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Papers by BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD
Callaloo, 2009
Page 1. Page 2. 822 Callaloo 32.3 (2009) 822825 THE SALLY HEMINGS CASE* by Barbara Chase-Riboud,... more Page 1. Page 2. 822 Callaloo 32.3 (2009) 822825 THE SALLY HEMINGS CASE* by Barbara Chase-Riboud, reply by Gordon S. Wood Barbara Chase-Riboud's letter to the editor and Gordon S. Wood's reply were published ...
Princeton University Press eBooks, Aug 4, 2022
Princeton University Press eBooks, Aug 4, 2022
Callaloo, 2009
... [End Page 852]. In Echo of Lions, Barbara Chase-Riboud foregrounds the Amistad revolt and cas... more ... [End Page 852]. In Echo of Lions, Barbara Chase-Riboud foregrounds the Amistad revolt and case to illuminate the ways slavery has been integral in shaping American and New World discourses and practices. The case interrogates ...
Callaloo, 2009
Once upon a time, there was a Khoekhoe nation called the People of the People, who inhabited the ... more Once upon a time, there was a Khoekhoe nation called the People of the People, who inhabited the eastern coast of South Africa. In 1619, we were discovered by the Portuguese, who, besides civilization, brought us syphilis, smallpox and slavery. They were followed by the Dutch, who gave us our name, Hottentot, which means “stutterer” in Dutch, because of the way our language sounded to them, and who introduced us to private property, land theft and fences. They were succeeded by the English, who organized us all into castes and categories and who called themselves and others like them white, and us, Hottentots, Bushmen, and Negroes, black, although, to my knowledge, none of us ever chose that name. And so to tell this, my true story, I was stuck with a name we didn’t choose but must use so that those who gave us these names may listen. And, although Hottentot is an insult equivalent to nigger, I used it in this, my story, just as Negroes use that word they do not recognize themselves by with whites, who gave them that name to begin with. I am sure that God doesn’t call me Hottentot any more than He calls them white. S.B.
Callaloo, 2009
Edgy, epic, oft-times controversial, always boundary-crossing-Barbara Chase-Riboud has attracted ... more Edgy, epic, oft-times controversial, always boundary-crossing-Barbara Chase-Riboud has attracted international attention as a sculptor, novelist, and poet for the past fifty years. This issue of Callaloo features creative work by Chase-Riboud alongside critical engagements with her creative writing, poetry, and sculpture. Few Americans, certainly few women or African Americans, have excelled across the genres of sculpture, poetry, and fiction simultaneously and received the acclaim Chase-Riboud has consistently garnered. While there is an overwhelming tendency to concentrate primarily on her sculpture, the time has now come, we believe, to reconsider Chase-Riboud as more than a sculptor. The critical essays assembled here in Callaloo navigate across Chase-Riboud's capacious oeuvre. One of our central aims in this gathering of creative and scholarly work is to impress the dynamism, diversity, and breadth of Chase-Riboud's artistic compositions. We aspire to abrade the boundaries that have compartmentalized her work. To date, Chase-Riboud has published two books of poetry and five historical novels, in addition to sculpting and drawing. Her poetry books include From Memphis & Peking and Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, both of which bear a synthetic relation to her sculptural work. Her novels include Sally Hemings (on Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress), Valide: A Novel of the Harem (on gender and power in the Ottoman Empire), Echo of Lions (on the 1839 Amistad ship mutiny), The President's Daughter (sequel to Sally Hemings), and Hottentot Venus (on the life of Sarah Baartman), a complement to her prizewinning sculpture Africa Rising at the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, New York.
African American Review, 1996
The story, told in alternating time narratives, begins in 1831 when Sally is aproximately sixty y... more The story, told in alternating time narratives, begins in 1831 when Sally is aproximately sixty years old and is visited by a census taker called Nathan Langdon. With encouragement, Sally recounts her past to him. A past that begins when she passes into the ownership of her half-sister Martha Wyles who marries Thomas Jefferson. After Martha dies, Jefferson goes to Paris where he is joined by his two daughters. Elizabeth Hemings volunteers Sally as their maid, seeing it as Sally's chance for freedom as slavery has been abolished in France. Jefferson and Sally fall in love and she returns to America with him, on the promises that they will go back to France someday and that she will be the only mistress of his estate in Monticello. Both promises are broken when Jefferson accepts political office and allows his daughter to live at Monticello after her marriage breaks down. Sally realises that nothing has or ever will change for her. A fact borne out when Jefferson dies and his will does not free her, only her last two sons, from bondage. She has not only been held in bondage by the fact of slavery, but by love as well. She has been a possession of both and only she can free herself.
