Monster’s Cover Art by Leila Fanner

“How easy it is to construct a living wonder you can trip from awe to ridicule and back to awe again.”

—Dzifa Benson, “Freak Sonnets”, Monster (Bloodaxe Books, 2024)

The story of Sarah Baartman’s life and death is a paradox. Baartman, a Khoekhoe woman tricked into a “contract” by two English men, was exhibited across Europe to audiences who found her both alluring and vile, who saw in her both beauty and deformity. She passed at the tragically young age of twenty-six, but her organs were preserved and displayed in a museum decades after her death.

Artistic explorations of Sarah Baartman’s story often pose the risk of making her more symbol than person, or extending the violence of her abuse through their mere recounting. In a blog post exploring historical portraits and caricatures of Sarah Baartman, writer and performer Dzifa Benson wrote, “As much as I hesitate to add more notoriety to Baartman’s legacy by sharing these images, I also feel it is important we are fully cognisant of history’s disturbing and pernicious constructions about the black female body.” Indeed, while the reality of Baartman’s abuse may be difficult to face, it remains undoubtedly necessary to expose, through retellings, the white supremacy which allowed this abuse and continues to vilify black women and our bodies in the present day. Benson’s debut collection Monster (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), in part a biography of Sarah Baartman in poetry form, rather than treating her as a symbol, gives a vividly personal first-person perspective to a woman often only spoken about by a world which has denied her personhood.

More than a poetry collection, Monster is, like Baartman’s story, a paradox in itself. Over the course of its four sections, Benson spans ghazals to poem-plays to interviews to prose-poem articles to musical scores. She transitions seamlessly from biography to ekphrasis, from the historical to the present day, exhibiting a formal adventurousness that knows no limits. This collection alone includes a poem-story overlayed by Benson’s own genome, a theatric conversation between a bustle and a black woman’s rear, and a poem composed entirely of English translations of Ewe surnames. Monster is brave not only in subject matter but in method.

Benson’s exposure of the ugliness of misogynoir is nothing short of unflinching. Whether in revulsion or sympathy, Baartman is denied human descriptors by her captors, spectators and even her advocates. Rather than “woman”, she is “creature”. “Macaulay assures me they have come with good reason / To assist this poor creature in their well-found suspicion”, Benson writes in “The Attorney General’s Submission to the King’s Bench”, a reimagined petition for Baartman’s liberation. Throughout the collection, she is described as “shaved ape” and “monster”, but also as as a “rare beauty of voluptuous allure”. The vile language used towards Baartman forces readers to grapple with the disturbing realities of history. In “Blues for Sarah” Benson writes, referring to Baartman’s audiences, “Can they be human / if their eyes are empty / and, like animals, they think they’re reflections are the enemy?” She inverts the white supremacist gaze by asking whether it is more inhuman to dare to possess a body deemed “other”, or to strip your fellow human beings, your “reflections”, of their humanity.

While Monster stuns in its brutally realistic portrayal of Baartman’s abuse, it stuns even more so in its humanisation of her as a person who lived, who loved, and who wanted. “Miss Baartman Recalls Her Lover, a Drummer from Batavia”, a moment of tenderness amidst overwhelming emotional violence, explores a romantic relationship of hers with delicate vulnerability. She states, “You asked: What parts of you are unknown to me. / I answered: This too muchness of self in its not enoughness”, a moment which lets readers see their most human vulnerabilities in Baartman. In “For the Morning Chronicle, 12 October, 1812, p.3”, Benson intersperses an article calling for the end of her inhumane condition with interjections from Baartman’s perspective. She refers to herself as “a creature he supposes has no interior”, confesses that “night after night I try to leave her behind me but the work of the Venus is never done.” We are shown a Sarah Baartman who longed for her freedom in place of the fabricated version of her who consented to and enjoyed her exhibition. We are placed viscerally in her skin rather than made to be her spectators.

This is achieved through Baartman’s intimate first-person point-of-view, but also through intensely vivid anatomical imagery. Over the course of Monster, Benson writes about the body with a surgical precision which unravels it layer by layer. “I want to bury the chameleon of this love in a secret place of nerve and sinew,” Baartman says in “Miss Sarah Baartman Recalls Her Lover…”. One of Monster’s most gruelling pieces, “1810-2002”, relays the storage of Sarah Baartman’s organs and genitalia after her early death, describing “Shelves of bell jars pickling / grey matter and nether regions / in an ungodly marriage / of decanted brains / of European male scientists / and black women’s genitalia.” This imagery makes for more than a compelling aesthetic experience, but makes the historical viscerally real and human.

That is the true heart of Monster, its ability to give humanity to a woman often reduced to a symbol of lust and racist dehumanisation. One of the collection’s most powerful moments, “Bottom Power Redux // Augmented with Bustle (A Poem-Play)” is a dialogue between a black woman’s bottom and a bustle that is both humorously ironic and deeply sincere. It condemns the hypocrisy of demonising black women’s features while, in the same breath, attempting to imitate them. It acts as an emotionally vulnerable account of the paradox of owning a body in an age when women’s bodies are under constant scrutiny. Bustle asks Bottom, “What is it like to own a body?” to which Bottom replies, “A hiding place you carry with you in plain sight. Double shadowed and twice born, three times if you have a uterus. A too muchness of self in the glare of mirrors revealing former body, desired body, digital body, bikini body, a body made for sin or in the gym.” This is, perhaps, an even greater contradiction than to be simultaneously fetishised and disparaged: to be both hyper-visible and invisible, picked apart nerve by nerve, limb by limb, but never examined for your deepest interior, to be “looked at and not counted”. Monster is not just a historical account, but a critique of a modern age which continues to capitalise on black women’s bodies while denying us our voices.

It is through art like Monster, that we can begin to reclaim them. It is by, as Benson has done, taking our own narratives and writing them in our own voices, that we can rectify our historical silencing. Monster is not only beautifully crafted and fearless, but necessary.