I want to tell a story about two girls capable of retrieving what remainsdormant—the purchase or claim of their lives on the present—without committing furtherviolence in my own act of narration.

the imperative to respect black noise—the shrieks, the moans, the non-sense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hintat and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical toits attendant discourse of Man.3

I hoped toilluminate the contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact, to topple the hierar-chy of discourse, and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices. The outcome of thismethod is a “recombinant narrative,” which “loops the strands” of incommensurate accountsand which weaves present, past, and future in retelling the girl’s story and in narrating thetime of slavery as our present.3

he archive of slavery rests upon a founding violence. This violence determines, regulatesand organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about slavery and as well it createssubjects and objects of power.33 The archive yields no exhaustive account of the girl’s life, butcatalogues the statements that licensed her death.

If I could have conjured up more than a name in an indictment, if I could have imaginedVenus speaking in her own voice, if I could have detailed the small memories banished fromthe ledger, then it might have been possible for me to represent the friendship that could haveblossomed between two frightened and lonely girls. Shipmates. Then Venus could have beheldher dying friend, whispered comfort in her ear, rocked her with promises, soothed her with“soon, soon” and wished for her a good return

How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannotknow? How does one listen for the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackleof fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and then assignwords to all of it? Is it possible to construct a story from “the locus of impossible speech” orresurrect lives from the ruins?

While the daily record of such abuses, no doubt,constitutes a history of slavery, the more difficult task is to exhume the lives buried underthis prose, or rather to accept that Phibba and Dido exist only within the confines of thesewords, and that this is the manner in which they enter history. The dream is to liberate themfrom the obscene descriptions that first introduced them to us

and to respect the limits of what cannot beknown.

Yet how does one recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from theterrible utterances that condemned them to death, the account books that identified themas units of value, the invoices that claimed them as property, and the banal chronicles thatstripped them of human features?

One cannot ask, “Who is Venus?” because it would be impossible to answer such a ques-tion. There are hundreds of thousands of other girls who share her circumstances and thesecircumstances have generated few stories. And the stories that exist are not about them, butrather about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, trans-formed them into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off asinsults and crass jokes. The archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, a display of theviolated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about awhore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.

When Dana, the protagonist ofButler’s speculative fiction, travels from the twentieth century to the 1820s to encounterher enslaved foremother, Dana finds to her surprise that she is not able to rescue her kin orescape the entangled relations of violence and domination, but instead comes to accept thatthey have made her own existence possible. With this in mind, we must bear what cannot beborne: the image of Venus in chains

If this story of Venus has any value at all it is in illuminating the way in which our age istethered to hers. A relation which others might describe as a kind of melancholia, but whichI prefer to describe in terms of the afterlife of property, by which I mean the detritus of liveswith which we have yet to attend, a past that has yet to be done, and the ongoing state ofemergency in which black life remains in peril.

Initially I thoughtI wanted to represent the affiliations severed and remade in the hollow of the slave ship byimagining the two girls as friends, by giving them one another. But in the end I was forced toadmit that I wanted to console myself and to escape the slave hold with a vision of somethingother than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic

If it is no longer sufficient to expose the scandal, then how might it be possible to generatea different set of descriptions from this archive? To imagine what could have been? To envi-sion a free state from this order of statements? The dangers entailed in this endeavor cannotbe bracketed or avoided because of the inevitability of the reproduction of such scenes ofviolence

t wasdifficult to exercise sexual restraint on the slave ship, Barbot confessed, because the “youngsprightly maidens, full of jollity and good humor, afforded an abundance of recreation.”19Falconbridge seconds this, amplifying the slippage between victims and sweethearts,acts of love and brutal excesses: “On board some ships, the common sailors are allowed tohave intercourse with such of the black women whose consent they can procure

What are the kinds of stories to be told by those and about those who live in such anintimate relationship with death? Romances? Tragedies? Shrieks that find their way into speechand song? What are the protocols and limits that shape the narratives written as counter-history, an aspiration that isn’t a prophylactic against the risks posed by reiterating violentspeech and depicting again rituals of torture? How does one revisit the scene of subjectionwithout replicating the grammar of violence? Is the “terrible beauty” that resides in such ascene something akin to remedy as Fred Moten would seem to suggest?14 The kind of terriblebeauty and terrible music that he discerns in Aunt Hester’s screams transformed into the songsof the Great House Farm or in the photograph of Emmett Till’s destroyed face, and the “acuityof regard,”15 which arises from a willingness to look into the open casket

AbstrAct: This essay examines the ubiquitous presence of Venus in the archive of Atlantic slaveryand wrestles with the impossibility of discovering anything about her that hasn’t already beenstated.

