Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sarah Baartman: A Life On Show

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

Who was Sarah Baartman? Why was she paraded across Europe as part of a 'freak' show? And why did it take until 2001 for her remains to be repatriated to her birthplace of South Africa?Born around 1770, Sarah, who was derisively named as the 'Hottentot Venus', was publicly examined and exposed inhumanly throughout her life. Her brain, skeleton and sexual organs remained on display in a French museum until 1974.Dr Robin Mitchell from joins Kate Betwixt the Sheets to discuss the tragic life of Sarah Baartman.You can find out more about Robin's book here, or follow her on Twitter here.*WARNING this episode includes adult themes, explicit words, and graphic discussion about slavery and racism featuring words which are now rightly deemed as offensive.*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit. This episode includes music by Epidemic Sound. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, it's me, Kate Lister, just jumping in here to let you know that this episode is a tough listen. We have got descriptions on racism, on enslaved people, inhumane behaviour and historical language that today is rightly considered offensive. Who was Sarah Bartman? What do we know about her? In the 19th century, she was a woman that was exhibited across Europe. as a sideshow. Images of her were printed on postcards that were widely sold. But why? Why was she

there? Why did she draw crowds? Join me, Kate Lister, on today's episode of Betwixt the Sheets. Professor Robin Mitchell has dedicated much of her life and her energy to shining a light on the lives of historical black women and their experiences in France, broader Europe and in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. Her work and her commitment to this subject are absolutely unbelievable. And today, we're lucky enough that she's here to tell the story of Sarah Bartman. From South Africa to London to Paris, from free woman to enslaved woman to domestic servant to stage show freak. Caught somewhere between sexualisation and desexualisation. It's hard to know who Sarah Bartman really was.

but let's try and find out. I am so, I'm beyond excited. I'm deliriously happy to be here with it's only Professor Robin Mitchell. Hello. Hello, I'm so happy to be here. I am so excited to have you here. I'm trying to, you know, not fangall all over you

and try and keep my stuff together and to be professional, professional historian. Before I get into that, have you bought any more new shoes? I have bought several new shoes. French historian. shoes is all over the world now. People are now tagging me. It's hilarious. If you don't follow Robin on Twitter, go and do it because it's just not only is there amazing historical content, but there is

amazing shoe content as well. Hashtag French historian shoes. Most interesting thing about me. Oh, that's not even true. The first time that I didn't meet you, I heard your voice. I was doing a recording for Matthew Sweet in a London studio, me, Fern Riddell, and you. I don't, I didn't, I didn't meet you. I heard your voice. I was doing a recording for Matthew Sweet in a London studio, me, Fern Riddell, and you had pre-recorded your section and you were talking about Sarah Bartman who were talking about today. And it always went very quiet and they played your clip. I think it was like 10 minutes of you talking. And it was so powerful that me and Fern both got really teary listening to it. It was that amazing. And that was like, I need to find out more about this. So I'm so pleased to have you.

here. Sarah Bartman is, she's extraordinary. So thank you so much for letting me get to talk about her. I find her absolutely compelling. Tell us, there'll be people listening who know she is, there'll be people that have heard the name, and there'll be people that have never heard the name before. So who was Sarah Bartman? So that's a really good question. And I don't know if I have a definitive answer. Sarah was born, we think, sometime in the 1770s. And, you know, when we talk about black women, when we talk about black people in general in Europe, it's often she was maybe this, she was probably this, which helps us understand the complexity of slavery. And we think she was born in the 1770s. She was born and raised, we believe, into slavery.

And she doesn't really appear in the historical record until about 1810 when her master's brother enters into some kind of agreement to bring her to London and to Paris. Where was she born? Do we know that? She was born in South Africa. We do know that. We know that she was most likely smuggled out of South Africa. Ordinarily, her master would have needed permission from the colonial government to remove her. And as far as we know, that didn't happen. Oh, okay. And so she's smuggled on this ship. She's the only woman on the ship. She, well, the court case that ultimately happens in London indicates, and Sarah apparently enter into an agreement. Whether Sarah was in a position to be able to enter into agreement is another question.

