Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman

Venus in Two Acts Reviews

• 
  Aggrey Odera

  It is not clear precisely under what category Saidiya Hartman's work falls. It contains elements of both history and narratological reimaginings, but it is neither history, fiction, nor historical fiction. This sense of obfuscating uncategorizability is carefully cultivated by Hartman herself. Her subject is the condition of blackness - or, more aptly stated, the precarity of blackness. In the archive, as it exists, the history of blackness is mostly the history of terror, subjection, and subjugation. Not to mention the fact that the archive itself - the ledgers, legal documents, restatements, transpositions- is mainly the production of those who instantiated, partook in, or mediated against black people the very domination they write of. So to write about blackness under the terms of the archive is to reify the archive by the mere fact of one's participation. Hartman wants an aesthetic mode that recognizes that black life was lived, not just experienced as the object of history; where the howls, dirges, orgasms, aesthetic rebellions, experiences of desire, and the intimacies are accorded space. "Proper" history is hardly the place for this.
  
  And yet, as Annette Gordon-Reed has noted, one must be careful not to ascribe agency where there are only attempts at survival. In my well-worn copy of Hartman's "Wayward Lives," one remarkable scene stands out: Hartman vividly, almost troublingly, describes A'lelia Walker's (the daughter of Madame C. J. Walker) participation in a highly erotic lesbian sex scene. Why do this? Even assuming that the sex scene did indeed happen - itself a contested fact, no one can argue that anyone - perhaps not even those who were there at this sex party - can remember the sighs, the smells, the furtive glances. Why does Hartman go to such pains to recreate them? Why is she so intent in articulating this likely fabricated world of the possibilities of the subjugated? (in A'lelia's case, despite her wealth, because of the combination of her blackness and her queerness.)
  
  Hartman answers that this is, perhaps, the only way to transcend the constitutive limits of the archive; to, by calling forth the experiences of being humanly black that are not included in the methods of history, give space for black life to transcend the archive even as it undoubtedly exists within it. Only this way, thinks Hartman, can we paint a fuller picture of the lives of those who came before us, and in that way, view ourselves as members of a long tradition of black precarity. Recognizing that the archive left so many important things out, why not make them up?
  
  Importantly, however, this is not a retrospective or a rehabilitative project: the aim isn't simply to say that black lives were better/ worse than the facts of history make them out to be. Hartman refers to her project as "critical fabulation." By re-arranging, representing, and complicating ostensible facts of history, Hartman hopes to "illuminate the contested character of history." Yet, since any black-produced counter-history of blackness almost necessarily exists on the fringe - as marginal or insurgent (hey 1619 project!) - Hartman's goal isn't simply to challenge the canon. Instead, it is to illuminate to us, black people, just how much our presents - and their fragility - are tethered to those of the black people that came before us. Venus, the black girl in a slave ship, raped, killed, and forgotten by a white man who was later acquitted in the 17th century, isn't so far from Trayvon Martin. What we do with this knowledge, Hartman herself isn't sure, though she does have an inkling that it could be useful for demonstrating the bounds of what she calls a "free state".
  
  Hartman is a scholar of unusual erudition and brilliance, yet one also feels that she is full of warmth and care. It is easy to understand her celebrity among a particular cadre of black nerds. And also her reticence towards such celebrity. I hereby submit my application for the fan club.
• 
  yasmin

  The process of reclaiming ones narrative is tiresome, to dig through archives to find some semblance of a truth. Saidiya Hartman is the living example of how rounded you can come out at the end of the tunnel, proving its worth.
• 
  Malis

  I don't even know how many times I cried reading those 14 pages
• 
  Farrah Lavelle-Mclean

  ‘Loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive.’
• 
  Akaash Krishnan

