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. 

My New Friend, "KINDRED" by Octavia E. Butler

 

Me and my new friend "Kindred" by Octavia E. Butler. This is the 25th Anniversary Edition

Hi. My name is Bobby Keniston, and my only friends are books. And sometimes books have to tell you hard truths. Sometimes friends have to hold you accountable. Sometimes friends need to make you look at an issue with empathy, shock, and, yes, sometimes even guilt, to help you grow and change. 

I am talking about my new friend, Kindred the late, but certainly great Octavia E. Butler, who helped redefine what science fiction for a new era. Kindred may be her most celebrated standalone novel. Written in 1976, writer Walter Mosely said, "It is everything the literature of science fiction can be," while Harlan Ellison called the book, "That rare artifact... the novel one returns to, again and again, through the years, to learn, to be humbled, and to be renewed." 

I think my new friend is truly great. Let's talk about why. 

HOW I MET MY NEW FRIEND

I have been meaning to read some Octavia E. Butler for quite some time. And then a YouTube channel I enjoy watching called "Books and Things" had a video about a Historical Fiction Readathon for the months of May--- and here we are. One of the challenges in this readathon is to read a piece of historical fiction that has a speculative element, and the host, Katie Lumsden, recommended Kindred. That felt like a nice bit of encouragement to finally discover this brilliant author, and I am very glad I did. 

(If you want to watch the video about the #HistoricalFictionReadathon, you can do so by following THIS LINK)

I was happy that my local library, The Thompson Free Library, had a copy of my new friend Kindred. I am a little sad, though, that it looks like I'm the first person to ever take it out. 

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT MY NEW FRIEND

Kindred tells the story about woman a black woman in the 1970s who, after moving into her new house with her white husband Kevin (I only mention their races because they are imperative plot points and thematic points in the book), inexplicably finds herself getting dizzy, losing, fading away from her new home and arriving in the antebellum south on a plantation in Maryland. Here, she finds her path intersected with Rufus Weylin, the son of the plantation owner, who, we learn early on, is an ancestor. She is clearly coming back to save his life time and again, protecting her very bloodline, though at the expense of becoming an enslaved person and confronting the violence of the time. Each time she is pulled back, the stakes are higher, and she loses not only more months and years of her life, but also is threatened with losing the very foundation of who she has always known herself to be. 

SOME THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MY NEW FRIEND

Kindred is simultaneously a difficult book to read because of its unflinching portrayal of the inhumane treatment that white Americans inflicted upon the people they enslaved, while also being a suspenseful page turner. That is a huge testament to Butler's remarkable skill as a storyteller. 

I also love that Butler doesn't waste time. She comes right out of the gate, hooks you, then continues to keep kicking it up a notch as the pages fly by. For example, her are the first two sentences of the book:

"I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm."

If that doesn't grab a reader, then let's just say it is the fault of said reader and not the writer. 

You will notice based on these first two sentences that the story is told as a first-person narrative, another brilliant stroke by Butler. For this story in particular, a first-person narrative heightens the idea of empathy as we the reader see things through Dana's eyes, and hear her every thought. And Butler gives us a thoroughly complex, but relatable, and oh-so-strong narrator. Dana is brilliant, resourceful, and with compassion that I believe very few people could have in her circumstance. She is put through a great deal in this book, and we are put through it with her. It is impossible not to root for her (unless you are an awful person, but more on that later). 

Butler gives every character (with the exception of maybe one or two very minor ones) a complex humanity. This is what could be truly brilliant about the book, and the very thing that makes it as philosophically complex as it is flat-out entertaining: Butler recognizes that, like it or not, whether we want to admit it or not, dark, grotesque inhumanity is still part of being human. The enslavement of a race of people would not be possible if it wasn't. 

Try to let that sit with you for a moment. As much as we try to separate ourselves from the very idea of inhumanity by calling it inhumanity, it is simply not true, but just another way for humans to avoid accountability. These vicious deeds SHOULD NOT be part of the human experience. But, dammit, they are, and acknowledging it is the first step to maybe trying to actually do something about it. 

I also love Butler's depiction of the relationship between Dana and her husband Kevin. They are both writers, and, while they do have fights, their love is strong. When Kevin is sucked back in time with her (perhaps a mild spoiler, but it happens early on--- sorry), we really get to see how it affects their relationship and what they feel about one another. 

It is also worth noting that, since the novel takes place in the 1970s, Butler's present day is historical now, too. A history story that goes into a deeper history story. Clearly, one of the messages here is that, even for present day Dana, there are still issues (especially her marriage to a white man). One can look at the novel as very prescient in the idea that for ever advancement, we are always being pulled back by the wrong people. 

Sad that it is still true even 46 years after the novel was published. 

RANT

Which leads me to a little rant. 

Kindred, in my opinion, should be taught in every high school in America. The fact that it is one of several books that, even recently, have been banned in my country at certain schools, proves Butler's point completely. 

We make progress but are pulled back. 

This book should be taught because it tells the truth. 

White people enslaved back people in this country. In a very real and horrifying sense, it is part of how this country managed to be built. This needs to be discussed openly and honestly and often. 

I will not lie--- I am sickened by the many arguments against CRT, the arguments that ban books by Toni Morrison and Octavia E. Butler and many others--- sickened and honestly exasperated.  No one is saying that any of us white people today are responsible for enslaving black people in the 1800s. But here is the simple truth:  we white people have benefited and continue to benefit from the white supremacy that help build this country. This is not opinion, It is fact. And white people are the only ones who can really fix the problem of white supremacy, because we are the ones who made it and continue to benefit from it. 

And it starts by taking this accountability of our history AND our present. 

Rant over (for now). 

FINAL TAKEAWAYS

Read Kindred. It is enriching as well as being absolutely exciting and gripping. Fiction can make a difference and it is writers like Octavia E. Butler who can remind us. 

Please feel free to tell me your thoughts about my new friend Kindred in the comments., and join me next time with a while new friend.