But the agreement stated apparently that she would display herself, that she would get a certain amount of money to repatriate herself back to South Africa after two years. And she'll end up dying in Europe. So, Christ. So she was smuggled out to South Africa around the age of 30-ish as an enslaved woman. And you said there that she was signed a contract, which is just, okay, whatever. But when you said that she... Exactly.

Yeah, right? When you said that she agreed to be exhibited, what to be shown? What does that mean? What, like, what was she brought to Europe to do? So part of it is that Bartman had enlarged fat pockets in her buttocks and her thighs. which she was very short. It was sort of fascinating. When I finally saw her body cast in Paris, I was really struck by the fact that she was only about five feet, four inches tall. But because of her body proportions, they thought Europeans had never seen bodies like Sarah's and so that they could

make money displaying her. Sarah for me is, I don't even know how to say it. Sarah for me represent so much. You know, it was always important to me that I retain her personhood, that anybody reading about her or talking about her always understood that she was a human being. But I think what is so interesting for Europeans, particularly in London and in Paris, is what she represents, what her body represents. So looking at her, some folks thought she was the antithesis of a white European female body, right? And so that you could look at her body and juxtapose it against British women and then French women's bodies and then see something inherent about the black female body. And that's ultimately what she becomes for the British and for the

French is in many ways she becomes a canvas to write on. It's horrifying when you look at sort of what they do to her body versus who she is as a human being. And you and I react with horror. And the people handling her. And literally at one point, she is transferred to an animal trainer, a handler. Jesus. But part of what happens is this idea is for them, she isn't a human being. She is this thing to be sort of manipulated and to read themselves against, right? So when we talk about sex and we talk about scandal, part of the scandal for me is how she's treated.

the scandal for Brits and the French are her body is a scandal. That she's just a scandal. And there's so much going on there that it's really hard to get a hold on the awfulness of it. I mean, just like the fact that an African woman, a South African woman is just, that they would just think that they could just exhibit her because she was so strange and weird. And it's just like that alone blows my mind just by doing nothing other than being born in her body. Than being exactly. And that's the thing is when you look at the the playbills, when you look at the sheets that are put up around Piccadilly saying just in from Africa to be exhibited, you've never seen anything like this. This is your moment to see the ultimate other body. And you think to yourself, okay, wait, what? But that's exactly what is so interesting about her. for these people is that you will see something unlike anything you've ever seen. And so in some

ways, it is the empire come home. Was Sarah her name? Was that her real name Sarah Bartman? Was that no? No, she comes in, I don't know what her real name was. She was named Saatchie Batman, which is Little Sarah. And so she comes in with the moniker of Saoichi Baatman. And then that will be how people refer to her, although as soon as she hits the shores, the bills and the advertisements list her as the hot and taught Venus. And then she will go by that name, Saatchie Bauchman or the Hot and Tot Venus, until 1811, when after a court case comes to determine whether she's being held against her will, she will be baptized in Manchester. And her name appears for the first time. as Sarah Bartman, yes.

Oh, my, I did not know that. Before we get to the court case, and that's baptized, right? Yeah, she's baptized, and I think she's baptized as a result of the court case. I think that the publicity that it engenders is really controversial. And so all of a sudden, she's baptized, and she will actually carry her baptismal certificate with her for the rest of her life. Before we get to the court case, that's really important. What is a hot and tot? Can you explain a little bit about what that term is for anyone that doesn't know?

Yeah. It's a pejorative. It's hard to talk about Bartman under the guise of how she's viewed by Europe because Europe refers to her as the Venus hot and tot. It is, in many ways, it's a way of reducing her down to a thing. And Venus as well, although. Well, Venus is supposed to be sort of amusing. We're all supposed to get looking at her and say, of course she's the antithesis of a Venus. There's no way anyone would find her attractive, right? But she came from the Coyzon people, and they have always been, by the Europeans,

pejoratively called Hot and Totts. You know, I, after I was doing some research, and I researched Sarah's life and what is meant by Hot and Talk, and I watched Mary Poppins again, and there is that scene on the rooftops where, and I'd never, ever picked it up before, where all the chimney sweeps have got black face because they're all covered in sutt

and then there's the guy who keeps like shooting things, the general guy. And he looks at them and he goes, it's hot and tots and then he tries to shoot them. And he's not only is that a pejorative racial term, he thinks they're hot and tots because they've got black face.

