Citation: Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14.
Scholar Saidiya Hartman is a literary scholar and cultural historian that focuses on the translation of tracing afterlives of slavery in American life. Hartman uses this essay as a space to examine the ever-present, yet unknown existence of the Venus in the archive of the Transatlantic slavery. She grapples with the impossibility of discovering anything about the Venus that hasn’t already been stated as well as the ironic symbol of Venus used to describe the unknown presence of enslaved women in the Atlantic world. She argues that the excess of literature on Venus simultaneously details absolutely nothing and all that can ever be said about the anonymity of enslaved women subjected to terrors at the hands of her enslavers. Hartman notes that readers will always know more about the overseers that exacted terror and the violence exacted on these Venuses than we will ever know about these women themselves. Therefore, all enslaved women in every variation of abuse can only ever be imagined as Venus because of the purposeful erasure of her fate. Her name cannot and will not be remembered, as there was never cause to prescribe agency to an object meant for the abuses of whiteness and the capitalistic benefit of burgeoning nations.
In this article, Hartman states that all we know of the Venus is always situated in her encounter with dominant powers and marks her presence as a meager existence to the larger narrative of colonialism and slavery. Most of what is divulged about a Venus is taken from the accounts of her masters and captors which makes the window of information a generalized account of experience with the enslaved woman as commodity and sexual object. Hartman states that it is futile to ask “Who is Venus?” because it would impossible to answer that question in a way that individualizes a woman from thousands of others that suffered similar terrors. She argues that even the stories that exist are not about the women themselves, but of the violence exacted on them that turned them into nothing but a generalized and collective group. Hartman ultimately argues that the archive, or the: literature, analytics, statistics that seek to collectively define the Venus is only a “death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property…an asterisk in the grand narrative of history”.
Hartman asks the reader many poignant questions about how exactly to extend to the stories of the histories of enslaved women. She states that those endeavors, particularly in the experience of her own writing, is grounded upon a kind of hopelessness. There is a difficulty in accurately writing on an experience of the Venus because of purposeful erasure of their histories as commodified objects. There is also a danger of enacting methods of romance or fanciful imagination in order to restore agency to these unknown women. To Hartman, it is difficult to rewrite accounts of an enslaved people whose histories are already enacted, and for whom are these stories for ultimately? If the re-counting of painful histories of the Venus stems from a cathartic level, then is the written endeavor a selfish feat? Ultimately, Hartman asserts that one can only continue to speculate on the most appropriate ways to tell painful histories and stories and allow that in the task of writing on the impossible, one has to be mindful of the continuous effort to recognize our place in contributing to engaging the archive.
