this performance I liked more. I think this one is much closer to the original script than the previous one. During the whole scene Venus stands at the back of the stage hidden behind a white curtain that prevents the audience from seeing her identity.
I mentioned these two performances to show the difference in realisation of the play which can develop as a result of the omission of strict action characterization. But if someone chooses to read Venus as a book instead of going to the theatre performance, he may miss some closer description of what is happening on the stage. Actually, there are several places in the play where it really requires it, or at least I missed it there when I was reading it for the first time. From my experience, it was not so easy to imagine what was going on for I had never seen it before. In comparison with drama works which I had to read at secondary school, for example “Kým kohút nezaspieva” or translated to English “Until the Cock Sings” from Slovak writer Ivan Bukovčan, the Venus was harder to read and make a picture of the happenings in my head. But maybe it is only a question of the writing style preferred in certain countries. Bukovčan used many more descriptions of surroundings, movement and activities of the characters, and even their feelings, so reading it was very close to reading a prose. However, Parks᾽ Venus is closer to traditional plays like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the amount of such description is similar. He also briefly defined who is on the stage at the beginning of each scene and used characteristics of movement only in cases where it was necessary. Parks uses a similar style and leaves more space for readers’ imagination.
Another disturbing thing about reading or watching the play is the interruptions of the main plot by insertions of scenes that belong to a melodrama called “For the Love of the Venus,” which was very popular among middle classes in Europe in the early 19th century. And there was another one scene that seemed to have nothing in common with the main plot. It was scene 3, “The Brief History of Chocolate,” which was actually established only on the idea that Venus loved chocolate.
But, for now I want to focus on the formerly mentioned melodrama “For the Love of the Venus”. The only connection between this story and the main plot of Venus is made by the person of Baron Docteur. It is like he’s gone to a theatre to see this melodrama. He “is the only person in the audience. Perhaps he sits in a chair. It’s almost as if he’s watching TV.” (Parks, 1995, p. 34) This cut-off shows us that his attention and interest in what he sees grows still more. For me it seems that he somehow relates it to his own life and his relation to The Hottentot Venus whom he’s charmed by. At the end of the melodrama he, being inspired by it, decides to take Venus to live with him. However, as the story relieves later, his decision was very selfish, because he didn’t intend to save her from the slavery at all, but to keep her close for his scientific research. He did not really love her, although he said it to her several times. If he had loved her, he wouldn’t be able to dissect her after her death. He lied to her about his emotions because he wanted her to believe him and allow him to examine her body more closely. Actually, no sources mention whether Venus had some romantic relationship with any of the doctors who studied her during her life, even though the movie Venus Noire indicates something such, but only very little. What we know for sure is that she never allowed any scientist to examine her genitals. That was done after her death.
At this point we come to the next difficulty and that’s the scientific description of Venus’s body in which Miss Parks uses a lot of special medical terms. This is caused mostly because they are real extracts from reports by the doctor who did Venus’s autopsy. These are stated in Footnotes (Parks, 1995, p. 37, 113, 125) which are other features interrupting the plot or, at a greater rate at Intermission or at page 151. Though the author explains all the foreign terms at the end of the book, I guess that only seldom would people look up each word they don’t know, for there are plenty of them, as you can see on the following extract. “The Spienius colli was inserted by a double tendon into the Transverse Process of the 2 upper cervical vertebrae, the lower tendon being somewhat larger. The Cervicalis Ascendens was distinctly separate from the Scrolumbalis.” (Parks, 1995, p. 100) Within these two sentences we can find 4 Latin medical terms and several tens within the same page. This may upset some readers when they don’t understand these highly scientific passages and lead them to an impression that they are not clever enough to read it. However, every coin has two sides, and here we can assure ourselves that the book isn’t totally made up by the author, but stands on real historical basis. This is supported even by some newspaper articles or other historical documents read in the play mostly by The Negro Resurrectionist. Just to mention a few, for example in scene 27 he cited a part from The Book of Days, a publication written by Robert Chambers. It is this one: “Early in the present century a poor wretched woman was exhibited in England under the appellation of The Hottentot Venus. The year was 1810. With an intensely ugly figure, distorted all European notions of beauty, she was said by those to whom she belonged to possess precisely the kind of shape which is most admired among her countrymen, the Hottentots…” (Parks, 1995, p. 46) Or next in scene 24 there is a newspaper advertisement from Daniel Lysons᾽ collection about the time of Venus’s performances (Parks, 1995, p. 53).
