Barbara Chase-Riboud

Chase-Riboud, Barbara (b. 1936), sculptor, poet, novelist, essayist, and literary and visual pluralist. As a visual artist and writer Barbara Dewayne Chase-Riboud (D'ashnash Tosi) blends African worlds with European, Asian, and Muslim worlds. Embracing differences is central to her idea of coupling or combining opposites. Chase-Riboud was born in Philadelphia to parents who encouraged her talents in the arts. With their support, her interest in the visual arts grew. She received a BFA from Temple University (1957). In the same year she was awarded a John Hay Whitney Fellowship to study art in Rome. Returning to the United States, Chase-Riboud completed an MFA at Yale (1960). From 1957 to 1977 Chase-Riboud exhibited widely in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the United States. Although she is not an expatriate, Chase-Riboud lives with her second husband, Sergio Tosi, in Paris and Rome.

Her world travels with her first husband (photojournalist Marc Riboud) during the 1960s inspired Chase-Riboud's initial efforts as a writer. From Memphis to Peking (1974) is her collection of poetry based on the motif of traveling spiritually, physically, and sensually to Egypt (Memphis) and the People's Republic of China, where she was the first woman visitor since the 1949 revolution. With her publication of Sally Hemings (1979) and Echo of Lions (1989), Chase-Riboud can be included in the African American neo-slave narrative tradition, which extends from Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966) to J. California Cooper's Family (1991). Although Chase-Riboud is not the first African American novelist to treat the alleged Jefferson-Sally Hemings affair (see William Wells Brown, Clotel, 1853), her novel reignited the controversy over the authenticity of the relationship. At the heart of Sally Hemings is the interrelationship among love, politics, and slavery. Chase-Riboud suggests that Jefferson's abandonment of antislavery sentiments is due to his relationship with Hemings, his wife's half sister, whom he keeps in bondage because setting her free would mean she would have to leave Virginia. Valide: A Novel of the Harem (1986) depicts slavery in the Ottoman Empire during the late eighteenth century. Chase-Riboud uncovers the little known world of the harem through the protagonist, a Martinican woman who is captured and sold to Sultan Abdulhamid I. The woman rises through the ranks of the harem to become valide when her son becomes sultan. Although still a slave, as valide, she holds the highest position for women in the empire. The novel portrays harem women as living lives of boredom and self-indulgence, engaging in murder or manipulation in the competition to be chosen by the sultan. Portrait of a Nude Woman As Cleopatra (1987), Chase-Riboud's second collection of poems, connects her visual and literary talents. Observing a Rembrandt sketch with the same title, Chase-Riboud was inspired to write a narrative dialogue between Mark Antony and Cleopatra framed by Plutarch's story. In Echo of Lions (1989) Chase-Riboud presents the story of Joseph Cinque and fifty-three men who, as slave captives, murder most of the slave ship's crew and attempt to sail back to Africa.

The Africans land off the coast of Long Island and are jailed but John Quincy Adams successfully defends them.

In all of her literary works, Chase-Riboud gives a voice to those silenced by history. Pursuing this theme, she achieves a synthesis of human experience, bringing the past and present, the African and European worlds together. Chase-Riboud published Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Monument Drawings in 1997.

Bibliography

• Charitey Simmons, “Thomas Jefferson: Intimate History, Public Debate”, Chicago Tribune, 3 July 1979, 2, 4.
• Theresa Leininger, “Barbara Chase-Riboud”, in Notable Black American Women, ed. Jessie Carney Smith, 1992, pp. 177–181

Australia Tarver

artist; novelist

Personal Information

Born on June 26, 1939, in Philadelphia, PA; daughter of Charles Edward (a building contractor) and Vivian May Braithwaite (a medical assistant; maiden name, West) Chase; married Marc Eugene Riboud (a photojournalist), December 25, 1961 (divorced, 1981); married Sergio G. Tosi (an art scholar and dealer), July 4, 1981; children (first marriage): David, Alexis
Education: Temple University, BFA, 1957; Yale University, MFA, 1960.
Memberships: PEN; PEN American Center; Century Association; Yale Alumni Association; Alpha Kappa Alpha.

