Difficult Diasporas. Samantha Pinto

poem begins, untitled, we recognize the voice not as Cuvier’s but as that of the Venus Hottentot of the title. The speaking subject is not passively placed but locates herself within London, as a traveling/traveled body, one who is decidedly doing “work,” like Kay’s Bessie Smith, including the intellectual work that Alexander attributes to her in her interview:

      There is unexpected sun today

      In London, and the clouds that

      Most days fit into this cage

      Where I am working have dispersed.

      I am a black cutout against

      a captive blue sky, pivoting

      nude so the paying audience

      can view my naked buttocks. (1990, 4)

      This first eight-line stanza, too, offers a containment, but of a different sort. If Alexander’s reference to Cuvier was sparse, direct, and limited, then these expansive stanzas offer a blunt but thoughtful version of histories of display. Hottentot as speaking subject is a theorist, critically reading her surroundings and referencing the visible structures in/of her display: “this cage,” “paying audience,” and so on.¹⁰ She is both naming and, as she continues, named, the referent and the one capable of referencing.

      Her ideological reference point, however, is neither science nor shame, the dominant modes of characterizing black women’s sexuality in the discourses of typology and respectability. The awkward articulation of the word “buttocks” at the end of the stanza marks the turn to official terminology within poetic construction, the wish to codify “where I am working” with a certain halting banality in place of the “double entendre” of “vulgarity” (Cooper 1995, 141).¹¹ For Alexander, it is the labor of reference, as the reader stumbles over the sound and the sign of the bottom, “buttocks,” that is emphasized. It is also the resistant timing of the speech, its specificity—“today”—and its posthumous address, that manages to escape the predetermined narrative of epic tragedy.¹² This is the quotidian existence of the cosmopolitan subaltern, the work that representation continually does not just in the lexicon of domination but in the too-quick preoccupations generalized categories in diaspora and transnational feminist studies.¹³

      This ability to read the “surfaces,” distorted though they may be, offers Alexander’s Hottentot a capacity that obviously complicates the narrative of her legacy in Western discourse, on display at the Musée de l’Homme, in parts and jars. (In 1825, she would be posthumously speaking.)¹⁴ She, too, can construct lists of “small things,” like Cuvier, things that she would acquire in her diasporic performative work, things that Alexander repossesses to her:

      I would return to my family

      A duchess, with watered-silk

      Dresses and money to grow food,

      Rouge and powders in glass pots,

      Silver scissors, a lorgnette,

      Voile and tulle instead of flax,

      Cerulean blue instead

      of indigo. My brother would

      devour sugar-studded non-

      pareils, pale taffy, damask plums. (1990, 4)

      This list could continue: a family, a home, an understanding of material, of color, of food. The “small things in this world” are not, of course, for the speaking subject but are part of an unfulfilled narrative of reciprocal desire for cosmopolitan legitimacy (4). Such desire for ownership, these references to commodity culture and the good life, shifts the raced and gendered paradigm by making everything cosmopolitan. This Venus Hottentot assesses not only her given name but those of her sideshow “neighbors,” her own animal-like presentation, as well as her “planet”-ary status (5). Baartman is large, in Elizabeth Alexander’s text; she is her own world, her own system of reference, even as she is limited by another set of meanings.