And I had never, ever clocked that before. You know, it's terrible. Once you hear it, it's hard to unhear it. One of my favorite films used to be the Wizard of Oz. Oh, okay. And I can't watch it anymore. Right, I'm going to brace myself for this. Okay, go on.

Yeah. There's a moment with the cowardly lion when he's singing about courage. Yeah. And he's, who puts the ape and apricot, he's going through all of these things. And he says, what makes the hot and tot so hot? Oh. And I remember, I have watched that movie a hundred times. And all of a sudden I was sitting there and I guess I wasn't paying attention.

And I heard what makes the hot and tot so hot. And I thought, oh my God, I can never watch this film again. And now I can't. When you see it. See? Thank you. You're welcome. No, thank you.

It's important. Because you know, I think the fact that you don't see it is actually really important because it's so much just like the cultural background that you don't even register that that's what's happening in these things. And that's a legacy that's exactly. You can throw those things out there and it's supposed to be like it's a throwaway line. Oh, what really? well, there's lots that interest me about Sarah,

but in particular, when you're talking about historical attitudes to enslaved people and to people of color and all those things, is you occasionally hear voices saying things like, well, it was just different back then, attitudes were different back then, and they were, but there was resistance to what was happening to Sarah.

There were people that said, this isn't acceptable. It wasn't universally, everyone thought that this was great. No, absolutely not. And at a certain point, Bartman is being displayed in a cage. People are allowed to pay a small fee and they bring her out. They're allowed to come into a room.

It's so fascinating to me when you sort of think about it is that these people are able to come into a room and see her in a cage, right? So everything is set up that you're about to see some kind of animal or you're about to see somebody or something that is dangerous, that has to. to be caged. And so the idea is she's behind a sheet. Her trainer brings her out. You know, listen to the language I'm using. Her trainer brings her out. And apparently what could happen is you could poke at her to make sure that she was real, that they hadn't padded her bottom or they hadn't done anything to her body. But she was in sort of a skin tight outfit so that you could

see the contours of her body. And then they encouraged you to poke and prod at her to prove that what you were seeing was an actual specimen versus a sort of a contrived freak. And they were prodding her buttocks and her genitals. They were. That was supposed to be the most incredible and amazing thing about her. Exactly. And as a result of that, there are a number of abolitionists who decide to bring a court case. and the court case was to determine whether she was being held against her will. So for three days, she is, I don't want to say examined, because it's not really in that way,

but they try to ascertain whether she knew what she was getting into when she came to England, if she was being held against her will, if she was being taken care of. And so it's an interesting dynamic because you have the celebrated abolitionist saying, Bartman is not in a position to be able to say whether she could consent to coming because, in fact, she's an enslaved woman, right? At the same time, her handlers are saying, no, we have this document. I've never been able to find this document. And that says, no, no, she has said, I want to do this, that I know what I'm doing. And so if you read the documents from the court case, it's really quite fascinating because,

it says things like she said she's happy. She says this is what she wants to do. There's nothing in there that says, I decided this is what I want to do. And so they say they examined her and determined, I don't know how they determined this considering the fact that she spoke Dutch and there's really no indication on if she understood the questions that was being directed at her. But after three days, they determine that she is, in fact, her own agent and can continue being exploited. And then right after that, she's baptized. It's a really interesting dynamic. So I think part of this is trying to make her seem more civilized through her baptism. It's, the injustice of it is, is it's really staggering. And like how an enslaved woman can be

forcibly taken from her homeland, smuggled across. She might not even speak English. Apparently, she signed a document. And then she can be cross-examined. And am I right in thinking that the person who, quote, quote, owned her was in the room as she was being examined? Like, as they were interrogating her. Exactly. So she's never in a position for someone to say, are you okay? No. During her entire testimony, her master is, he's inches away from her. It's horrifying. And where is she going to go? What is she going to do? Who just blows my mind the injustice of it. So she's this court case, okay, and then apparently she's consenting. And then from what I can see, she's still exhibited. Yes. But there seems to be a kind of a shift in, and it's what happened to John Merrick as well, the elephant man, is it starts off as this kind of side show curiosity and then eventually doctors get involved. And it's basically the same thing, but it's now medical touring.

