Notes from the Human Zoo 3: The Case of Ota Benga

Ota Benga (c. 1883 - 1916)

If any one individual can lay claim to being the face of the human zoo, it's surely the pygmy Ota Benga ...

Purchased from African slave traders by the missionary and anthropologist Samuel Phillips Verner, Benga was taken to the United States and featured in an exhibit at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904), before, two years later, becoming a popular sensation at the Bronx Zoo.

Although required to report to the monkey house at showtime, Benga was otherwise given the freedom of the zoological grounds. However, often subject to verbal and physical goading from the crowds Benga would sometimes become aggressive, thereby reinforcing the stereotype of Africans as untamed savages, who were, as a New York Times editorial informed its readers, very low in the human scale.

Whilst campaigners who opposed Benga's treatment petitioned the New York City mayor for his release, defenders of his role at the zoo pointed out that he had, in a sense, fulfilled the American dream by becoming something of star. He even had celebrity friends, including the Apache Indian chief Geronimo.

It was a shit life in some respects - but hey, it was still showbiz and Benga initially seemed to delight in his role and was excited to see his name in the newspapers. He also liked the fact that he was able to charge visitors for photographs and collect tips after a performance, thus making him complicit in his own exploitation.*

Alas, moral crusaders are nothing if not tenacious: and so, in late 1906, the mayor ordered that Benga be taken into custody by Reverend James M. Gordon, supervisor of a church-sponsored asylum in Brooklyn for coloured orphans. Gordon argued that Benga should be fully valued as a human being and condemned the exhibit as not only degrading, but an anti-Christian promotion of Darwinism to boot.

Benga spent four years at the orphanage, before Gordon arranged for him to be cared for by a respectable Christian family in Virginia.

Ota was given a nice new wardrobe of western-style clothes and had his teeth - which had been filed into sharp points in his youth in a traditional manner - capped, so as not to frighten the locals. He was also taught English and given a job at a tobacco factory, where his co-workers called him Bingo and rewarded him with sandwiches and bottles of root beer for regaling them with stories about his life.

To paraphrase Henry Hill, Benga became an average nobody who got to live the rest of his life like a schnook. Thus, when plans of returning to Africa were frustrated due to the outbreak of the First World War, it's little wonder that he fell into a deep depression.

On 20 March, 1916, Benga built a ceremonial fire, chipped off the caps from his teeth, and shot himself through the heart with a stolen pistol. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the negro section of the Old City Cemetery.

* Note: I appreciate this is a controversial claim, but don't see why we should completely strip Benga of his agency and ability to give consent. It's important to note, for example, that prior to taking up his residency at the Bronx Zoo, Benga returned with Verner to the Congo, but quickly discovered he couldn't stand his old way of life and so voluntarily returned to the US. Arguments to do with alienation and false consciousness are interesting, but not entirely convincing (not least of all because, ultimately, I don't subscribe to the fiction of free will). 

Part 1 of this post on the myth of the Great Family of Man can be read by clicking here. 

Part 2 of this post on the case of Sara Baartman (the Hottentot Venus) can be read by clicking here.  

Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo (1906)

Notes from the Human Zoo 2: The Case of Sara Baartman (the Hottentot Venus)

Sara Baartman: adding to the gaiety of nations 
and making the Georgian world go 'round

I.

Although more than one black woman was paraded on the stages and exhibited in the zoos of Europe with a sign around her neck reading Hottentot Venus, undoubtedly the most famous of these was Sara Baartman (or Saartjie, as she was often called) ...

II.

Brought to London in 1810, Baartman was presented in shows all over England as an eroticised human freak due to the substantial levels of adipose tissue in her buttocks and thighs producing a provocatively curvaceous figure (a genetic condition known as steatopygia that is common in women of sub-Saharan African origin, particularly those, like Sara, belonging to the Khoikhoi people).

For just a couple of shillings, you could gaze upon her flesh. Those willing to pay a little extra could even poke her with a finger or a stick, as if to confirm that her body must be jelly, 'cos jam don't shake like that!  

Not surprisingly, abolitionists were outraged - particularly as this was taking place shortly after the passing of the Slave Trade Act (1807). They called for her freedom and argued that Baartman's performance was not only indecent, but coerced. The courts, however, found otherwise and it was decided that she was as entitled to earn a living as any other freak.*

Ironically, publicity from the case only increased Baartman's popularity as an exhibit.


