Barbara Chase-Riboud, visionary woman: in words and art the renowned author and sculptor breathes life into the history of the forgotten female.

"Writing isn't my second choice. Writing is a parallel vocation."

--Barbara Chase-Riboud

Heeding the call of the Muses, poet, novelist and sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud has pursued art and writing as forms of expression since her adolescence. She began writing poetry in 1950, and sold her first work of art, the woodcut print Reba (1954), the year she graduated from high school. She enjoyed critical acclaim as an artist during the 1960s and '70s before entering the domain of literature with the publication of her poetry collection From Memphis to Peking (1974).

Chase-Riboud fuels her writing and her art with a seemingly inexhaustible source of creative energy. Of the four (yes, four!) projects that she was shepherding as we talked, two are artistic and two are literary. She is preparing a retrospective exhibition of her sculpture for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai to commemorate the 40th anniversary of her 1965 visit to the People's Republic of China. (Chase-Riboud was the first American woman to visit post-revolutionary China.) The exhibit dates have not been set. She is reviewing her published and unpublished poems for a retrospective collection that she wants to call Untitled. She continues to move toward the realization of her Middle Passage project, a memorial to the 11 million victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade that she designed and hopes to have erected in Washington, D.C. Finally, she is nurturing an unfinished novel about a turn-of-the-century African American New Yorker whom she describes as "a very wicked lady, indeed."

Many observers have noted connections between Chase-Riboud's writings and her art. In Barbara Chase-Riboud: Sculptor (1999), author Peter Selz juxtaposes Chase-Riboud's Zanzibar series of sculptures with her writing of the poem "Why Did We Leave Zanzibar." He mentions her volume of poems Portrait of a Nude Woman As Cleopatra (1988) in discussing her Cleopatra sculptures, created from 1973 through 1997; and he cites her composition of the poem "Harrar" during the development of her proposal for the memorial to the Middle Passage. In the same book, author Anthony Jansen eloquently explains what he considers to be the relationships between her "Monument Drawings" and several of her poems, including two sonnets and the verse "The Well of the Concubine Pearl." Chase-Riboud says that if she could elaborate on these connections, she would deserve the Nobel Prize ... for physics. "I just go on in perpetual motion, one event fueling another, whirling into eternity" she quips.

To See the Invisible

The general public most likely knows Chase-Riboud best for her novels, through which she resurrects the stories of some of the innumerable forgotten people of African Diasporaic history. She calls these people "the invisibles" and emphasizes that "no one is more invisible than a black woman." Sally Hemings (1979) was the first and best known of these novels in the United States and abroad. It explores the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and the beautiful, much younger enslaved Hemings, who was also half sister to the widower Jefferson's wife. Chase-Riboud says that she wrote this work because, "I wanted the American public and the men who write history to recognize an historical figure that had been denigrated, erased and denied. I wanted her to have a name--something she had never had--even if I had to do it through fiction."

Though she is a lauded professional, Chase-Riboud can identify with the namelessness that shrouds historical women figures like Sally Hemings. She experienced it firsthand during the dispute over the movie Amistad, when she charged Steven Spielberg's production company Dreamworks with copyright infringement of her novel Echo of Lions (1989) in 1997. The case became a cause celebre in federal court. Of that harrowing time, she states, "I was not Barbara Chase-Riboud, but 'a black woman' with no name, despite my reputation as a best-selling author, a member in good standing of the establishment...." The suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.

The media attention generated by the case as well as that which was directed toward Chase-Riboud after DNA tests proved that Sally Hemings's male descendants carry the Y chromosome of Thomas Jefferson's clan have assured that "Hemings's extraordinary existence as Jefferson's slave wife would, in fact, go down in history despite everything," she says.

The Case of Sarah Baartman

Chase-Riboud's latest novel, Hottentot Venus, recounts the life story of the 19th-century South African woman Sarah Baartman. Chase-Riboud describes Baartman as "the emblematic literal mother of Western racism," whose "travails were the travails of a whole nation, a whole continent, a whole race of men."

Chase-Riboud first encountered Baartman at the Musee de l'Homme (the Museum of Man) in Paris during the 1970s. A glass case prominently placed at the top of the stairs contained Baartman's body cast and organs. Chase-Riboud read the cams describing the contents of the case with horror. She could not leave the museum quickly enough, and never went back.

After reading Sally Hemings, a French historian sent Chase-Riboud a collection of documents on Sarah Baartman in 1983. The revulsion that she felt when she stood before Baartman's remains at the museum grew deeper as she read of Baartman's ignoble treatment--both in life and after death.

In 1994, South Africa's newly elected President Nelson Mandela opened dialogue with French President Francois Mitterand to negotiate the return of Baartman's remains to her homeland.

The French Senate eventually produced a bill that would sanction the repatriation. On May 3, 2002, Sarah Baartman's remains finally arrived in Cape Town, and she was buried on a hilltop in Hankey, near the Gamtoos River on August 9, 2002.

Meanwhile, Chase-Riboud entered the competition to create a memorial sculpture for the African burial ground that was discovered north of Wall Street in Manhattan. She drew upon her desire to restore Baartman's human dignity in order to create the award-winning sculpture called Africa Rising (1998).

Exhibited in the lobby of the federal building at the burial site, this work gives substance to Baartman's spirit in the prominent posterior that juts backward in parallel with the wings (modeled on those of the Nike of Samothrace) above.

Power in Survival

Chase-Riboud is fascinated by the power that has been wielded by women throughout the ages, a fact that is evident when one considers her writings and art inspired by Cleopatra. With the exception of Echo of Lions, all of her novels have been about women--seemingly powerless women. Chase-Riboud sees them as powerful because they survived violence, depredation, disdain and contempt in life and because their names have emerged "from the darkness of the past to become part of human history." She sees herself as empowered because she is a writer who controls words and the truth that is told by those words. She views her success in validating the memory of women such as Hemings and Baartman as substantiation of that power.

When asked what similarities and differences she sees in the lives of Sally Hemings and Sarah Baartman, Chase-Riboud says, "There are parallels: the invisibility, the historic importance, the eternal negation of their humanity. But there are differences. Sally Hemings is a footnote to American history, a name lost to history because of her color and status and the need to keep the inventor of the American identity pure. Sarah Baartman, on the other hand, is an icon of the invention of race--one of the most powerful and prevalent historical forces that exists ... Sally Hemings is a private yet emblematic anecdote between black and white. Baartman represents the entire relationship between Africa and Europeans."

To summarize her devotion to art and literature, Chase-Riboud recalls a question posed to interviewees on the television show Inside the Actor's Studio: "If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?" Her response to this question would be: "So what shall it be, Barbara? Shakespeare heaven or Michelangelo heaven? They are separate, but equal."

Monique Y. Wells is cofounder of Discover Paris! Personalized Itineraries for Independent Travelers (www.discoverparis.net) and the author of Food for the Soul: A Texas Expatriate Nurtures her Culinary Roots in Paris (www.parisfoodforthesoul.com).