Even the choice of language makes the author of this work more trustworthy. Miss Parks made the characters speak a kind of older English combined with the slang that was typical for the lower classes which Venus and her admirers belonged too. The author uses in their speech old variants of pronouns, like ye, yer, thee, thy, thuh. Then also many shortened and assimilated forms of words. So, it resembles an ordinary fluent speech. A good example of this atypical dialect can be: “She thuh main attraction she iz… Whats thuh show without thuh star?” (Parks, 1995, p. 13) or “…who’s all undressed awaiting you to take yr peek. So, you’ve heard.” (Parks, 1995, p. 14) The author also uses a rather unusual word order in some sentences so sometimes it is difficult to understand the text at all. It’s also hard because English doesn’t use commas as much as the Slovak language does. As a result of this seldom punctuation it is in some moments quite troublesome to guess what words belong to one syntactical unit and what is the right meaning of the whole sentence. This problem may occur for example at Venus’s speech at the very end: “Completely unknowing thuh Godfearin ways, she stood / Showing her ass off in her cage. When Death met Love Death deathbed Love and left Love tuh rot / Au naturel end for Thuh Miss Hottentot. Loves soul, which was tidy, hides in heaven, yes…” (Parks, 1995, p. 162) This way of speaking is a pretty good portrayal of the environment in which the play takes place. It reflects the society of the mostly poorly educated people who paid more attention to their everyday problems and tended to talk speak their minds before they thought about what to say… they didn’t care about grammatical or syntactical correctness of their speech. Comparatively, the Baron Docteur as a scientist had the best education and was considered a powerful personality at that time so he spoke in a higher manner.
The last feature I want to discuss, which some readers may consider to be a bit disturbing about the text’s structure is the repetition of some significant sentences or even longer parts, apparently from the fact that the very first and last scenes are almost identical. But even within the first scene, The Overture, there are several lines repeating, and here I feel a strong need to remark on them all for I consider it to be very significant for the story. They are these: “I regret to inform you that the Venus Hottentot iz dead. There won’t b inny show tonite.”, “Outrage! It’s an outrage!”, “23 days in a row it rained.”, “We know youre disuhpointed. We hate tuh let you down.” With a slight change there was also “Turn away. Don’t look. Cover her face. Cover yer eyes.” Later in scenes “For the Love of the Venus” we find repeating sentence: “You wrote me once such lovely poetry.” And next a few longer parts, such as when the Chorus of Spectators stated the Legend about a Girl which was sent away from home without any specific reason (Parks, 1995, p. 67, 70) or when The Chorus of Eight Human Wonders claimed how difficult and impossible it is to escape from the freak shows (Parks, 1995, p. 51, 89). Lastly there are more the measurements of Venus’s body after her death: “The height, measured after death, was 4 feet 11 and ½ inches. The total weight of the body was 98-pound avoirdupois.” (Parks, 1995, p. 95, 98) Repetition of these lines gives the story a strong feeling of fatality, because they are very sad exclamations and to mention them more times only amplifies their seriousness. Actually, for someone they may affect almost scarily and frighteningly and they may have a deep impact on the reader’s or theatre-goer’s emotions. From this they can realize that there is nothing good awaiting Venus.
This is a rather abbreviated analysis but if anyone has a chance to read Suzan Lori-Parks᾽ work Venus, he or she might have experienced it on their own. This book is not so easy to read and understand without knowing some background and historical and social references. Despite all the difficulties, I wouldn’t say I disliked reading it. However, I did not love it either. Venus is a very sad story about a black woman who was treated like a soulless animal just because she had different body proportions than usual Europeans did and it’s a pretty good display of how undeveloped and footling the society really was. And that is very disgraceful. We should be ashamed of how badly people behaved towards Venus. Well, I pitied her for her unenviable destiny. There would be much to discuss about this and the relationship between Venus and the society, but that would require many more pages to write on. So, in conclusion I’ll just say that this is a good book especially when you want to think about the mischief in the world and how it came out of real historical events from Sarah Baartman’s life, the real Venus Hottentot. For me it was a very interesting and thoughtful read and I would recommend everyone interested at least to watch the movie “Venus Noire” if they don’t feel up to reading the book or seeing the theatre performance.
Sources:
- Wikipedia – information about the author Suzan Lori-Parks and the co-called “Venus
Hottentot” Saartjie Baartman - YouTube – video excerpts from performances of play Venus and interviews with the author
- “The “Hottentot Venus”: A Stunning Figure of Her Time by Amy Alexander” from the
Washington Post’s webpage - “My Take: Suzan-Lori Parks᾽ Venus” from www.aneconomyofwords.blogspot.com
- “The re-objectification and re-commodification of Saartjie Baartman in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus” by Jean Young from www.findarticles.com
- “Rep᾽s bottom-heavy ‘Venus’ doesn’t reach desired end” by Alexis Soloski from The Yale
Herald’s webpage archive - “Venus Noire” the movie by Abdellatif Kechiche, released in 2010