And that happens to Sarah. It's absolutely, that's perfectly stated. When you think about it is after she is baptized in Manchester, something happens. And I don't know what it is. But we think that she goes to Ireland for a minute. We're not absolutely sure. And she may actually travel throughout England a little bit.

And then all of a sudden, she becomes connected with this animal trainer. And I don't know if she gets sold to him or what, but then he brings her to Paris. And so if there's controversy with Bartman in England, a lot of that controversy is muted when she comes to Paris. She's sort of fully the hot and taught Venus, right? And so people still have things to say about it. They're editorials like there are in England. saying, this is not okay. But she's embraced in France in a way that is, I think, different than

England. I think the other thing that is different is she's going to die very quickly in France. There's a possibility that she had breast cancer. There's some indication that she was an alcoholic. I think she might have been self-medicating. She was deeply unhappy. I don't know how you could not be not unhappy. So she had medical issues. And so, She's displayed in Paris and then either in December of 1815 or January in 1816, she dies. And so the French Surgeon General gets permission to have her body dissect it. And so she enters into this different realm of both representation and spectacle because now they're able to look at her body in a way that they weren't when she was alive. and she becomes a scientific oddity.

And this is the kind of the high age of quack pseudoscience, theories of phrenology, and the idea that you can read a person's moral character on their body somehow. And we still see echoes of that today. If someone say, I thought his eyes look shifty or like that. Exactly. Kind of a legacy. And Sarah, unfortunately, she was appropriated by this particular branch in medical science. So she gets to Paris.

she is displayed at the Palais Royale. So if you have enough money, you can see her sort of privately. There's a lot of scrutiny, a lot of fiction written about her. There are a series of letters purported to be from her talking about that happenings in Paris of the day. One of the letters says, I'm happy to be here as I was bored in London. You know, the Paris air suits kind women. And then she starts talking about how much more beautiful. French women are than British women.

They're absolutely absurd entries into these journals. They're hilarious and sort of maddening. But this idea like in the Persian letters where she can, that this foreigner can talk about the happenings of the day. And so she's displayed in Paris. And then Georges Cuvier, the naturalist, arranges to have her painted at the Giardin de Plante. so at the Museum of Natural Sciences.

And he says at the time that he wanted to see her genitalia and she wouldn't let him. And that they tried to entice her with like candies and money and that she wouldn't let him. And he's sort of annoyed that she won't like give him access to her genitalia. Because Cuvier believes that he can learn something about black women in general through this one black body. And so after she dies, he sort of gleefully dissects her. Like, he can't wait. You can hear it, even in the pages of his autopsy. You can hear it and you can feel how excited he is to finally uncover whatever he thinks he's going to uncover. So he has her brain pickled, her genitalia, you know, mounted literally on a board. And his autopsy is quite fascinating. Fascinating for me,

because he's unable to retain a scientific gaze. He says he found her face repelling, but that she had a really nice neck, that she had a wonderful speaking voice, but that she had a body like an orangutan. Like these interesting slippages happen that he can't contain himself within the bubble of scientific objectivity

that he thinks he's in, that you can hear the moment where he is hyper-sexualizing her at the same time he's trying to make her asexual, if that makes sense. Because that dichotomy, that seems to surround Sarah. Like on one hand, as you said, she was known as the hot and top Venus, which was supposed to be a joke. And she was supposed to be read as the antithesis of white European beauty.

And there's this effort to make her ugly. And, like, look at her body. Is it so deformed? But then she's also hypersexualized. Like, when she was alive, she was exhibited in very, very tight. very, very revealing clothing. People were encouraged to pot and poke her genital region. And it's this strange, by being there, she suddenly creates a permission base for these Victorians who would never, ever behave like that ever, to suddenly they're allowed to explore these things.