Callaloo, 2009
The fetish you gave me out of love being The five shorn tips of the fingers of your left hand Tru... more The fetish you gave me out of love being The five shorn tips of the fingers of your left hand Truncated at the first joint, still bloody Not yet curled and ivoried in mummification yet Strung on a pendant of moon-shaped mother of pearl You hung round my neck Forehead pressed on mine Over an ancestor’s grave But I saw only the pulse Of traumatized flesh left back there A melancholy moan from Dahomey Purple with mutilation Which means Another woman is Dead, Doesn’t it?
Callaloo, 2009
Bathers In a new and unpolluted sea Fresh from vision You and I You and I New New Emerging Clinki... more Bathers In a new and unpolluted sea Fresh from vision You and I You and I New New Emerging Clinking like metal Shiny on the sand As wave-washed copper pennies Anchored by beach lizards Weighted in shrouds of Smooth rose pebbles Attached to Slow-rolling flying kites Separated by a Gritty breeze That winds down The space Between us As irrefutable as The Great Chinese Wall. . . Evaporating sea tears On you Sea tears that dry Leaving small white Circles of brine Not like my tears That remain Forever Undried
Callaloo, 2009
I am most affected by this spectacle And I must say, I am happy to be in the company Of one of my... more I am most affected by this spectacle And I must say, I am happy to be in the company Of one of my own sex. For I am shamed by the pudeur and forbearance This poor woman displayed In the face of the brutish, pornographic, Voyeurism of my countrymen (and women). They pluck and prod this small creature and call her names And verily act like a bunch of baboons. The comedy of manners being exhibited By the masters of the world Towards its colonized slaves Is more like a morality play of oppression On one hand, versus a kind of defiance Of all white English morals on the other. It is not an amusement. It is an erasure of time and distance Between our civilization and its antithesis, This African Venus The irony of whose name is not lost on me or the audience And even plays its part in this charade. For the Venus is a parody of English beauty and womanhood, As far from our pretensions of gentility As one could possibly imagine. Yet, there, in a cage . . . in the most dire Primordial circumstances, the Venus Has a dignity and a humanness that is totally lacking In her spectators and puts them to shame. I shed a tear. Mary does too—at her vulnerability. As females we all are burdened In the face of a male society. I am revolted. I try as did several other ladies To make eye contact with the Venus
Callaloo, 2009
Page 1. Page 2. 822 Callaloo 32.3 (2009) 822825 THE SALLY HEMINGS CASE* by Barbara Chase-Riboud,... more Page 1. Page 2. 822 Callaloo 32.3 (2009) 822825 THE SALLY HEMINGS CASE* by Barbara Chase-Riboud, reply by Gordon S. Wood Barbara Chase-Riboud's letter to the editor and Gordon S. Wood's reply were published ...
Princeton University Press eBooks, Aug 4, 2022
Princeton University Press eBooks, Aug 4, 2022
Callaloo, 2009
... [End Page 852]. In Echo of Lions, Barbara Chase-Riboud foregrounds the Amistad revolt and cas... more ... [End Page 852]. In Echo of Lions, Barbara Chase-Riboud foregrounds the Amistad revolt and case to illuminate the ways slavery has been integral in shaping American and New World discourses and practices. The case interrogates ...
Callaloo, 2009
Once upon a time, there was a Khoekhoe nation called the People of the People, who inhabited the ... more Once upon a time, there was a Khoekhoe nation called the People of the People, who inhabited the eastern coast of South Africa. In 1619, we were discovered by the Portuguese, who, besides civilization, brought us syphilis, smallpox and slavery. They were followed by the Dutch, who gave us our name, Hottentot, which means “stutterer” in Dutch, because of the way our language sounded to them, and who introduced us to private property, land theft and fences. They were succeeded by the English, who organized us all into castes and categories and who called themselves and others like them white, and us, Hottentots, Bushmen, and Negroes, black, although, to my knowledge, none of us ever chose that name. And so to tell this, my true story, I was stuck with a name we didn’t choose but must use so that those who gave us these names may listen. And, although Hottentot is an insult equivalent to nigger, I used it in this, my story, just as Negroes use that word they do not recognize themselves by with whites, who gave them that name to begin with. I am sure that God doesn’t call me Hottentot any more than He calls them white. S.B.
