#Je suis Saartjie

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Her shoulder-blades made for a burden of junk irony –
rusted ploughshares traded for a load of local memes
too heavy for this time
when topple-heavy ideologies must fall –
even if weighted down by heavy hips,
fulsome lips that give no voice are heavier,
and tip.

Did our own Willendorfish Venus weep
under a gaze that cannot understand her pain?
Did she cry out while stamping on the serpent’s head?
Or just not know her shame? Did she call upon her museum-maid’s
apron to shield her from the whites
of curious eyes?

We choose to dress her mettle, dare not loosen bolts
that lock her to us, turn the cogs that link us
to her own paleolithic sight.
Her native nudity’s unbearable
to eyes that lust from out the West, craving flesh,
frustrated by a storm of isms
clanging hard against our heads.

(Following the fall of the Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town in 2015, the sculpture of Sarah Baartman by Willie Bester (2000) that stands in the UCT Library was ‘dressed’ with sheets of fabric. Around the same time, the grave plaque of Sarah Baartman was vandalised in Hankey, Eastern Cape.)

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