But there's a real tension there between she's highly sexualized and also, like, supposed to be repugnant at the same time. You know, that's what I find really fascinating about the representations of her. You know, from the moment she hits Europe, the representations of her change often dramatically. Like if you look at the earlier representations of Bartman up until the moment that she dies, her body changes. And that's what I find so fascinating about looking at representation is that Stuart Hall says, once you represent something and put it out in the world, you lose control of that image.

Right. And so if the public doesn't respond the way they're supposed to, you have to alter that image to help them, right? And so it's fascinating to me that Bartman gets there. And, you know, people that are drawing her that are representing her represent her represent her in a way that is seemingly closer to what she might have looked like. Right. And then you see over time she becomes larger. She becomes darker.

She becomes more masculine. They suddenly put pipes in her mouth. They suddenly start putting warrior stripes on her face. face, right? And so to me, it became sort of clear that people were looking at these earlier representations and not reacting in the way that Europeans expected them to react, that people were clearly looking at her and going, well, okay, you know, I'm not quite sure what's happening here. But if you look at her body cast, even if you look at her face, I find her sort of exquisite to look at. And so clearly other people were too, because then her face,

changes, right? Then she starts behaving in ways that are more ape-like. So it's fascinating to me to watch how she needs to change to get the reaction that the people representing her need. She's got to perform the colonial savage. It's not enough to just... Exactly. And that at no time can you look at her and have any kind of sexual reaction. At the time, she's, like you said, she's this hypersexual body. I mean, it's hard not to read the autopsy report and all of the medical bullshit around this poor woman and not see it as sublimated sexual attraction. I mean, when he was looking at her genitals, like, what on earth do you think he was going to find? Well, what he thought he was

going to find was the ultimate proof of the hypersexuality of the black woman. And what he says is, I found that. He said, her labia is larger than a year. European woman, which means she must want sex more. And if you think about how the characteristics that are assigned to her by him and the medical establishment here in this case, they're talking about the fact that her masculine characteristics are contributing to the fact that she'll have sex with anything and anybody, right? And so part of it is proving what he thinks he wants to prove, which is this is a hypersexual woman. And then he looks at her labia and he goes, I said.

See? I told you. There was similar nonsense studies done in France, actually, at the same time on women that sold sex, their clitorises were examined, like hundreds in this effort to try and prove that sex workers, clitorises, and their labia would be horrendously engorged because that meant that they were hypersexual. And you actually see in some of this early pseudoscientific nonsense, black women and sex women, their genitals are compared directly to one another. Yes.

Yes. in an effort to prove something. And part of that is racializing sex workers. The fact is, it's like we can now prove that all black women are hypersexual. If we compare that to sex workers, what we're saying are sex workers are closer to being non-white bodies who are also hypersexual, right? So there's ways of sort of talking about race without really talking about race. and then linking that to sexuality in ways that are so disturbing and distasteful.

But, you know, when you're looking at it, you go, oh, I see what you're doing, right? Of course they want it all the time. Because look, we see these black women who are hypersexual who also clearly wanted all the time. And then Cuvier takes her genitalia and sort of shows it. He invites people from all over Europe to come to his. auditorium and sort of shows them her genitalian and says, see, I've proved it. It's horrifying. I went to the Museum of Natural Sciences when I was in Paris the last time, and his auditorium still exists. And I think they use it for meetings and things. Now it's a horrifying place.

And I have a picture of myself somewhere just looking like I'm about to throw up. And I remember somebody said, oh, do you want to go in? And I said, yes. And I took one step in, in the the door and I said no and I sort of backed out and I thought this place is haunted and I felt it literally one step walking in I thought I don't want to be in this room something terrible happened in this room and I don't want to be in here but it you know for him it was like oh look what I found I've made this I've made this discovery and it's so important for him to be able to share that throughout Europe and you'd think that poor Sarah would have been through enough by this point, but it's not going to end, is it?

Is she remains on display, her body remained on display for years? Decades, actually. I mean, I don't think she comes off display until the 70s, the 1970s, I want to say. She's in the museum, the Muse de Lombe for a really, really long time. And it's interesting because I believe an event takes place where a man attacks a docent. And his, his rationale for attacking this docent is that his proximity to Bartman has inflamed him. And I think that's when they take her off to split.