III.

In 1814, Baartman was sold and taken to Paris where she amused onlookers in the Palais-Royale. She was also examined by scientists from the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, including Georges Cuvier, the famous professor of comparative anatomy, who was not only searching for proof of a missing link between man and ape, but hoping to find an elongated labia, which earlier French naturalists had observed in Khoisan women.

Sadly, as Baartman's biographers note, her life in Paris was really quite wretched. Not only did she experience extreme poverty, but she was literally treated like an animal (there is some evidence to suggest that at one point a collar was placed around her neck). It's perhaps fortunate, therefore, that she died prematurely the following year, from an undetermined inflammatory disease.

Prior to being dissected, a plaster cast was made of Saarjie's body and this was put on public display at the Musée de l'Homme for over 150 years, along with her skeleton and preserved brain and sexual organs.**  

IV.

It's interesting to note in closing how Baartman lives on in the porno-cultural imagination. In a sense, she's still being exhibited in artworks, scholarly papers and across the media and the exploitation of her body (as symbol and artefact) continues.

The obsession with exaggerated female forms also continues. Bootylicious black performers twerk their hips and arses and trade on their wild or primitive sexuality, whilst Kim Kardashian knowingly celebrates (thereby endorsing) myths of black femininity by balancing a champagne glass on her extended bottom, as if inviting viewers to get love drunk off her hump.

In sum: it's radically mistaken to believe we closed down the human zoos, or that racial and sexual stereotypes are no longer tolerated within our society. The latter remain systemic and, whether we like to admit it or not, they continue to give a great many people pleasure.        

Notes

*According to Baartman's testimony, she was acting of her own free will and subject neither to sexual abuse nor false imprisonment. Some historians have cast doubt on the veracity and independence of this statement, however.

**Readers to whom this kind of thing matters, will be pleased to note that Baartman's remains were finally returned to South Africa for burial in 2002 and she has attained iconic status in the land of her birth.

See: Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, (Princeton University Press 2009).

Part 1 of this post on the myth of the Great Family of Man can be read by clicking here.

Part 3 of this post on the case of Ota Benga can be read by clicking here.

Notes from the Human Zoo 1: The Myth of the Great Family of Man

Today, along with freak shows, bear pits, and public executions, ethnological expositions - aka human zoos - have pretty much been consigned to the shameful past on the grounds that they are cruel, degrading, and racist.

Far be it from me to dispute or deny this; for it's true that the displays often emphasized the ethno-cultural superiority of white Europeans over non-white, non-European peoples deemed to be primitive and inferior, if not, indeed, subhuman. But it seems to me that the contemporary myth of universal humanism that posits a single Great Family of Man sharing a unified history is equally pernicious and, in fact, shares a similar logic.     

Roland Barthes explains how this moralised and sentimentalised myth functions in two stages:

"first the difference between human morphologies is asserted, exoticism [or what we now like to term otherness] is insistently stressed, the infinite variations of the species, the diversity in skins, skulls and customs are made manifest [just as in the human zoo exhibitions] ... Then, from this pluralism, a type of unity is magically produced: man is born, works, laughs and dies everywhere in the same way; and if there still remains in these actions some ethnic peculiarity, at least one hints that there is underlying each one an identical 'nature', that their diversity is formal and does not belie the existence of a common mould ... a human essence ..."

This is the lyrical neutralisation of men and women and the suppression of a history wherein we find not merely colourful, superficial differences, but stark injustices.

Thus, whilst it might seem to be an advance to be accorded equality and granted legal rights - it's certainly prefarable to being exhibited in the monkey house - one still needs to exercise caution and constantly look for signs of the ancient imposture exposed by Barthes.

The human zoos may have closed - but the system of values that opened them continues to operate.   

See: Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (Noonday Press, 1991), p. 100. A pdf of this book can be read online by clicking here. 

For part 2 of this post on the case of Sara Baartman, click here. 

For part 3 of this post on the case of Ota Benga, click here.   

Further Reflections on Baby Mia

Baby Mia with eyes open (2 weeks)

I.

Babies: what on earth do they think about, when they stare with eyes full of inhuman darkness?

I'm not certain, but I find myself agreeing with D. H. Lawrence that it's "by no means a gaze of innocence", but is rather one of "profound, pre-visual discerning."

It's obvious (is it not?) that the infant looks across a strange gulf of some kind and does so with such cruel objectivity that we instinctively attempt to chase the look away with kisses. 

