Response Paper 4

Bidisha Sengupta

In the essay titled, Venus in Two Acts, Saidiya Hartman interrogates the archives and
laments over its inability to give voice to the subalterns, in this case, a black slave
woman named Venus, killed aboard a slave ship, mentioned in the paper trail of the
Middle Passage. Hartman points out that Venus was hardly a single entity in the
Atlantic slave world rather she represented the fates of many such black women who
died a silent death, unrecorded and forgotten. In other words, she says,

“...Harriot, Phibba, Sara, Joanna, Rachel, Linda, and Sally, she is found everywhere in
the Atlantic world. …….Hers is the same fate as every other Black Venus: no one
remembered her name or recorded the things she said, or observed that she refused to
say anything at all. Hers is an untimely story told by a failed witness.”

According to Hartman, it would be impossible to answer if one asks, “Who is Venus?”

because there are hundreds of thousands of other girls who shared her circumstances
and whose words hardly generated any records. Unfortunately, the stories that exist are
not about them but are a romanticized version of the torture, abuse, and violence that
was inflicted upon them. Their names were hardly ever recorded but tossed off as insults
and crass jokes. Contextualizing the role of the archive, Hartman says,

“The archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body,
an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhoea, a few lines about a whore’s
life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.”

In most parts of the essay, she grapples with questions such as these- What are the
protocols and limits that shape the narratives written as counterhistory, an aspiration
that isn’t a prophylactic against the risks posed by reiterating violent speech and
depicting again rituals of torture? How does one revisit the scene of subjection without
replicating the grammar of violence? Such concerns regarding the ethics of historical
representation form the first act out of the ‘two acts’ mentioned in the title of the essay.
In the second act, Hartman makes an attempt to write about Venus while being careful
to not invent another narrative that ends up romanticising her fate and her death.

The inability of the archives to bring to the fore these forgotten voices of the past and the
restrictions imposed upon narrativity because history pledges to be faithful to the limits
of fact, evidence, and archive creates, as Hartman rightly points out, a seemingly
unbridgeable gap for the historian to overcome. Even if one tries, they eventually fail to
produce a version any different from what has already been repeated and romanticized (
the death of slaves, in this case) over and over again because the sources for each
attempt reveal almost the same stories, that is- the silence of the dead slave girls and
graphic descriptions of the violence leading to their deaths.

Finally, Hartman concludes by saying that the narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in
the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of the method of flattening the levels of
narrative discourse and confusing narrator and speakers, as is imperative to respect
black noise. However, contrary to Hartman’s claims, her attempt at not retelling the
death of Venus seemed to foray into the genre of romance and tragedy in some ways.
Overall, this remains an influential essay that guides us to write a counter-history
effectively while grappling with several confusions and inherent archival restrictions.