It's repulsive. You know, it's really hard for me to not just be, like, insane with rage about Sarah Bartman's life because it just never ends. And then when the South Africans enter into the picture and say, you know, we need her back. Like her soul isn't going to rest until her body is in the place of her birth. At one point, the museum says, well, we can't find everything. So for a long time, they say her genitalia and her brain are sort of lost. They can't find her. And then in 2001, it heats up pretty good.

And finally, they're able to put, literally put her back together. And so they, yeah, they transfer her to the South African government, her brain, her genitalia, and her skeleton and bring her back to South Africa. In 2001. Yeah. So France still has the paintings that were done of her that Cuvier commissioned. Her baptismal certificate is still in France, which I'm actually a little bit sorry about. And her bodycast, they do a plastered bodycast of her when she's dead as well. And I'm sad about the baptismal certificate because it was folded and unfolded quite a bit.

And apparently she carried it for the rest of her life. And so I don't know. It seemed to me that it might have had some kind of meaning for her. And so I was sorry it wasn't repatriated with her. But the South African government did not want anything that sort of tied her to Europe. And it was Nelson Mandela, wasn't it, that brought her home, which is incredible. Yeah. And, you know, there's a documentary about Bartman.

It's not one of my favorite things to look at where literally the French government are trying to justify why they thought it was okay to keep her. And I show it in my classes. And it's quite fascinating to me to watch the rage build up in the room as they're sort of trying to justify what they did to her. They said, you know, it was the time. Things like that happened. And I thought things like that. yes, things like that happened. And there were people at the time saying, this is horrifying.

Yeah. And it was still allowed to happen. And so even if you follow that line of reasoning, which I do not, the fact of the matter is that 2001, I mean, rest with that for a minute. That for a long time, you know, her body, her genitalia, her brain just. sat. And she was born in 1770. Exactly, because of her so-called importance to science, it's repugnant. It is repugnant, and it's very hard to clutch anything from this that isn't, as you say, rage-inducing. But before I let you go, would you tell me a little bit about the first time you saw Sarah's bodycast? Because I love listening to you talk about that.

I love, you know, it's, yeah, it's really hard to talk about. You know, I went. I went, in 2004 to do my dissertation. France, and I don't think France is special here, but, you know, when you show up in an archive, you're supposed to have credentials, you're supposed to have made an appointment, you're supposed to go through the steps of doing what you're supposed to do to prove that you're actually a serious scholar. And I just showed up at the Musei de Lombe. I didn't have a letter, I didn't have a card, I didn't have anything. And I asked if I could see a, her. And I checked in at the front desk and I said, I'm here to see Sarah Bartman and bless his heart. I still feel bad for this poor man. He sort of stared at me and then he called upstairs to say, you know,

there's a crazy woman here who wants to see Sarah Bartman. And the most wonderful man came up, Philippe Manusier. And I said, I'm here to see Sarah Bartman and he said, okay, which makes no sense at all. And I told him what I was working. I said I was working on my dissertation. and I was doing a chapter on Sarah Bartman, and he sort of gently took me to his office. And I had read in other books that people had asked to see Sarah Bartman's body cast and that, and I'm really grateful for this, that the museum had said no. And so he asked me, he said, would you like to see her? And I think something just turned off in my brain. You know, I've been studying Sarah Bartman's life. And I've been studying Sarah Bartman's life for a long, long time by that point. And I had assumed everything had been

repatriated. So I didn't know everything was still back there. And he said, you know, we still have some things, including her bodycast. And he asked me if I wanted to see it. And I said yes. And I remember thinking, I am so ill-equipped to write the story of Sarah Bartman. I don't know what I'm doing in France. I don't know what I'm doing in an archive. And they brought her body cast, her crate out. she's crated up. And there were, I still remember, there's 13 screws that keep her in this crate. And I remember as they started unscrewing them, they had a power drill. I remember just sort of looking around.

