Titles establish property change the title, and you’ve wrested from the history of racism a powerful symbol for the emergence of black women as the depictors of their own lives. “The Voyage of the Sable Venus” has made its own voyage-that word’s bitter irony, lost on its original audience, is now its meaning-and ended up in this arresting book, whose title subtly transforms it. She glides serenely across the Middle Passage, attended by an entourage of cherubs and dolphins and escorted by a predatory Triton, who looks as though he’d read the poem on which the engraving is based: Isaac Teale’s “The Sable Venus, An Ode,” which celebrates the pleasures of raping slave women, since black and white-Sable Venus and Botticelli’s Venus-are, after all, the same “at night.”
Robin Coste Lewis’s début poetry collection, “Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems” (Knopf), derives its title from a notorious eighteenth-century engraving by Thomas Stothard, “The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies.” The image was slave-trade propaganda: it shows an African woman posed like Botticelli’s Venus on a weirdly upholstered half shell. Lewis’s catalogue of Western depictions of black women spans forty thousand years.
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