Venus

Laurie
Venus
Starbucks, April 20, 2008

Richard was researching the history of human exhibits, particularly the display of non-white bodies, for an essay he was writing. As recently as 1997, one document reported, a small natural history museum outside Barcelona finally removed a stuffed Bushman from its permanent display cases in response to international pressure. Richard shared material as well about Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan woman orphaned in a commando raid and enslaved by Dutch farmers in Cape Town in the early Nineteenth Century. The brother of her owners took her to England to exhibit her because of her unusually large buttocks, a condition known as steatopygia. She was presented in a cage at Picadilly, and visitors were permitted to touch her ass for an extra fee. When offered an opportunity to free herself from display, she declined, saying she shared in the profits, although some witnesses doubted her account. She was intelligent, had an excellent memory, and spoke fluent Dutch. She toured France as well as England and was internationally famous by 1815 when, at 26, she died, possibly of small pox. After her death, a wax cast of her genitals was displayed. In my prompt, I wonder what Saartjie might have been thinking while appearing on stage. The history of human exhibit includes, as well, 500 years of human dissection in laboratories and operating theaters, a chronicle fraught with charges of heresy. I think about the subversive and in some ways liberating aspect of viewing the human body as a thing, rather than a repository of metaphysical properties, among them a soul. I reflect on the mixing of strangers with each other and our departures from safe and unsafe homes.

Candle wax drips from the chandelier, a second skin, for I am naked on stage, my breasts aloft, my waist circled with a string of pearls, my thighs thick tunas in a calm sea, and aft is my treasure, my clever monkeys: my backside so globular I am a world. When I walk, the earth thumps like a heartbeat.

Their eyes are suns with sharp rays. It’s the turn they wait for, so I extend the moment the way dawn stretches before seizing the morning sky. My ass. People steal glances for fear of being blinded. I am so much more than they have imagined. When they gasp, they are embarrassed for themselves.

They want to open it, my book, and as I stand on stage, their human exhibit, they see they are matter.

I am a charger whose heart and ribs they want to feel, and sometimes I’m overwhelmed. Isn’t that the way with intimacy? You fall in love with something you are missing. Words surround your throat, and you offer a chain to be tugged along by. Everything gets rubbed. You don't know what you can become.

I’m on stage in London, and a boy places his paw on my leg, and I cradle his blond head against my breasts, and he doesn’t squirm. His eyes are so blue they leave bruises on my shoulder, and I say in another life I was a lizard. He laughs. I show him my pointed tongue and tell him it’s impertinent to climb a mountain. He feels like my child in the light, and then a man with a mustache snatches him away. “I didn’t know you could speak English,” he says. “Do you know what I am?” I ask. He shakes his head, and I think: This is not just my problem.

It's that way with the theater. You leave home, the jungle, the village, and shortly the world enters you, and then you carry the eyes, the wax, the cage, the beauty, the chain, and it is a good thing you are built to travel, built to swallow, built to stay awake while studying the alien.