My New (Old) Friend, "VENUS" by Suzan Lori-Parks

 

Me with my friend Venus, a brilliant, Obie-award-winning play by Suzan Lori-Parks.  I first read the play in college and it felt like new reading it again. My edition also looks like new, safely packed away in a box for years now.

Hi. I'm Bobby Keniston, and my only friends are books. Don't worry about it. I've made it this far. 

I've made it far enough to reconnect with an old friend and have it feel like making a new friend all over again. This friend is Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks, the first play I have covered on talked about on this particular blog, but by no means will be the last. Some of my favorite books are plays, after all, and I couldn't be happier that I am discussing a play by Suzan-Lori Parks, who is one of my favorite living playwrights. Back in the early 2010s, I would tell people that if I were on the Board in Sweden, my two top picks for a Nobel Prize in Literature would be Kazuo Ishiguro and Suzan-Lori Parks. In 2017, Mr. Ishiguro did indeed win. Now I am waiting for Parks to get that recognition. For one thing, the Nobel doesn't honor enough playwrights in my opinion. For another, she simply deserves it. 

Not that she is short on prizes. She has won many, many over the years, including an Obie for Venus, as well as a Pulitzer Prize for her incredible Topdog/Underdog, and her most recent play, 2019's White Noise won an Outer Critics Circle Award. Along the way, she also received a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. 

Because she is a genius. 

With an incredible work ethic. She undertook the challenge of writing 365 plays in 365 days. And she did it. The result, 365 Plays/365 Days has been produced in theaters all over the world. 

ABOUT MY NEW (OLD) FRIEND, VENUS

Venus tells the real-life story of Khoekhoe woman Saartjie Baartman, also known as Sarah Baartman, and who would come to be known as the "Hottentot Venus". Baartman, when she is "The Girl", is living her life in South Africa in the early 1800s when she is asked by a bearded opportunist if she would like to go to London where "the streets are paved with gold" to be a dancer. He assures her in two years, she could make a fortune and come back home wealthy. She agrees to go on these terms, that everything will be split 50/50. Once in London, he pushes her into a sexual relationship before selling her to "The Mother-Showman" and her freak show, and then disappearing. 

This is not easy subject matter. Baartman is put on display because of her backside, and spends years being objectified, pawed at, touched, sexual assault (alluded to in a few lines). This plays is about not only colonization, but about the objectification, racialization, and fetishizing and historical sexualization of back women. It is uncomfortable. Just the cover of my edition is uncomfortable in its dehumanizing, racist imagery. 

And being uncomfortable is the point. 

Eventually, a character called the Baron Docteur (based on Georges Cuvier--- more on him later), buys Baartman from the Mother-Showman. He takes her to Paris where he begins an affair with her, but also puts her on display as a scientific specimen. In this way, she is still being gawked at and pawed over and ultimately dehumanized. 

The Baron Docteur is married, and receives pressure from "An Old School Chum" to stop the affair, and get to the dissection, which, really, should be the only purpose for his interest in this "Hottentot Venus", right?

There is also a "play-within-the-play" called For the Love of the Venus, performed by the Chorus. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THE PLAY

What I love about the play is its power and its energy. Suzan-Lori Parks, instead of telling a standard, linear tale here, uses terrific theatricality, theatre of the absurd flourishes, lively language, and a Chorus ensemble to heighten the themes and characters. She uses history as a jumping off point, but is truly interested, as she herself said, in the "questioning the history of history". 

I also love that Parks is not afraid to make us feel uncomfortable. She does not shy away from the nastiness of how Baartman is used, how she is objectified and sexualized. She shows the lust head-on and in your face. And at the same time, she makes Baartman such a complete character, making it all the more upsetting to see her as either an object of lust or a scientific specimen. 

Another major idea explored here is the very notion of agency over ones own life and body, which, of course, is all the more relevant even today with our SCOTUS. 

IN REAL LIFE

Georges Cuvier, in real life, was a French zoologist, sometimes called "the founding father of paleontology". Like other "founding fathers", he was also an entitled white man and a racist, who was one of the founders of scientific racism, the psuedo-scientific bullshit that suggests that other races are inferior to whites. He subjected the real-life Sarah Baartman to examinations while she was being held captive and neglected. After her death (she was only 26), he performed an autopsy, and compared her physical features to those of monkeys. 

Suzan-Lori Parks has these "findings" described by the Baron Docteur in her play. It is, obviously, stomach turning. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Venus and the real-life Sarah Baartman deserve dissertations and far more conversation than what I can accomplish here on my stupid little blog. But what I can say is how fortunate I feel we all are to have this play. We need to remember. We need to take stock and accountability of the fact that white people have systemically stripped people of color of their agency and humanity for their own benefit, desires, and discoveries for... well, forever. We should be uncomfortable by this fact. We shouldn't look away. 

Please check out the work of Suzan-Lori Parks. I look forward to reading and re-reading more of her work, including her novel Getting Mother's Body. 

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.