The Hottentot Venus Hails Botticelli’s on the High Seas

Venus, I am the other
one cast in the wake
of your wash, calling
to you in my own voice

the milky opalescence
of your thighs is alibi
to the dammed creeks
in our deluge of stories

your floating existence
a cold blade of mirror
a shelf-worn canto of myth
a wearying wall of black

women’s unsaid names
your face is our stopped
time as if you’re the only
woman in this coarse world

as if we are not all crafted
from the same mud as you
as if it’s possible that we can
all look the same at night

foam born one this name
is an exhaustion to wear
without a scallop shell, our
stripped torsos painted

with the theatres of thorns
blown by your small white gods
O Pudica, bloodless eater
of hearts, who will leach

the salt from tears, from
sweat, from all our seas, and
our endlessly gazed upon
vulvas and palpated vaginas

for you ghost ocean swells laugh
while I am pressed into the again
of hiss and roar in salt spray, into
the barrel straits between tides

The narrator of this week’s poem is the after-death incarnation of a young South African woman, Sarah Baartman (1789-1815) who was trafficked to Europe for public exhibition and entertainment as the Hottentot Venus. “Hottentot” is thought to be a Dutch imitation of the word Khoekhoe, which designates Baartman’s particular ethnicity and language. It’s considered now to be an offensive word.

For the the multimedia poet and dramatist Dzifa Benson, Baartman and her story are central among the minds, bodies and cultures she examines in her first collection, Monster. The impressive title sequence demonstrates how biography can be transformed into poetry without sacrifice either of poetry or realism.

A few basic details about Baartman are useful here. Dead at 26, she was an embodiment, in her short adult life, of what Dzifa Benson describes in an illuminating personal commentary https://www.dzifabenson.com/sarah-baartman as the continuing “objectification, appropriation, caricaturisation and fetishistic fascination with black women’s bodies.” She was dispatched to London and, Benson goes on to explain, “as well as being displayed in museums, one-off shows and salons, Sarah Bartmann was displayed at the famous Bartholomew Fair … along with other ‘freaks of nature’.” Later, she was sent to Paris, where she provided entertainment for the patrons of various restaurants, and may have been forced into prostitution. When the founder of comparative anatomy, Georges Cuvier, performed an autopsy after her death the following year, it was in an attempt to discover if her body was the connection between animals and humans. The expression of her full humanity is the achievement of Benson’s powerful re-visioning.

She employs a variety of poetic forms, ranging from the traditional to the innovative. Redaction (words and segments of a given script partly blacked-out) and the use of white font on black background provide deeply thought-through, more than visual illumination of whiteness through blackness; a series of “Freak Sonnets” allows other exhibited women besides Baartman to perform their thoughts about shame, shaming, and the “burden of blood and bone”.

Though far from being the only speaker, the protagonist remains the one we listen to most attentively for her exceptional directness and insight. In the current poem, un-resting despite the final repatriation of her remains, the African Venus speaks through a formal-looking pattern of nine quatrains, a mould or self-made “shell” from which to “hail” her Roman namesake, the “foam born” goddess of love, as depicted by Sandro Boticelli.

In Khoekhoe ritual, Benson explains, water could represent either a danger to be avoided at times of transition and vulnerability, or offer “protective properties linked to the phases of the moon and the blood-flow of women”. The African Venus, unlike the European, is threatened by the sea she endlessly travels, “pressed into the again / of hiss and roar in salt spray”. Enslavement and the horrors of the “Middle Passage” are still present in her bitterly relentless onward journey.

The poem is essentially a lament, although one that makes a powerful argument when its swelling energies are unloosed. Venus the goddess, whose thighs are so different from Baartman’s in their slenderness and “milky opalescence”, becomes the opposing force, the silencing of black women’s names and stories by a limiting, but continually empowered “image” of womanhood. The collection’s leitmotif, equality, is repeated, and made sorrowfully memorable in short, staccato but somehow song-like lines: “your face is our stopped / time as if you’re the only / woman in this coarse world // as if we were not all crafted / from the same mud as you / as if it’s possible that we can / all look the same at night”. Although chaste (“O Pudica”), the goddess is morally imperfect, a “bloodless eater of hearts”. She hurts men, but destroys the speaker and her kin, eroticised, sexually abused and “scientifically” investigated, with “our endlessly gazed upon / vulvas and palpated vaginas”.

Benson’s sparse punctuation brings words together like waves meeting from different directions. The line “for you ghost ocean swells laugh” is one particularly to pause on: should it be read as, “for you, Ghost, ocean swells laugh” or are “ghost ocean swells” the laughing subject? There’s also the double meaning of “swells” and the suggestion that the speaker is referring not only to the waves, but to the fashionable young men who abused her. If the sea that Baartman’s spirit travels is still a sea of tears and preying monsters, Benson, in the cultural and linguistic depth she brings to her work, offers the hope that there are wider horizons in human understanding.

• Monster is reviewed in the recent Guardian poetry roundup here.