II.

It's mistaken to believe babies are born blind, like kittens. For even at birth they can see something of the world and can make out the shape of objects, like a maternal breast for example, if these things are within very close range. But pretty much everything else is a black and white blur to which they are supremely indifferent.     

By two weeks, they can just about recognise a face (or a camera lens) and are able to hold eye contact for a few seconds - as baby Mia demonstrates above. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that they have any feelings for us, nor expect to get a genuine smile out of them (any appearance of such is purely an automatic reflex, more likely to indicate the passing of gas rather than the signalling of affection). 

III.

Barely able to perceive, babies have no clear ideas of anyone or anything and remain darkly self-centered. That doesn't mean babies are stupid or selfish. It just means they aren't mentally conscious and live not from the mind, but from the dynamic centre of first consciousness acting powerfully at the solar plexus.

In other words, it's from their little round tummies that they know "with a directness of knowledge that frightens us and may even seem abhorrent". 

And what does the infant know?

It knows that having lost the peace and joy of the womb and had its umbilical cord severed, it must develop ever-further into single identity. Exiled from uterine paradise, "no wonder there are storms of rage and separation."

Ultimately, baby Mia must scream herself into being and independence; for a soul cannot come into its own through love alone. 

See: D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

For earlier Lawrentian reflections on Baby Mia, click here; for Nietzschean reflections on Baby Mia, click here. 

You Can Take the Girl Out of Sodom ... (Notes on the Story of Lot and His Daughters)

Jan Matsys: Lot and His Daughters (1565)

I.

I've said it before and I'll undoubtedly have opportunity to say it again: the Bible is the world's most transgressive work of literature; a mytho-historical novel that contains page after page of terrible events and wtf incidents.

And there are none more shocking than the story of Lot and his daughters ...

II.

Having escaped the destruction of their hometown of Sodom and witnessed their mother turned into a human condiment, the two young women and their elderly father find themselves seeking refuge in a mountain cave.

Here, according to the account in Genesis [19:30-38], they ply their old man with wine and then engage in drunken sex with him over consecutive nights. This is done not only without his consent, but, apparently, without even his knowledge or memory of what occurred. In this manner, each girl conceives a male child as hoped, thereby illicitly preserving patrilineality or their father's seed.       

Now, I'm no prude - but, really, this is a bit much, isn't it?


III.

Having said that, there is something perversely pleasing about the daughters initiating and perpetrating the incestuous rape of their father, after he previously offered them as sexual playthings to the Sodomites if the latter would but agree to leave his angelic guests unmolested. For it hints at the idea of what Baudrillard terms the revenge of the object. 

However, some commentators prefer to turn the biblical account on its head and insist that women can only ever be victims of patriarchal power. Thus, they argue that it was more likely that Lot raped his daughters and that the narrative we are given in Genesis is a perversion first and foremost of the truth concerning incest and sexual abuse.

Such a cover-up - if that's what it is - may have been done in order to exonerate Lot and preserve the family honour. For whilst he may have been something of a black sheep, Lot was still the nephew of Abraham, father of the Covenant and progenitor of the nation of Israel. It could well be that the familiar practice of victim-blaming and shifting responsibility for sexual abuse away from the male perpetrator is first given religious sanction in this tale.  

Notes 

Readers interested in the idea that it was Lot who raped his daughters rather than vice versa, might like to see the following article by Ilan Kutz: 'Revisiting the lot of the first incestuous family: the biblical origins of shifting the blame on to female family members', in The BMJ, 331 (7531), pp. 1507-1508, (24 Dec 2005). Click here to read online. 

For a sister post to this one on strange flesh and sodomy, please click here.

  

The Possibility of an Island: Reflections on the Case of John Allen Chau and the Sentinelese

There exists in the midst of time

The possibility of an island

The recent case of the American missionary John Allen Chau, killed by members of an isolated tribe, the Sentinelese, for encroaching in the name of Love on their remote island home, raises many fascinating and ethically-complex questions:

What is our duty - if any - towards these people? Should we leave them to continue living as they have always lived; or should we assimilate them into our world? Should we try to protect them as if some kind of endangered species; or should we exterminate them?

It seems to me, that since there are so few of them - probably no more than a 100 - and since they present no real threat (unless provoked), then we should let them be; particularly as they have made it very clear that they don't want anything to do with us.

