Voyage of the Sable Venus: How the Intersectionality Between Race and Gender Has Shaped the Iconology of the Black Woman Figure

Robin Coste-Lewis’ poetic composition Voyage of the Sable Venus is a form-driven piece that utilizes the titles of Western art depictions of the black female figure to construct new ways of seeing. The collection uses eight catalogues of art titles from a range of historical periods that surround or include black women, beginning with Catalogue 1: Ancient Greece & Ancient Rome and traveling through time to Catalogue 8: The Present/Our Town. All of the titles Lewis engages with in this work were originally formulated under the hands of non-black, non-female artists, which indisputably tainted their portrayals of the black woman figure. Lewis confiscates these titles from the grip of their colonial origins and manipulates them in their form to construct new meanings for them. These formal decisions include the dramatic spatial separation between words, the placement of specific titles in conjunction with one another, and the obscure punctuation of particular terms - all working together to radicalize the meaning previously prescribed to the titles. Sadiya Hartman, a critical race essayist and analyst, delves into this notion of misconstrued iconology in her essay, The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors. Lewis and Hartman, both contemporaries within the discourse of black female portrayal, walk backward through history to make sense of black women’s representation across modern mediums. This essay will intertwine the poetic work of Lewis with the discursive work of Hartman to examine how the black woman symbol was molded under the intersection of racialized and gendered violence. Through a close reading of Lewis’ poetic form and Hartman’s historical analysis, an idea can form on how to make room for a new narrative archetype of the black woman. 

In the first poem of the collection, The Ship’s Inventory, Lewis strategically groups together titles that describe black women through color, “Our Lady of Mercy, Blue,” “Nude Iconolia Girl,” “Girl in Red Dress,” and “Yellow Negro Woman.” Lewis arguably places these descriptions among one another to illustrate the depiction of black women during the middle passage - blue embodying an initial innocence, nude embodying a portrayal of the naked body, red embodying sexualization or seduction, and yellow embodying a sickly body in the aftermath. By reducing the human figures to colors, there emerges the feeling that these titles (placed together by Lewis) ultimately represent the fate of the enslaved black women during the Middle Passage. This brutal portrayal of a human figure mirrors Hartman’s recount of the slave trade, where “the captive female body was subjected to innumerable uses. It could be converted into cash, speculated and traded as commodity, worked to death, taken, tortured, seeded, and propagated like any other crop, or murdered” (Hartman 168). Lewis’s color-centered descriptions illuminate the gendered nature of slave labor, where the black woman was not only forced to perform labor on the plantation, but was additionally subject to “sexual abuse and exploitation by the men of the household” (Hartman 170). Historical representations such as the color-focused titles hand-picked by Lewis are vital in understanding the social temperament toward black women, where their value was purely in their sexual desirability, reproductive capabilities, and overall profitability.

Catalogue 1: Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome strategically utilizes titles depicting black women as supplementary elements of furniture decoration, like a “Woman Reduced to the Shape of a Flat Paddle,” an “ointment spoon in the form of swimming black girl,” and a “mirror with handle in the form of a carved standing black girl” to exemplify that even in the artistic form, the black woman is performing a service for the pleasure of another. Lewis places the object description on the left margin, with ample space separating it from the description of humans that sits on the right. This space implies that the depiction of the black female was solely an aesthetic portion of the object, not crucial to its functionality. Lewis includes these art pieces from the hands of white artists to show their view of the black female body as an aesthetic object for the purpose of their art. Lewis ostensibly chooses this formal structure to critique how black women’s legacy is widely understood as supplementary to black figurehood and readily extractable at the hands of all others. Lewis emphasizes that their portrayal doesn’t have purpose or agency within this art, but exist as a means to uphold another object - the inclusion of the title “Statuette Once Supported an Unguent vase” exemplifies this fact. Black women were the basis of capital gain under slavery, and “women’s sexual and reproductive labor is critical in accounting for the violence and degradation of slavery, yet this labor falls outside of the heroic account of the black worker and the general strike” (Hartman 166). Essentially, the sexual exploitation and aestheticization of black women’s bodies aren’t accounted for in the consideration of historical black labor even though their reproductivity and domestic work upheld the entirety of slave-driven capitalism. Their bodies and integrities were, and continue to be, relentlessly extracted from in the name of capital.

