NaPoWriMo Day 26 : Still I Stand, Sarah Baartman
20 years,
I was 20 years old in 1810 when I got onto a ship to Britain with my
master.
I was on a quest to find fame and inner coexisting happiness.
It was not to my knowledge that I would be the main act at a carnival in
a “freak show
Black Venus,
They call called me
Venus Noire
They called me Hottentot
But I am
SARAH BAARTMAN
Daughter of a Khoisan man’s son,
Whose derrière
Whose beauty you have stripped off the face of the sun
As I walked down the street the white men smoking cigars whistled at me
to make me affirm how grandiose my rear end is
I stand.
As European women stopped me in order to touch my hair because it looked
“peculiar”
I stand.
As they called me a freak of nature but little did they know that if
anything I am Mother Nature who gave them the mothers that mothered them
I stand.
As a naked plastered body
I stand
As mere skeletons on display
I stand
As brains and genitals in the Natural Museum
I stand in the UK,
I stand as visual display through the Americas
I stand in Paris
I stand, far away from home.
Ask them, when will they take me back home?
Tell them I demand to go back home
Tell them, I stand, far away from home.
187 years,
I was 26 when I ceased to exist and it took them 187 years to take me
back home, in a coffin.
I was not alive to kiss my motherland,
But even though, sorrows no more
Do not forget me, remember me as
SARAH BAARTMAN
Daughter of a Khoisan man’s son
Whose derrière from which you wish you had a son
Whose beauty you can never strip off the face of the sun.