Hottentot Venus - Top Shelf - Brief Article - Book Review

Ebony, Nov, 2003

With HOTTENTOT VENUS (Doubleday, $24.00), Barbara Chase Ribound, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and best-selling author of Sally Hemings, once again has confronted a controversial topic head-on. This historical novel presents the tragic story of Sarah Baartman, the bushwoman with--among other features--prominent buttocks, who was taken to London from South Africa in 1810.

She was promised fame and fortune, and got only captivity and degradation. She was sold to a circus owner as a curiosity, and forced into nude public displays in London and Paris, subject to cruel stares and crude comments, exhibited as a zoo animal, desperate to assert her "humanness ... the only thing I possessed." Hottentot Venus is a compelling story about racism and sexism and European imperialism, a story about the cruelty of curiosity that, in the end, should force many people to take a long hard look at themselves.