This initial section also calls attention to the brutalized state of these human depictions with “Fragmentary Arms” or “Traces of Incrustations Present In Their Mouth.”  Lewis anthropomorphizes these art objects; we no longer feel that we are walking through a gallery observing aesthetic objects surrounding the black female form, but instead walking through history, observing an unbearable list of physical and structural violence that has influenced the depiction of the black female form. She conflates the broken remnants of the physical art form with the contemporary illustration of black women as broken, incomplete beings. They “endured the exhaustion and the boredom part and parcel of caring for children, cooking, cleaning, and servicing the lives of others” (Hartman 170) but are looked down upon for being neglectful mothers and wives. They are excluded from non-domestic work and forced into the care of white families over their own to uphold their families financially. The fragmentation of these women, as described in Lewis’ inclusion of titles, is representative of a mental and physical toll on the black woman’s body. She is degraded and violated within her space of employment and, in turn, degraded within her own home for it. Lewis anthropomorphizes these women through the presentation of physical art to comment on the societal burden placed upon black women’s existence.

Looking forward to Catalogue 4: Medieval Colonial, Lewis harps on the repetition of “untitled” art pieces and black women's portrayal in the background of art pieces. The descriptions left untitled suggest that the subjects or events depicted in the art form are irrelevant to the art’s value and that they were just elements used for their art’s sake. Here, Lewis may be commenting on the disposability of the black woman’s body and history’s refusal to acknowledge their existence within black labor. This section includes titles where the black woman is a minuscule feature in the art piece, such as “Negro Man strapped to a ladder, Being. Lashed slave woman seen”. This line expounds that while the black man is “being”, or at the foreground, the black woman is again just a feature of the backdrop. The repetition of “untitled” within these titles paints the black woman as a fragmented piece of the black experience, which is where they are situated by others in their representation. While black women are seen as having taken a backseat to the radical work of black men, they were in fact “required to mother children who held their children in contempt; to cook, clean, and comfort white men enabling them to go out into the world as productive laborers; and submit to intimate relations with husbands and sons and brothers or be raped by them” (Hartman 171). The black woman’s work within black liberation isn’t considered; seldom are there depictions of how she “poisoned slaveholders; plotted resistance; dreamed of destroying the master a guy nd his house; utilized abortifacients rather than reproduce slaves; practiced infanticide rather than sentence their children to social death, the auction block, and the master’s bed; exercised autonomy in suicidal acts” (Hartman 167). Black women have been radical figures throughout history, but where is this depicted in their iconology? Lewis urges her audience to question why there exist so many “untitled” works depicting violence against women.

In a post-slavery narrative, black women are rendered as self-degrading, upholding derogatory stereotypes, and unable to work for their respect. Catalogue 6: Modern, Civil, Right places the titles “South Uptown Woman/ Scolding Her Companion Woman/ Leaning on Radio Woman,” “Clapping Christening Cleaning/Club Women Cooking Class,” and “Wannabees at the White Party,” one after another. While isolated, these titles may accurately describe the piece they are endowed to, their grouping places a negative connotation on their representation of black women as the subject. Through the compiling of these descriptions, her figure becomes reduced to the stereotype of a neglectful mother, an unproductive member of society, and a woman unwilling to standardize herself to the white standard of living. Through this form, Lewis spotlights the absence of acknowledgement toward the physical and mental toll on black woman in a post-slavery society. Lewis aims to address all modes of violence within the institution of slavery, not just the male-centered ones or ones that are easily conceptualized. Her work in these poems emphasizes that women were the key mode of acquiring capital within slave-driven capitalism - their bodies are seen as machinery to gain further profit. She ultimately suggests the lack of sufficient narratives to encapsulate women’s acts of radicalism within the black liberation - ones that plagued their physical health, if not their lives. She challenges why black women are painted as archetypes of “broken and sullen” (Hartman 167) rather than depicted as transformative in their radicalism. Within the contemporary discourse of race, there exists a constant denial of their radical acts against gendered and racialized violence.