  as cogent and necessary as ever. required reading.
• 
  samantha

  WHO TF IS DOING IT LIKE HARTMAN!!!!!!!!
  no one
  
  o The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroom—turn out to be exactly the same place and in all of them she is called Venus.
  o The archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history. Given this, “it is doubtless impossible to ever grasp [these lives] again in themselves, as they might have been ‘in a free state.’”5
  o But I want to say more than this. I want to do more than recount the violence that deposited these traces in the archive.
  o Yet how does one recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from the terrible utterances that condemned them to death, the account books that identified them as units of value, the invoices that claimed them as property, and the banal chronicles that stripped them of human features? “Can the shock of [such] words,” as Foucault writes, “give rise to a certain effect of beauty mixed with dread?”6 Can we, as NourbeSe Philip suggests, “conjur[e] something new from the absence of Africans as humans that is at the heart of the text”?7 And if so, what are the lineaments of this new narrative? Put differently, how does one rewrite the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom?
  o What are the kinds of stories to be told by those and about those who live in such an intimate relationship with death? Romances? Tragedies? Shrieks that find their way into speech and song? What are the protocols and limits that shape the narratives written as counter- history, an aspiration that isn’t a prophylactic against the risks posed by reiterating violent speech and depicting again rituals of torture? How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?
  o If “to read the archive is to enter a mortuary; it permits one final viewing and allows for a last glimpse of persons about to disappear into the slave hold,”16 then to what end does one open the casket and look into the face of death?
  o The Open Casket, the Scandal of the Archive
  o Falconbridge seconds this, amplifying the slippage between victims and sweethearts, acts of love and brutal excesses
  o Given the condition in which we find them, the only certainty is that we will lose them again, that they will expire or elude our grasp or collapse under the pressure of inquiry. This is the only fact about Venus of which we can be sure.
  o Here I’d like to return to a story that I preferred not to tell or was unable to tell in Lose Your Mother. It is a story about Venus, the other girl who died aboard the Recovery and to whom I only made a passing reference.
  o I wrote two sentences about Venus in “The Dead Book,” masking my own silence behind Wilberforce’s. I say of him: “He chose not to speak of Venus, the other dead girl. The pet name licensed debauchery and made it sound agreeable.”28
  o I decided not to write about Venus for reasons different from those I attributed to him. Instead I feared what I might invent, and it would have been a romance.
  o Picture them: The relics of two girls, one cradling the other, plundered innocents; a sailor caught sight of them and later said they were friends. Two world-less girls found a country in each other’s arms. Beside the defeat and the terror, there would be this too: the glimpse of beauty, the instant of possibility.
  o The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited. To fabricate a witness to a death not much noticed.
  o wanted to write a romance that exceeded the fictions of history—the rumors, scandals, lies, invented evidence, fabricated confessions, volatile facts, impossible metaphors, chance events, and fantasies that constitute the archive and determine what can be said about the past. I longed to write a new story, one unfettered by the constraints of the legal documents and exceeding the restatement and transpositions, which comprised my strategy for disordering and transgressing the protocols of the archive and the authority of its statements and which enabled me to augment and intensify its fic- tions. Finding an aesthetic mode suitable or adequate to rendering the lives of these two girls, deciding how to arrange the lines on the page, allowing the narrative track to be rerouted or broken by the sounds of memory, the keens and howls and dirges unloosened on the deck, and trying to unsettle the arrangements of power by imaging Venus and her friend outside the terms of statements and judgments that banished them from the category of the human and decreed their lives waste31—all of which was beyond what could be thought within the parameters of history.
  o The romance of resistance that I failed to narrate and the event of love that I refused to describe raise important questions regarding what it means to think historically about matters still contested in the present and about life eradicated by the protocols of intellectual disciplines.
  o Is it possible to exceed or negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive? By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities), in fashioning a narrative, which is based upon archival research, and by that I mean a critical reading of the archive that mimes the figurative dimensions of history, I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling. The conditional temporality of “what could have been,” according to Lisa Lowe, “symbolizes aptly the space of a different kind of thinking, a space of productive attention to the scene of loss, a thinking with twofold attention that seeks to encompass at once the positive objects and methods of history and social science and the matters absent, entangled and unavailable by its methods.”34
  o The method guiding this writing practice is best described as critical fabulation. “Fabula” denotes the basic elements of story, the building blocks of the narrative. A fabula, according to Mieke Bal, is “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused and experienced by actors. An event is a transition from one state to another. Actors are agents that perform actions. (They are not necessarily human.) To act is to cause or experience and event.”35
  o Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise—the shrieks, the moans, the non- sense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man.38
  o The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death—social and corporeal death—and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance. It is an impossible writing which attempts to say that which resists being said (since dead girls are unable to speak). It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive.
  o The necessity of recounting Venus’s death is overshadowed by the inevitable failure of any attempt to represent her. I think this is a productive tension and one unavoidable in narrating the lives of the subaltern, the dispossessed, and the enslaved.
  o My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yet another demand upon the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, by finding in it a lesson for our future or a hope for history. We all know better. It is much too late for the accounts of death to prevent other deaths; and it is much too early for such scenes of death to halt other crimes. But in the meantime, in the space of the interval, between too late and too early, between the no longer and the not yet, our lives are coeval with the girl’s in the as-yet-incomplete project of freedom. In the meantime, it is clear that her life and ours hang in the balance.
  o We begin the story again, as always, in the wake of her disappearance and with the wild hope that our efforts can return her to the world. The conjunction of hope and defeat define this labor and leave open its outcome. The task of writing the impossible, (not the fanciful or the utopian but “histories rendered unreal and fantastic”44), has as its prerequisites the embrace of likely failure and the readiness to accept the ongoing, unfinished and provisional character of this effort, particularly when the arrangements of power occlude the very object that we desire to rescue.45 Like Dana, we too emerge from the encounter with a sense of incompleteness and with the recognition that some part of the self is missing as a consequence of this engagement.
  
• 
  iz

  Possibly the most beautiful academic writing I've ever read—I'm going to be thinking about this one for a long time.
  
