This is just a way of recording information until I manage to break it down (hopefully!) into a series of poems about SB. I became absorbed in Saartjie's story whilst reading up last week on the work of Elizabeth Alexander, the poet who will be presenting a poem at the Inauguration of BigBO next week... :)) xx

FROM THE DIARIES OF SAARTJIE BAARTMAN 1789-1815


Piccadilly, London, September 1810

At home in the Gamtoos River Valley, I’m known as Little Sarah, but here they call me “Hottentot” and “Venus”, suggesting deviant and divine. They display me gyrating my buttocks, dressed in a body-stocking decorated with feathers, overlaid with a mantle of curly, black hair. Brown Botticelli goddess, how these fat-assed Georgians love me, celebrate and deplore my bawdy excess: broad-bummed Lord Grenville especially, and his Party, the Bottomites. Women everywhere plump their butts to look like mine. Some want to send me to Bible College, make me go back. But in fluent Dutch I tell the judge, “No! I’m staying! I’m assured 50% of my profits!”


Paris, France, 1814

First, I have been trained to perform by a man who works with animals. Now I sit over a period of three days for leading naturalists, scientists and artists of the Enlightenment. Anatomist, Georges Cuvier, takes tools to measure my particulars: weight of what swings behind; length of what hangs between. De Wailly paints me as Cnidian Venus, right hand covering my groin.


Paris, 29th December 1815

I am dying from smallpox or pneumonia, aged just 26. Before Cuvier takes his knife to perform my dismemberment, moulds will be taken of my body, sculptors and artists finishing the lines, polishing their surface with turpentine oil. Skin and vessels will be painted on, the cast then coated in varnish. Within 48 hours I will be completely dissected, my bones boiled, brain and genitals bottled. My death coincides with repatriation of the Medici Venus, her voluptuous, milky-smooth contours, arm covering her breasts, plundered by Napoleon in 1802. She has been crated-up and shipped back to Palazzo Uffizi in Florence. My preserved remains will be displayed here at Musee de l’Homme, the Museum of Man, for a further 159 years before returning for burial to a hilltop in the Eastern Cape, overlooking the place of my birth. De Wailly’s “modest” portrait will later become my image endorsed by a free South Africa, unimagined in my time.