Like it or not, these men and women are not as we are: they are literally savages - a word that, as Lawrence says, is not merely a term of racist reproach. For the Sentinelese are "savage with [their] own peculiar consciousness, [their] own peculiar customs and observances" and we should neither idealise them nor deny their radical alterity.      

One would hope that even those who preach globalism and universal humanism (or, indeed, subscribe to a fanatic monotheism), might allow la possibilité d'une île and leave the remnants of an older, savage mankind "to live their own life, fulfil their own ends in their own way".

For I think Lawrence is right: to be confronted with an aboriginal people such as the Sentinelese is a kind of test upon us; for they are so absolutely in our power at last. If we can't let them be and abstain from interfering in their lives, then we may as well round 'em up and put them in a zoo, or simply shoot them now ...

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'O! Americans!', The Poems, Vol. III, ed. by Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1563-67.

In Memory of Stan Lee and on the Joy of Collecting Comics

Image: The Hollywood Reporter (July 2016)

We assume, says Freud, a strangely considerate attitude towards the dead.

Not only do we suspend all critical judgement and turn a blind eye to their shortcomings, but we write nice things about them on social media in cultural obedience with the ancient command De mortuis nil nisi bene. This display of posthumous kindness and respect contrasts sharply with the mockery and malice we usually direct towards the living.   

So it is that I have refrained from saying anything about Stan Lee, the Marvel Comics genius who died, aged 95, earlier this month. Clearly a gifted, energetic and ambitious individual - and someone who exerted a significant influence over my childhood - I nevertheless struggle to think of anything more I can say about the man.

Truth be told, I always found him a little annoying and hated all that Excelsior! bullshit. What's more, looking back, I don't even think I really cared about his costumed heroes or storylines. What I really enjoyed, I think, was collecting comics rather than reading them.

That is to say, I loved them as cultural artefacts; glossy, colourful objects that had come all the way from America and which put homegrown comics (including the piss-poor British editions of Marvel comics) in the shade. 

The excitement lay in the anticipation of the books arriving monthly in the local newsagents and then going on a Saturday morning to buy (or steal) them. And the pleasure lay in piling 'em up on the floor and watching the collection grow, as I competed with my friend Andy to see who could get the most or earliest issues of those titles we privileged.       

Strange Flesh: Notes On Sodomy

Sleeve artwork for Mortal Way of Life (1988) 

by German thrash metal band Sodom

I. The Sin of Sodom is Polysemic

Sodomy is one of those lovely old-fashioned words that is commonly misunderstood. Many people, for example, think it refers exclusively to anal sex - particularly between two men - and perhaps recall that Oscar Wilde was accused (not unfairly) of posing as a sodomite by Queensberry.

Historically, however, sodomy possessed a much broader meaning and referred to all non-procreative sexual activity, including, for example, oral sex and bestiality. It was often also tied to the practice of pagan witchcraft. Sodomy was thus not simply a form of perversity, but heresy; a rejection of God and a libidinal defiance of his moral authority.

It's hardly surprising, therefore, to discover that sodomy has a biblical origin ...


II. What Begins with the Threat of Angel Rape Ends with Fire and Brimstone 

According to the account in Genesis [18-19], God decided to exact divine retribution upon Sodom after two of his angels entered the city (in human form) and were immediately threatened with gang rape by the inhospitable locals.

Although Lot, who was charged with looking after the divine messengers, offered the townsfolk his virgin daughters as sexual substitutes, the men of Sodom were adamant they wanted to experience strange flesh whilst they had the very rare opportunity to do so.

For the Good Lord, who had long identified Sodom (along with the twin city of Gomorrah) as a hotbed of impenitent sin and sexual depravity, this was the final straw and He unleashed his destructive wrath upon it and its inhabitants in the form of fire and brimstone.

Only Lot and his family were given the opportunity to get out of town, although, unfortunately, their escape didn't quite go to plan after Lot's wife made the fatal mistake of looking back, as if secretly longing to stay and continue her old life in Sodom. For this, as everybody knows, she was turned into a pillar of salt.

(Interestingly - and as perhaps fewer people know - Lot and his daughters found solace in this time of apocalyptic upheaval and great personal loss by entering into an incestous relationship and having drunken sex in a cave ... but that's another story, for another post: click here.)
 

