He complainsAnd this:
at my scent and does not think
I comprehend, but I speak
English. I speak Dutch. I speak
a little French as well, and
languages Monsieur Cuvier
will never know have names
If he were to let me rise upI don't know how, but in my early readings of this piece, I missed perhaps the most important emotion--a kind of slow-burning rage. There are many ways to read those two quotes. But I'm black and Ta-Nehisi and what I see is the irony of science, how disciplines founded to better understand the world so often obscure the world.
from this table, I'd spirit
his knives and cut out his black heart,
seal it with science fluid inside
a bell jar, place it on a low
shelf in a white man's museum
so the whole world could see
it was shriveled and hard,
geometric, deformed, unnatural
I've talked about this a lot here, about how, to social science, black seems to mean the bottom of the statistical barrell. Well yeah it does, but science can't tell us what else it means (how it feels for instance) and when employed without humility, it blinds us. So Cuvier doesn't know that this woman can speak all kinds of other languages, and not just other languages but languages that he's never heard of. And in that, there are many layers, because language is a short-hand for ways of seeing the world. The speaker in the poem has seen the world from many perspectives. As is often the case with people on the bottom, she knows more of his world than he knows of hers.
And then the violent end, the sense that she isn't the freak, but that this dude who is obsessed with this woman's genitals, these well dressed "civilized" people who oggle at her ass, are really the ones who belong on display. That their "geometric, deformed, unnatural" hearts are really what's truly freakish. But because they are priviliged, their own human foibles, their own insanities can be hidden, while hers are paraded out for show.
Deep. Anyway, what does the room think?
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Being me, I looked up the Hottentot Venus, as I've heard the reference and couldn't place it.
I'm going to quietly sit her being horrified for a bit, and come back to the poem later.
"I've talked about this a lot here, about how, to social science, black seems to mean the bottom of the statistical barrell. Well yeah it does, but science can't tell us what else it means (how it feels for instance) and when employed without humility, it blinds us."
Blake wrote that the best science of his day told him what the world WAS, but not what it was WORTH, only Vision could do that. I think that rhymes with your thought here. The "rage" you name gives her the focus that gives her the clarity to see those looking at her better than they can see her or themselves. The ability to focus on on these things and in its own way is why poetry, despite its comings & goings, is a tool we should never let get dull, much less shelved.
I'm sure when Nelson Mandela got her remains returned Home, the stars over the Cape shined a little brighter. These things do matter.
I read the poem for the first time today - and I felt the rage immediately. However Sara felt, Elizabeth was enraged.
Cuvier has a brilliant but somewhat checkered history (if I correctly remember what I have read). I think your comment that it is Cuvier who is on display at the end of this poem is exactly right.
Cuvier apparently was quite aware that Sara spoke several languages.
The "geometric, deformed, unnatural" is a specific reference to the display of molds taken, after her death, of Sara's labia. Cuvier and others of that time took her very differently formed labia and concluded that she was "less than". I don't think Elizabeth took that too well. Nor do I.
Thank you for the story (Sara's story) and the poem. Both were worth experiencing.
In terms of structure, it seems that Cuvier's motivations are far simpler than Saartjie's. He gets two lines to every eight of hers.
She gave up so much to get so little in return.
Not saying I have nearly the pained perspective this woman did, in terms of the race factor and extreme humiliation, but having had multiple health problems and surgeries as a kid, I was at least able to grasp that "science can't tell us what else it means (how it feels for instance)" aspect right away. I guess it's natural to see oneself in a poem, though I still feel kind of like, "Ugh, why am I making this about me?" But here's why I connected to it - I had countless experiences of lying half-naked in a hospital bed, drugged up yet aware, while a room full of doctors came in to discuss my conditions for learning purposes. It really is amazing to have a room full of human beings look at you, seeing only a body and none of your humanity. They can address all of your limbs and ailments while acknowledging the pain not at all. Which makes this the most important part of the entire poem to me:
Since my own genitals are public
I have made other parts private.
When I read this earlier this morning (thanks for posting it and giving me a little poetry break!), I was struck by that second passage you quote as well. In part because it is a perfect example of the difference between a good poem and a great poem: nailing the finish. And Alexander gets it exactly right as she turns the tables while she turns up the heat. It really is amazing.
This is Elizabeth speaking in Sara's voice. The words are not Sara's words. This is a long distance anger, and Cuvier is not just Cuvier, nor is Sara simply herself.
We are all interesting people. That is also something Elizabeth said in another poem.
It is about the hatred of over-endowment. Black people (or the African diaspora) have always been hated for our over-endowment - physically, mentally, historically, and intellectually.