Callaloo, 2009
Edgy, epic, oft-times controversial, always boundary-crossing-Barbara Chase-Riboud has attracted ... more Edgy, epic, oft-times controversial, always boundary-crossing-Barbara Chase-Riboud has attracted international attention as a sculptor, novelist, and poet for the past fifty years. This issue of Callaloo features creative work by Chase-Riboud alongside critical engagements with her creative writing, poetry, and sculpture. Few Americans, certainly few women or African Americans, have excelled across the genres of sculpture, poetry, and fiction simultaneously and received the acclaim Chase-Riboud has consistently garnered. While there is an overwhelming tendency to concentrate primarily on her sculpture, the time has now come, we believe, to reconsider Chase-Riboud as more than a sculptor. The critical essays assembled here in Callaloo navigate across Chase-Riboud's capacious oeuvre. One of our central aims in this gathering of creative and scholarly work is to impress the dynamism, diversity, and breadth of Chase-Riboud's artistic compositions. We aspire to abrade the boundaries that have compartmentalized her work. To date, Chase-Riboud has published two books of poetry and five historical novels, in addition to sculpting and drawing. Her poetry books include From Memphis & Peking and Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, both of which bear a synthetic relation to her sculptural work. Her novels include Sally Hemings (on Thomas Jefferson and his slave mistress), Valide: A Novel of the Harem (on gender and power in the Ottoman Empire), Echo of Lions (on the 1839 Amistad ship mutiny), The President's Daughter (sequel to Sally Hemings), and Hottentot Venus (on the life of Sarah Baartman), a complement to her prizewinning sculpture Africa Rising at the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, New York.
African American Review, 1996
The story, told in alternating time narratives, begins in 1831 when Sally is aproximately sixty y... more The story, told in alternating time narratives, begins in 1831 when Sally is aproximately sixty years old and is visited by a census taker called Nathan Langdon. With encouragement, Sally recounts her past to him. A past that begins when she passes into the ownership of her half-sister Martha Wyles who marries Thomas Jefferson. After Martha dies, Jefferson goes to Paris where he is joined by his two daughters. Elizabeth Hemings volunteers Sally as their maid, seeing it as Sally's chance for freedom as slavery has been abolished in France. Jefferson and Sally fall in love and she returns to America with him, on the promises that they will go back to France someday and that she will be the only mistress of his estate in Monticello. Both promises are broken when Jefferson accepts political office and allows his daughter to live at Monticello after her marriage breaks down. Sally realises that nothing has or ever will change for her. A fact borne out when Jefferson dies and his will does not free her, only her last two sons, from bondage. She has not only been held in bondage by the fact of slavery, but by love as well. She has been a possession of both and only she can free herself.
Callaloo, 2009
The fetish you gave me out of love being The five shorn tips of the fingers of your left hand Tru... more The fetish you gave me out of love being The five shorn tips of the fingers of your left hand Truncated at the first joint, still bloody Not yet curled and ivoried in mummification yet Strung on a pendant of moon-shaped mother of pearl You hung round my neck Forehead pressed on mine Over an ancestor’s grave But I saw only the pulse Of traumatized flesh left back there A melancholy moan from Dahomey Purple with mutilation Which means Another woman is Dead, Doesn’t it?
Callaloo, 2009
Bathers In a new and unpolluted sea Fresh from vision You and I You and I New New Emerging Clinki... more Bathers In a new and unpolluted sea Fresh from vision You and I You and I New New Emerging Clinking like metal Shiny on the sand As wave-washed copper pennies Anchored by beach lizards Weighted in shrouds of Smooth rose pebbles Attached to Slow-rolling flying kites Separated by a Gritty breeze That winds down The space Between us As irrefutable as The Great Chinese Wall. . . Evaporating sea tears On you Sea tears that dry Leaving small white Circles of brine Not like my tears That remain Forever Undried
Callaloo, 2009
I am most affected by this spectacle And I must say, I am happy to be in the company Of one of my... more I am most affected by this spectacle And I must say, I am happy to be in the company Of one of my own sex. For I am shamed by the pudeur and forbearance This poor woman displayed In the face of the brutish, pornographic, Voyeurism of my countrymen (and women). They pluck and prod this small creature and call her names And verily act like a bunch of baboons. The comedy of manners being exhibited By the masters of the world Towards its colonized slaves Is more like a morality play of oppression On one hand, versus a kind of defiance Of all white English morals on the other. It is not an amusement. It is an erasure of time and distance Between our civilization and its antithesis, This African Venus The irony of whose name is not lost on me or the audience And even plays its part in this charade. For the Venus is a parody of English beauty and womanhood, As far from our pretensions of gentility As one could possibly imagine. Yet, there, in a cage . . . in the most dire Primordial circumstances, the Venus Has a dignity and a humanness that is totally lacking In her spectators and puts them to shame. I shed a tear. Mary does too—at her vulnerability. As females we all are burdened In the face of a male society. I am revolted. I try as did several other ladies To make eye contact with the Venus