Venus

Venus -Susan Lori Parks

First scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_KCCd_GO4Y

Disappearance of identity : Venus is rarely called by her name Saartje. Always either as the Girl, or the Venus of Hottentot.

Critics: they say that Parks softened version of true events; instead of having an addiction to chocolate Venus became an alcoholic. Also, her greed for money, “being her own accomplice” to her condition is implied. Instead of going to Paris, she was exhibited in a shed. Greg Miller tries to show how Parks’ works show a theatre of potentiality, rather than of derivative being. In minor literature, everything is political.

Critics and style: She doesn’t simply talk about colonialism. View of Parks’ works are “collective assemblage” or minor language where her language is more meant to convey, sensations, coexistence of view points than anything else. Point out examples of  the Chorus, the Negro Resurrectionist, the Venus and the Showman….Depending on who is saying the lines, a different meaning is given through the context.

Style of Parks: Usually her plays are abstract, but Venus is a little more real based ex: notes read out loud. "Rep & Rev," short for "repetition and revision," is a term Parks uses to

describe a style in which characters repeat phrases throughout a given play. She uses jazz as inspiration.

Different characters are played by same actors; through time the characters come back together. She enjoys writing about holes; of cramped space; wherever Venus goes, it’s in a confined space; even when she is with the doctor, that space is spooky to him. Also, holes in a more physical sense: her butthole, her vagina is alluded to so often by the people regarding her.

How Parks wrote the play as a mirror; although the narrative itself is in chronological order, the scenes are in backward order. Time is convoluted. The future was written before the past…

The theatre of Suzan-Lori Parks suggests new "lines of escape," new ways of  addressing the destructive desires of colonialism and its heirs.”

Complexity of oppressor/oppressed: multi-meaning in her plays including this one. There is no clear cut villain and hero. “double function of writing”. How the audience as well is complicit in the events that took place; they took objectify Venus and desire her. Colonialism capitalism through past and present. Venus is the desired object yet, she is “dominated by gaps, holes”.

She blurs the line between spectators: there are spectators in the court, at the freak show, at the Academy.

For all the mention of love (Venus, goddess of love, and the doctor’s insistent “I love her”, there is an absence of love. “The Baron Docteur's version of "love" proves merely another gesture of

oppression, a perverse fann of desire that injects death into love's hole and so hastens the Venus' decline.” There is space teeming with lust and desire, but no love. The desire is multi-faceted like all else: capitalist desire, fascist desire, bureaucratic desire….

Colonialism shows how it perverts Love: anything pertaining to love is destroyed eventually; the pregnancies, the liaison with the doctor. Sex is linked with death: “masturbation/maceration/mastication - wherein desire and death intermingle.” Colonial depersonalization: she is referred by the doctor briefly as a girl, but in his notes, she becomes a creature, a thing, her body verbally dissected for all to see. Despite the fact that she has talent, the doctor, to reassert his male and white power, dumbs her down to the chorus. Mother Showman did it too. Even a little glimmer of humanity needs to be made up by depersonalization.

Reason for the use of chocolate: Chocolate functions within the play as a drug, as a symbolic “profession of love”. → refer back to historic event where postcards were sent with coffee, depicting languor, refreshment. The chocolate also shows the decline of the world via colonialism: how the chocolate was lightened, how the “nipple of Venus” was enslaved,

[Backstory of the beginning of the play: Venus’s temptation and degradation; the Negro Resurrectionist, the 9 Wonders, the trial where Venus herself lets Mother Showman off the hook for money and hope. The love affair with the doctor coupled with opportunism; the blackmailing, the sickness, the death. ]

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE2lIZwMx2M