Suzan-Lori Parks and "The Venus Hottentot"

Suzan-Lori Parks is a playwright who has been unfairly responded to negatively by critics, partially due to the controversial topics that she addresses in her works. Instead of reading her play, Venus, as a nonfiction work, I read Parks as a writer who wants to show her take on uncomfortable circumstances, never claiming that she is an expert.

In case you are unfamiliar with the Saartjie Baartman story you can catch up here. In short, Baartman was born in the 1700’s in Africa and taken to London because of her elongated vulva and large buttocks in order to be paraded around like a circus freak. Baartman spent her life on display due to her “oddities,” and remained on display after her death in a Paris museum, finally being transported back to Africa in 2002 to rest in peace.



According to an explanation in this New York Times article, “the story of Sartje Baartman, the inspiration for "Venus," is rich in dramatic potential and social reverberations.” Critics claim that Parks “doesn't present Baartman as just an uncomprehending victim. This woman is clearly an accomplice in her own humiliation.” Audience members and critics were angry with Parks for painting a picture of Baartman that differed from the view of her as an innocent victim, with no choice in her destiny. Parks chose to present Baartman as a confused girl, showing the conflicting thoughts of whether or not this was “fun” for her, something that the audience believed the real Baartman would never get confused. This is subject matter with intense political charge.

This presents an argument of whether Parks, and authors like Parks, have the authority to write about things that “they don’t really know about.” There is a debate in literature that deals with whether or not an author has the credibility to write about something, whether it be an event or a culture of people, that they were not there for or are not a part of. I believe that the work that an author is creating is their own creation, their own take on something, and therefore is a work of art. This gives the piece room to breathe, to become a thing of its own, even if this is not completely historically accurate.

Dorothy Porter vs. Lyn Hejinian

So when it comes down to it, which is easier to read? Language poetry or a verse novel? You can find my explanation of what language poetry is here. A verse novel is basically a novel written in a series of verses, or poems, that have metrical composition. Which is “opposed to prose which uses grammatical units like sentences and paragraphs.”

Lyn Hejinian wrote in prose poetry. A critic said “crucial to understanding Hejinian's work is the realization that it cultivates, even requires, an act of resistant reading.” The less you try to read her work, the more you get out of it. That’s a bit confusing. In my previous blog entry about Hejinian, there is also information about how I read My Life, her most famous work.

An Australian author, Dorothy Porter, is famous for her verse novel. One example of this is The Monkey’s Mask, which is a thriller about a lesbian detective who wants to solve the case of who killed Mickey, a university student who loves poetry. Porter follows Jill, who is working on the case, but finds herself distracted and romantically involved with one of Mickey’s professors.

Even though Porter deviated from the standard prose approach to writing, I found her work understandable and easy to follow. Though the poems look much different on page than blocks of prose, I quickly forgot I was reading poems and was able to pick up the story line. Though I was reading short, usually less than a page long, poems, the story line was clear and sequential. This is quite the opposite of Hejinian, who often times leads her audience in circles with repetition and a hard to find plot.

I found Porter’s work to be easier to understand at first read, but both works to be equally enjoyable and rewarding, even if I had to work harder at reading Hejinian’s work to read it how she would want me to.

Monique Wittig

I just finished reading another book by a feminist author, Monique Wittig. Her novel, Les Guérillères, was written in French in 1969, and translated to English in 1971. The main story line of the book follows a war that women of the world started against the men. Wittig employs a prose poetry style, featuring short vignettes of scenes that do not seem to follow each other in sequential order, though are loosely placed in order of how things happened.

According to a critic in The Times Book review: “perhaps the first epic celebration of women ever written.” An opposing view in The New York Review of Books says, “the book itself turns out to be, sadly, oddly, at times almost maddeningly, quite dull.” Maybe a little harsh to feature this quote in her obituary in The New York Times, I unfortunately agree with the latter review.

Wittig creates a story that has potential to be groundbreaking, but the writing style does not do the story matter justice. As I read the book, I felt like I was going in circles, without learning much. Maybe some of Wittig’s meaning was lost in the translation from French to English, but I feel like Kathy Acker’s in-your-face style of writing was much more effective in getting her point across: women have been mistreated and must rebel against men.

If you want to see how you read Wittig’s style, the first thirty three pages of the book are available here.