  If "to read the archive is to enter a mortuary; it permits one final viewing and allows for a last glimpse of persons about to disappear into the slave hold," then to what end does one open the casket and look into the face of death? Why risk the contamination involved in restating the maledictions, obscenities, columns of losses and gains, and measures of value by which captive lives were inscribed and extinguished? Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence? Or are the merchant’s words the bridge to the dead or the scriptural tombs in which they await us?
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  Chloe Zheng

  Read this for class. I know some people are not fond of this method, debating where to draw the line between evidence-based argumentation and pure imagination (history vs. historical fiction), but I especially like how this work is pushing the boundary of history. And as long as the author makes it clear where history-based arguments end and where speculations begin, I think it could be a powerful method!
• 
  Pep.Kosteyetos

  Στο μικρό αυτό κείμενο, η συγγραφέας-ιστορικός αναμετριέται με τους περιορισμούς του ιστορικού αρχείου και τις μορφές εξουσίας που συντελούνται μέσα του. Η Αφροδίτη αποτελεί ένα ιστορικό πρόσωπο το οποίο όμως μένει μη προσεγγίσιμο εξαιτίας της εξουσίας που επιβλήθηκε πάνω της. Παραμένει μία αναφορά θανάτου πάνω σε ένα δουλεμπορικό πλοίο, γεγονός απροσπέλαστο από τον ιστορικό εξαιτίας της ανελευθερίας της δολοφονημένης γυναίκας. Επομένως η ανασυγκρότηση της μαύρης ζωής – εντός των συγκεκριμένων πλαισίων και μέσα στα ιστορικά πλαίσια –μοιάζει αδύνατη εξαιτίας της αποσιώπησης αυτής της ζωής από τα αρχεία της δουλείας.
  «υπάρχουν εκατοντάδες χιλιάδες άλλα κορίτσια που μοιράζονται τις συνθήκες [ύπαρξης] της [Αφροδίτης] και αυτές οι συνθήκες έχουν παραγάγει μερικές ιστορίες. Και οι ιστορίες που υπάρχουν δεν αφορούν αυτές, αλλά μάλλον την βία την υπερβολή, την αναλήθεια και τον λόγο που κατέλαβε τις ζωές τους, και τις μεταμόρφωσε σε εμπορεύματα και πτώματα, και τις ταύτισε με ονόματα που ξεστομίζονται ως προσβολές και αναίσθητα ανέκδοτα. Το αρχείο σε αυτή την περίπτωση είναι μία θανατική ποινή, ένας τάφος, ένα έκθεμα ενός παραβιασμένου σώματος, μια απογραφή ιδιοκτησίας, μια ιατρική πραγματεία για την γονόρροια, μερικές αράδες για την ζωή μιας πόρνης, ένας αστερίσκος στη μεγαλειώδη αφήγηση της ιστορίας. Δεδομένου αυτού είναι αναμφίβολα αδύνατη η σύλληψη αυτών των ζωών καθ’ αυτών, όπως δυνητικά θα υπήρχαν σε μια ελεύθερη κατάσταση».
• 
  a

  insanely genius
• 
  Amanda Chiu

  Hartman is an absolute genius. Critical fabulation is so interesting and innovative. This book is fantastic and really raises the bar for what was once understood as possible in a literary sense. I am in awe.
• 
  Freya Abbas

  This essay raises some interesting questions about the methodology in history and makes us see narrative the time of slavery as our present, not something that we can detach ourselves from. When describing the cruelty of Thomas Thistlewood, who raped and tortured slaves, Hartman writes "It is too easy to hate a man like Thistlewood; what is more difficult is to acknowledge as our inheritance the brutal Latin phrases spilling onto the pages of his journals" (6). The decision to center this narrative around a girl named Venus was effective in pointing out how the language of romance and violence merged in such a perverse way during the time of slavery. Under slavery, the unimaginable assumed the guise of everyday practice. James Barbot, captain of the Albion Frigate, romanticized the rape of female slaves on board while Oloudah Equiano's narrative, quoted here, captured how truly horrible it was and how the victims were sometimes children. The essay's methodology respects how incomprehensible the violence of slavery was, and how traditional methods will not succeed in grasping this if they rely on quantitative data with no imagination.
• 
  kelly

  offers an incredibly interesting way to theorise and document invisible histories—hartman's essay acts as a "double gesture" in its intent to jointly "tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling." academic writing can be so beautiful sometimes...?
• 
  N…

  One of a kind. I have never read something like this before. Some things I felt to be beyond my comprehension, but I felt I could still connect through the sensation her storytelling evoked in me. She is her own special genre.
• 
  Erin

  probably my favorite academic work ive ever read
• 
  Nick Koenig

  A beautiful and poetic piece that addresses the question of "What's at stake?" when researchers, practitioners, and interested folks want to explore archives.
• 
  sungyoon

  Honestly . honestly genius
• 
  Tia Hines

  An interdisciplinary slay
• 
  Alexander Speer

  For an average take you get an average review
• 
  Ange Tran

  hydrofeminism, peak