“Les Curiex en Extase ou les Cordons de Souliers et La Venue Hottentote” (The Curious in Ecstasy Or Shoelaces and the Belle Hottentot”, French cartoon, ca. 1814.
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The sad story of Ms. Sarah Baartman involved the barbaric maltreatment she received not only at the hands of those who held her captive; she was also brutalized and degraded by those who came to gape at her while she was exhibited throughout France from 1810 to 1815, up until she died at the age of 25.
The above cartoon depicts those who have gathered around her, and their exclamations about her body. The cartoon depicts the onlookers as the debased animals that they themselves were.
Sarah, displayed on a pedestal inscribed with the words La Belle Hottentotte is gawked at by two English soldiers, a male civilian, and a woman civilian. The little dog in the cartoon represents the base, carnal, animalistic nature of the four onlookers.
The soldier behind Sarah, reaching towards her rear, shouts: “Oh, godem, quel rosbif! (“Oh, goddam, what roast beef!”)
The other soldier, while looking at her genitals, shouts: “Ah, que le nature est drole!” (Ah, how amusing nature is!”).
The male civilian, looking through a type of eyeglasses, shouts: “Qu’ elle etrange beaute!” (What strange beauty!”)
The female civilian, while bending down to tie her shoelaces—hence the cartoon’s subtitle—looks through Sarah’s legs and shouts: “A quelque chose malheureaux est bon!” ( “From some points of view misfortune can be good.”) She however is not only looking at Sarah’s privates, but is also looking between Sarah’s legs and up the kilt of the soldier behind Sarah. The woman is looking at something else that is sexually arousing to her—the penis of the soldier standing behind Sarah.
Sarah in essence has been reduced to a piece of meat, a sexual curiosity, a sideshow freak, and a person the European woman can be thankful she is not. Not only is the woman able to bend down and sneak a peek up the kilt of the second soldier, she can also be smug in considering herself above Sarah—a two-pronged form of privilege that covers the privilege of viewing the penis, as well as the privilege of white womanhood (“true womanhood”).
All the while this is going on, the little dog is sniffing the butt area of the first soldier. They are not the civilized people they so pompously believe themselves to be, but are instead the debased beings who show no regard for Sarah’s humanity. In the end, they are the base, freakish animals who have been let loose from the menagerie of racist, sexist hate.
Sarah has become the subaltern of the “culture of dissemblance” that will come to follow all Black women who come after her, in how the rest of the world wishes to see Black women. The exploitative gazes render Sarah the exotic Other, a non-human to be ridiculed, derided, laughed at and in the process, erased, and rendered invisible in the long history of relegating black people and their humanity to the bestial and as pieces of flesh to be cannibalized and consumed for the benefit of the imperialistic, colonialistic, segregationist, stereotyping, racial profiling racist gaze.