The barracoon, thehollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, theprison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroom—turn out to be exactly the sameplace and in all of them she is called Venus

What else is there to know? Hers is the same fate as every other Black Venus: no oneremembered her name or recorded the things she said, or observed that she refused to sayanything at all

The solution is always about finding ways to “help” and to restoreability of some kind, thus reinforcing the normal and the normative as desirablespaces that all must ennulate,

Under“the medical model,” disabled and queer bodies were pathologized as lesser,deviant, and undesirable, with profound consequences. Eugenic laws, for ex-arnple, were instrumentalized across the world to sterilize, institutionalize, andat tirnes even eliminate queer and disabled bodies.

In the United States, for example, we identifysome plants with such names as Japanese knotweed or Chinese privet and yetanoint the Georgia peach as American even though it is of Chinese origin.Repeatedly, desirable objects become US American while the undesirableretain their foreign morikers.’ Phe majority of US crops are plants of foreignorigin, while most insects that cause damage are considered native.”

Rememory can help us recognizethe profound botanical amnesia that produced xenophobie concepts such as in-vasive species, “discovery” of plants long known to natives, and translating theexuberance of plant reproduction into the decidedly human registers of “sex.”As we rememory the history of botany, the past opens up.

s Edouard Glissant succinctly observes, “the West isnot a place, it is a project.”*! Linderstanding colonialism as a project allows usto see its vast infrastructures in academic disciplines.

native and foreign. Are these historical terms? As we will see in the later dis-cussion of invasion biology, historicizing botany allows us to recognize these asimprecise, indeed political, categories rather than natural or biological ones.

Some sugeest that western science is itself best understood as an “ethnosci-ence’ and that appreciating its roats, routes, and evolutions are important anduseful, Our knowledge production has been far too roediated by the politics ofthe academy.'* The field of botany, like other fields, has “disciplined” itself intoa narrow, myopic field, with a prescribed object of study (the plant world) andprescribed methods (the scientifte rnethod). Disciplinary education enablesexploring the world from particular perspectives, reproduced generationally—perspectives that are taught, learned, rehearsed, practiced, remembered, andthen replicated endlessly.

If colonization still informs our scientific knowledge practices, how might weundo these bistories? We need rich epistemological and methodological land-scapes to ground a countercolonial view of biology. We need to interrogateand challenge linguistic traditions that ground our theories, epistemologics,methodologies, and methods that shape botanical practices.

Plants are anything but static; theyare dynamic and evolving.

The history ofcolonial botany is a story about more than plant worlds—how plants, animals,and colonized humans were used by and for the colonial project. By centeringthe plant, we see how colonists remade plants in their image, for their needs,consumption, and profit and for empire. While my focus is botany, revealingand resisting the hauntings of colonialism in botany reveals these same bssuresin science as a whole.

We get to ask,Why this canon? Why is this the center of the narrative of the plant world?importantly, how might we narrate otherwise? In challenging Linnaean sexualbinaries, we challenge all binaries, Surely there are always more than two sideste every issue? Not a singular or binary view but a polyphonic, polybotanicalimagination. In revisiting the labyrinth of infinite plant hfe, [ urge us to seebotany not as a site of the dark unknown of colonial scripts but as a site of joyfuland playful exploration for flourisbing botanical furures.

when colonial explorers in Al-rica, Asia, and the Americas described species they encountered, the diversityof those species astonished and overwhelmed. When Linnaeus began his ca-reer, “natural history was a mess, and people needed guidelines,”

Little did Irealize that my botanical artwork followed in a long history of the sciencessteeped in histories of sexism, racism, and colonialism, While many peopleacross the world observed, studied, drew, painted, and used their knowledgeof plants, only a few were allowed the privilege of a professional life in botany.

Botany Hourished during colonial expansion as explorers “discovered” atreasure trove of plants chicing their global voyages. At its peak, botany wasbig business, fucling commerce and propelling the growth of merchant capi-talism.”

She writes, “through textual practices and other means, women andgender-tagved activities were placed into a botanical separate sphere, set apartfroro the mainstream of the budding science.”* By the mid-nineteenth cen-tury, the profession of botany was thoroughly a masculine enterprise and theascendant male botanist its celebrated prototype. Likewise, we see the erasureof artisanal and working-class botanists.’

He in-troduced a novel system of classification and nomenclature—a “sexual system”organized as a binomial with a genus and species name (for exarople, Homosapiens for humans). Me organized plants and flowers around an anthropo-morphic imagery and in sexual binaries—male and female. In flowers, stamensbecarne raale and busbands, and pistils became female and wives; fertilizationwas likened to husbands and wives on their nuptial Hower bed consummating asexual union and marriage.”