Physically - we are beautiful people who do not age like others, are not physically-built like others, and have features like no other. Mentally - we are stronger than others. Historically - no one came before us, we were great before any other, and we have been imitated & denied more than any other. Lastly and most importantly - intellectually - we are the most creative, strongest survivalist, most clever, and most ingenious of all others.
Since we are not the winners of history, our over-endowment has caused hyper-suffering of our people. Science (also like industry & the colonial governments)have always seen blacks as indestructible, but replacable items - Blacks can endure anything, but in case they can't, they can be replaced (see current global slave labor, all low wage immigrant workers in the US).
I read about this particular woman years ago, and I see history repeating itself now with the hip-hop revolution of the black women being an object (of hatred, jealousy, and curiousity). This is the reason why black women are so maligned around the world. We are seen as objects, not people, by EVERYONE & sometimes by our own self (and I hate to put black men in that category). We are not seen as human - we are emotionally ungiving, un-intellectual, and un-favorable lovers/partners - all the things that make one human. And who established this?
Now that Michelle Obama is going to be the face of the American woman, unlike Obama's post-racial boast, she is NOT post-racial, and it is time for us to give black women their voice long lost - since before the time of Sarah Baartman (AKA Venus Hottentot).
my .02: this is perhaps the most powerful part of the poem, where the speaker stands on her own experience and calls out what she sees in her own words:
"seal it with science fluid"
> she knows there are unseen forces
> she knows there are words beyond her own (many) languages
> she knows she has the truth, and is proud to say it in the words she has; by renaming the thing (science fluid) that is the fate of parts of her own body, she claims it
"Black people (or the African diaspora) have always been hated for our over-endowment - physically, mentally, historically, and intellectually."
I don't know. I think people just wanted cheap labor.
I hope Alexander gives a line or two about Cheney for the Inauguration. That "deformed" part might work.
Ta-Nehisi,
Only when you think currently - I am talking about the full scale of recorded history.
"We're the best race in every way and also the most oppressed." sigh.
I had never heard of Alexander and then read her poetry online this week and was just kinda like "Ho-hum." I've heard or read too many bad amateur poems of people imagining they were some sort of historical/fictional figure, which made me down on it from the get go. But then when you said you liked it, Ta-Nehisi, it made me look at it again and see it differently, in a better way. Thank you for that.
poetry takes more patience than I usually have... that fact itself makes it sort of rewarding, though. i haven't really been into it since i was a kid in HS and felt affected by "the cliffs of dover" and "dulce et decorum est". the latter is fairly hokey, but i was like 15 and it seemed pretty punk rock. i really wish i had gotten into hip hop earlier, but the hip hop kids at my school happened to be total assholes in wide contrast to the punkers. i havent really been affected by anything since then except Rumi and, to a lesser extent, Rabindranath Tagore. Your weekly focus on poetry is a side benefit of your blog, Coates, and I appreciate getting a little bit back into poetry.
As another aside - does anyone remember a poem with the refrain 'just the skin you livin in' by an older black poet, perhaps Amiri Baraka? I asked this on an earlier thread, i'll go back and search if it was answered there.
Thanks for sharing. I'm now looking forward to the inauguration even more than I already was. Too bad she won't read this piece.
I do very much like the lines "Since my own genitals are public/I have made other parts private."
Is that in some way a reflection of the experience of being Black in the US generally? The development of private culture, when "stolen" by whites, which is then created anew?
ha... i went back to that comment i made two weeks ago, and it was almost identical to my above comment (about my lack of patience and poetry being rewarding regardless)... i knew i repeat myself but damn..
anyway i found it! (Scroll to bottom.)
"“Blink Your Eyes” by Sekou Sundiata as published in The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets by Bill Moyers. Doubleday. 1995"
it was much more effective spoken, in my opinion. that really made it stick in my mind and brought its emotional power across. I don't think it is in the same league as what has gotten posted here, however.
Y'know, I'm gonna confess something here:
I'm not a big poetry reader.
Maybe it's 'cause I went to school for this kinda thing (literary analysis), and thus a lot of written expression -- even poetry -- has been turned into something only to analyze through some psuedo-scientific lens, to be taken apart as coolly and methodically as possible. And, it might not be fair, but something in the poem just pulled out something in my brain that I never realized before: it's white, painfully entrenched in that sort of European-American cultural heritage, something that -- all's said and done -- takes the very life out of whatever living, breathing text is there, ignoring its humanity in favor of some "literary empiricism."
Y'know, that so-called "Enlightenment" style of thinking that gave rise to, among other things, the "Venus Hottentot" in the first place.
I guess, beyond all that's already been said -- far more eloquently than I could -- about the poem and its meanings, it just "clicked" as a metaphor for lyrical expression itself.
Damn. I probably sound like a Curvier right now...