III. On the Necessity of a Little Sodomy

Never one to shy away from these matters, D. H. Lawrence insists that not only can bawdiness be healthy, but even sodomy can be sane and wholesome, provided there is a proper give and take between parties: "In fact, it may be that a little sodomy is necessary to human life."

It's only the fanatic insistence on purity, writes Lawrence, that always leads to madness, denying as it does the simple truth that all men and women are subject to desire and possess "blood and bowels and lively genitals".

The only problem is that Lawrence wishes to restrict acts of sodomy to the right time. But, by definition, such acts occur at the the wrong time, in the wrong place, with the wrong partners and involve a misuse of organs; this is what makes them such unnatural acts.

Nevertheless, it's important to be reminded that however problematic many aspects of his work are for a contemporary readership, Lawrence was not someone who wished to restrict human freedom and experience. Just so long as we don't get our sex on the brain and seek to form an ideal identity upon it, he was happy to acknowledge the necessity of vice as belonging to a general economy of the whole.   

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'What's sane and what isn't', The Poems, Vol. III, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1614-1615.

Too Much Water-Jelly

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard is best-known for a six-volume autobiographical novel given the Hitlerean title Min Kamp (2009-11): a series of books in which he exposes in intimate and intricate detail not only every aspect of his own life, but that of his friends and family too.

Several critics refer to him as a Scandinavian Proust. And so it's surely not coincidental that when asked for my opinion of Knausgaard's work, I immediately thought of Lawrence's criticism of the French writer, to whom he had a life-long aversion.     

For Lawrence, Proust was too much water-jelly. I don't quite know what that means, but I don't suppose it's a good thing. He was also guilty - like Knausgaard - of being "absorbedly, childishly interested in phenomenon" - not least of all in his own experience of such:

"'Did I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn't I?' asks every character in [...] Monsieur Proust: 'Is the odour of my perspiration a blend of frankincense and orange pekoe and boot-blacking, or is it myrrh and bacon-fat and Shetland tweed?'"  

Such writing, spun out for hundreds - if not thousands - of pages, displays an almost insane degree of self-consciousness: Mssrs. Proust and Knausgaard "tear themselves to pieces, strip their smallest emotions to the finest threads" and for Lawrence this is unacceptable:

"One has to be self-conscious at seventeen: still a little self-conscious at twenty-seven; but if we are going it strong at thirty-seven, then it's a sign of arrested development, nothing else. And if it is still continuing at forty-seven, it is obvious senile precocity."

The funny thing is, whilst I agree with Lawrence that infantile and narcissitic self-absorption doesn't necessarily make for great literature, it does give rise to TV comedy gold; for what is Seinfeld other than a brilliant exercise in supersmart postmodern irony and the microphysics of everyday experience?

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Future of the Novel', Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 151, 152. 

Note: Lawrence makes his water-jelly remark in a letter to Aldous Huxley written in July 1927. See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Maragaret Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), letter 4065.  

This post is for Simon Solomon.

It's Only a Little Prick (Reflections on a Flu Jab)

I've never had flu - not even man flu - but I appreciate the seriousness of this condition written in the stars and so this year, against my better instincts, I was convinced to be vaccinated against four of the strains of the disease anticipated to be in circulation this season.*

Now, my arm aches. And I'm sat here anxiously anticipating further adverse reactions, of which I've been given a long list, although, annoyingly, I was only told of such after I'd been given the jab, which surely makes a mockery of the idea of informed consent.   

Whilst assured that none of the ingredients in the vaccine can cause flu, it seems they can trigger mild flu-like symptoms, although these are re-branded within the small print as mere side effects. 

Of course, if you're unlucky enough to be in the 10% of people who experience headaches, muscular pains, fever, shivering and general malaise after being vaccinated, then you might not be so reassured to know these things have only epiphenomenal status.   

And if you're one of those really unlucky people (1 in a 100) to experience less common side effects - dizziness, diarrhoea, nausea, etc. - then you might be pretty pissed off that you agreed to the jab in the first place; especially when you read that even the World Health Organization admits that the vaccine is only modestly effective in decreasing transmission rates and the seriousness of symptoms in healthy adults.

If you're elderly or very young, have a chronic illness or are immuno-compromised, then it's probably worth having a flu jab. Otherwise, it seems pretty pointless: unless you like needles and have a thing for your local pharmacist ...   

*Note: the flu vaccine is reformulated each year for a few specific strains, but it certainly doesn't protect against all the strains presently active in the world, or any new strains that may as yet remain unidentified.