In the same respect that they were (and continue to be) exploited for their sexual, domestic, and physical labor, Lewis also calls attention to their exploitation within Western politics. Catalogue 6: Modern, Civil, Right groups titles that seem to be depicting black women within political campaigns, reading, “Woman Power!/She’s Black, She’s Beautiful, She’s Smart, She’s Registered, She’ll Vote”. These titles imply that the figure of “the voting black woman” was revolutionary in some sense - that her vote would somehow benefit her wellbeing within a society that is so clearly against her. Lewis situates these politically-centered titles in her work to point to the ways that black women were used as campaign tools in an attempt to acquire power for white, male politicians. Again, similar to Lewis’ other inclusions of derogatory titles, the black woman figure is being hijacked by non-black, non-women individuals in order to increase the vote-count within Western politics. Even within liberal spaces encouraging “powerful”, “beautiful”, and “smart” black women to vote, their figure is being used for a purpose that doesn’t benefit them. These titles, supposedly directed toward black women themselves, suggest that to achieve patriarchal freedom, beauty, or intellect, they must actively engage in the political realm that directly oppresses them. This irony within liberal politics only creates “another burden on black female flesh by making it a placeholder for freedom” (Hartman 171) and utilizes black women’s bodies as another number in the vote-count. This passage encompasses how the black woman figure is utilized for the gain of every individual except for them. 

The epilogue of the poetic composition, Boarding the Voyage, shifts to Lewis’ first-person point of view, where she whimsically interacts with the women stuck in these depictions of themselves within Western art. Throughout the piece up until this point, Lewis has evoked the eerie sensation that black women have been positioned against their will in an exploitative way. Now, she willingly enters the narrative to reshape it and perhaps change the depiction of these figures. She walks amongst these beings and now “She is not just a torso, or head, or scrap of a face”, but instead “the beginning of the world”. Lewis potentially argues that there is hope for the reclamation of the black woman figure. The figure is no longer enslaved to an image of a sexual being, a laborious being, or a being meant only for extraction. The figure, by the end of this collection of poems, has transcended to the contemporary figure of black womanhood - one that has agency over its own portrayal within art even though it is eternally sewn to its history. Lewis imagines these characters with the ability to come back to life, to re-word their descriptions on the gallery wall, and to narrate their tale with agency. The figure is finally at the center of the narrative and not being used to uphold another. As synthesized by Hartman, “her ability to provide care, food, and refuge often has placed her in great jeopardy and, above all, required her to give with no expectation of reciprocity or return. All we have is what she holds in her outstretched hands” (Hartman 171). The active voice at the climax of the poem aims to give her hands the freedom to construct her own narrative.

Voyage of the Sable Venus radically exposes the violent tropes of the black woman figure throughout history while also offering space for contemporary narratives to develop across artistic mediums. The collaging of titles with similarly violent sentiments, such as Lewis’ composition of women reduced to colors within Western art forms, emphasizes the creation of the black woman as an aesthetic object. The abstract formatting of lines describing furniture elements highlights the use of black women for upholding structural elements of society- where their bodies adorn home decor. The anthropomorphization of  black women as fragmented objects speaks to the generational burdens that produce mental and physical tolls on the black woman figure. The repetition of “untitled” in describing art with black women shows the lack of representation of their specific experience of gendered violence. The run-on lines made up of degrading tropes in modern context critique the racist undertones that contemporary art utilizes. Finally, the active voice within the epilogue leaves Lewis’ poetic journey with a hopeful feeling for the future of the black female figure. Her form reimagines a historical depiction of the black woman without value being placed on her body, her labor, or a legacy that has been painted without her consent. Through historical documents of gendered and racialized violence, Lewis beautifully walks with her audience through an unsanitized account of Western depictions of the black female form - exiting her work with an aura of agency for her future, as well as the future of the black female narrative.