I like a lot of this poem, but the last word, 'unnatural', seems wrong to me. 'Hard' is good, 'geometric' is awesome. But 'unnatural' (unwittingly?) evokes a corrupt civilization vs natural savagery cliche that's way out of place here, I think.
Unnatural is what they called her body, her genitals. Hence the turnabout. It isn't a crude evocation of Rousseau; after all, Sarah can reasonably claim to be just as (or more!) involved in Western culture as Cuvier.
Well, speaking as a writer myself (though not a poet; poetry is the most difficult writing there is, if you do it right. Novels are easier.) I say this:
Folks, you don't have to actually READ poetry -- just buy the books!
Elizabeth Alexander, A. Van Jordan, Major Jackson, Afaa Michael Weaver -- there are some amazing black poets writing today. They need the support.
Alexander's critical essays are also pretty good.
R. Whitford,
analyzing the life out of humanity is a white thing? certainly i see what you're saying about that cultural tendency to over-intellectualize and compartmentalize, and share your distaste with it, but that characterization is a bit harsh and frankly, cliche, isn't it? no color, no ethnicity (only we're "ethnic"), blandness personified.. come on. i'm not white but i still find it offensive, excessive, and unhelpful. the point about killing expression by looking too coldly and analytically at something so full of life and humanity as poetry is well taken otherwise, however. -sv
When I read it, at first, I hear nina singing, crying for Porgie to keep her safe. But no, it was Bess's imagined cousin, out tempting for enterprise, advantage, power, and finding humiliation and shame, harboring desire for revenge.
In the end, ourselves is all we've ever really had to sell, ehh? And the accounting pains when the market thrives selling the loss of dignity and respect.
That is our markets today; the people making profit on the volatility, gambling on other people's losses and failures.
Thank you for sharing.
TNC, have you ever read a book called "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation"? It was published for teens, but we keep getting into arguments over whether it's too heavy for teens to understand. (It's written in a quite good approximation of 18th century style.)
The main character is a slave who's being raised by scientists in order to "prove" whether blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, or a separate species, or what -- and this is in Boston just before the American revolution. But what's most remarkable about the book to me is how it engages the way in which supposedly objective science can be manipulated to confirm one's biases, and also, the slow-burning rage that you describe in the poem -- the poem reminds me a LOT of Octavian Nothing.
Anyway, I highly recommend the book if you haven't read it.
There's a way in which I think Sara Baartman's history is a history of how Europeans exoticized themselves, tried to imagine themselves as a new kind of human: e.g., at the same moment that they were thinking through the expansive, universalizing terms of the Enlightenment, they were also thinking through equally expansive ways to outrage against those ideas. This isn't a new insight, for sure, but this particular sad, frustrating, ugly story is a good opportunity to think about it.
But when I'm trying to think about how she thought about it, that's a different kind of puzzle. I often think of Krotoa, also known as Eva, alongside of Sara Baartman--she contains so many troubling contradictions, it's so hard to guess at her own thinking or experience. We like to think of Sara Baartman as having a clear, contemporary understanding of her own situation, but it seems possible to me that she thought about her situation in ways that we would have a hard time deciphering or appreciating now.
I first heard about Baartman's sad story in a great essay by Stephen Jay Gould--I think it was in The Flamingo's Smile. There and elsewhere, Gould was pretty good at picking out the common thread connecting Cuvier and other anthropologists of his time with people like Rushton in the 20th century--this exoticizing racism with a component of sexual voyeurism promulgated under the mantle of science.
I was trained as a physicist and it automatically raises my hackles when people voice "we murder to dissect" objections to science in general--I don't think that a proper scientific understanding of the world necessarily cripples wonder or human empathy, as it is often accused of doing. But I'll be damned if I'm going to rush to the defense of science! over the way Cuvier and his contemporaries treated Sara Baartman.
This poem moved me when I first read it, but when I looked up some of the facts under it, a lot of them aren't true. Cuvier didn't do anthropometrics, as far as I know. He knew that Saartije could speak European languages well. She controlled the display of her genitals (during her lifetime, at least), and while she lived they were never public.
These may sound like nitpicks, but they break the poem for me. When the author changes history around to make her point as forcefully as she can, she reduces the characters, Cuvier and Saatije both, to pawns instead of people. The author prefers to make stuff up than to deal with the more complicated incidents in Saatije's life, like when she is interrogated by a court in dutch, and testifies (falsely, presumably under coercion) that she is being treated well and paid.
I'm really excited that Alexander is going to be the inaugural poet. She contributes poems to two of DJ/Rupture's tracks on this fine CD http://www.tigerbeat6.com/index.php?id=3_82 which is how I first heard of her. Worth checking out.