I was in the back part of the museum. They had all these plaster casts. They had this line of death casts, death mask in the corner. And I started getting really hot and sweaty, thinking to myself, I don't know. know what I'm doing here. Finally, the guy's like, yep, okay, we got it. And they sort of pulled on the crate and the crate didn't open. And I remember him saying, you know, mailed because they had forgotten one screw. And so they took the last screw at and they pulled the front of it out. And the way she's in the crate is the front comes off and then you see her, you see her body

cast. And it's sort of wrapped in foam. And they pulled the crate out and I saw her and I just started to cry and oh Robin don't you're going to make me go and I just remember thinking you know this is probably the last thing her body touched that was attached to her and he Mr. Minussia at the time he was so kind he said would you like a moment alone with her and I remember saying yes I really would and you know for anybody who does archival work you're not supposed to touch things And it was hilarious because I remember sitting and I just held her hand. And it was just the tiniest little hand you've ever seen.

I mean, she was so tiny. And if you look at the representations of her, she's enormous in these representations. And I don't know in my mind I thought she was going to be six feet tall. And here's this little five foot four plaster cast. And I remember putting my hand in hers. and I had to sort of sanitize this for the book, but I remember looking at her and I said, you know, I'll try not to fuck this up.

I'll try really hard. And I sort of got up and walked out of the room. But it was almost like looking at this tiny little cast and thinking about all the humiliation and all the degradation, sort of wrapped up in this cast that this crazy man had done so that he would have proof of her abnormality for me was profound. Like years later, I still can't talk about it without becoming emotional about it. I'm in floods of tears just listening to you describe it.

I can't imagine what it must have been like. It was incredible. And it was so nice because I would come back to the museum and I would just touch the crate and say, I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I'm working. And so for me, it felt like there was a moment where you realize that the people that you write about existed, that they're real, right? And then all of the terrible things that I had learned about Bartman sort of came flooding at me in that moment in this body cast that is, I don't even think is real.

I think he padded it to sort of suit his purposes. but that that this had touched her body in death and that I was touching it telling her that she had not been forgotten. No. And that I was going to try to tell her story in a very particular kind of way and that I was going to try not to fuck it up. And that was sort of the moment for me that I thought, okay, here we go. So I thought to myself, if the book comes out and I feel like she can rest a little bit, then I did okay and I think I did okay. The book, Rinas Noir, is incredible and there's so much in it that's powerful, as you can

see. And one of the things that really struck me is that in all the research that you did about Sarah, all her life, all the exploitation, all the pictures that were drawn over, all the humiliating cartoons and nonsense, there was one word that you found that was said by her, just one, one word. Yeah. It's so interesting. Cuvier in his autopsy reveals something, I think, quite stunning, is he says, I kept trying to look under her covering. That was covering her genitalia. I kept trying to see under it and she wouldn't let me. And I think that that contributes a little bit to his glee when she's dead and he can now look at her labia. And it was in doing the research that I realized that I wasn't going to find anything written in Sarah's. hand, but what I did hear was probably the most important word I think in the book, which is the word no, is that we see in that moment where she had almost no agency to control her body, to control her representation, to control her exploitation, that she looks at Cuvier and says,

no. And that for that split second, he accepts the no. No. You know, when he says she wouldn't let me. I thought, it's the best ever that if you're going to have a word for Sarah Bartman, it's no. I won't let you have access, right? And when I realized that, I thought, there it is. I don't need any other word from Sarah Bartman because what Sarah Bartman did was she looked at that man, that horrible, hideous, repulsive man. And she said, no, it's glorious. is you're glorious the store oh robin rich thank you so much you've i'm just an awe of you in your work if people want to find out more about you venus noir is an amazing book about sarah and about other women of color in paris at the time but where can people find you on online to follow the work

that you're doing they can find me at paris noir on twitter and they can also follow the antics my latest research on Suzanne Simone Baptiste, who is the wife of Haitian Revolutionary Tucson Loviture. And we're going to have you back to talk about her. But I'm always on Twitter. She is incredible. I've been doing a little bit of research, knowing that you were researching her, and we're going to have you back to talk about her.

But just for now, Robin, you're just incredible. I'd love talking to you. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode. Thank you so much for letting me talk about Sarah Bartman. I always adore spending time in your company. I hope that you've found this one interesting. And thank you so much to Robin Mitchell, who blows my mind every time I'm lucky enough to speak to her.

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