Career

Sculptor, poet, and novelist. Exhibited art in group and solo exhibitions, mid-1960s-.

Life's Work

In her massive sculptures, Barbara Chase-Riboud fuses elements from several different cultural traditions to create a transglobal art. In her fiction, she strives to give witness to history's forgotten characters, the men and women who, often, were unable to read, and thus did not leave their written stories for posterity. Though she is acclaimed for her work as both sculptor or novelist, she has attracted the greatest public attention as the woman who challenged media mogul Steven Spielberg in a court case that accused his company of plagiarizing her 1989 novel, Echo of Lions, for the 1997 feature film Amistad.

Chase-Riboud was born on June 26, 1939, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her mother, Vivian Braithwaite Chase, was from a Canadian family descended from runaway slaves. A talented child, she was given piano lessons and ballet classes by her supportive parents, and was also encouraged to develop her artistic talents, which began to display themselves early on. A gift for language skills also came easily to Chase-Riboud: at the age of ten, she wrote a poem as part of a class assignment, but her teacher accused her of copying it from another source. She was sent to the principal when she wouldn't "confess." Her mother found another, more encouraging school for her daughter-at home. As a young woman, Chase-Riboud studied art at Philadelphia's Temple University, and after graduating in 1957 went to Rome on a John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship for further study at the American Academy. As she recalled in a 1989 Boston Globe interview with Marian Christy, Chase-Riboud said that it was in Italy, away from the racial tensions of the United States, that she "first tasted liberty.... That's the ultimate liberty: feeling that the space around you is expandable."

Worked as Artist, Novelist

Chase-Riboud was accepted into the prestigious Yale Graduate School of Art, where she earned her MFA in 1960. Yet she was still moving in a world that was not quite fully integrated. Once, she was mortified when she stopped at a bar with some fellow students and was refused service. Realizing that there was a more liberated world outside of the United States, with its laws against interracial marriage and refusal to extend equal rights to all citizens, Chase-Riboud began to travel. She spent time in several exotic places, and found inspiration for her early sculpture from the mix of materials used in ceremonial masks in Africa. While in London, she traveled to Paris for a weekend, fell in love, and moved there permanently after marrying photojournalist Marc Riboud in 1961. She is now a dual citizen of both France and the United States.

Chase-Riboud's work was shown at Paris galleries by 1966, and by 1970 was included in group shows such as that year's "Afro-American Artists" at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Her work quickly began to gain international acclaim. Chase-Riboud was fond of working with unusual, though tactilely rich materials, such as a combination of hand-knotted silk, bronze, and layers of wax, this last element shaped using a blowtorch.

She also began to write poetry, and by the early 1970s had found an editor at Random House, Toni Morrison, who liked her work. Her first collection, From Memphis to Peking, appeared in 1974. She spent the next few years researching and writing her first novel, Sally Hemings. Published in 1979 and a best-seller not without its share of controversy, the book was inspired in part by a 1974 biography of Thomas Jefferson that touched upon a possible romantic relationship between the third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence with a slave he owned, Sally Hemings. Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson's own wife: Jefferson's father-in-law had sired both legitimate children, such as the future Martha Jefferson, and illegitimate ones with his slaves, as was common in the era. When Martha Jefferson died, Thomas Jefferson never remarried, but Hemings moved into his house, the Virginia estate Monticello, and may have bore him several children.

"She's a woman who's been erased from American history for no good reason except that she was inconvenient," Chase-Riboud told Los Angeles Times writer Edmund Newton, who noted this "titillating story of sex, slavery and the President has been gossiped about, indignantly dismissed and periodically resurrected since 1802, when a Virginia newspaper reported scandalous charges of miscegenation during Jefferson's first term in the White House. It was America's first presidential character controversy." On this topic and her other works, Chase-Riboud recalled a favorite quote from eighteenth-century French philosopher Voltaire: "There is no history, only fictions of various degrees of plausibility."

Faced Controversy Over Hemings Novel

Sally Hemings was a best-seller, but Chase-Riboud was criticized by historians for using an actual personage from history, and then inventing dialogue, inner monologues, and other characteristic devices of fiction. Moreover, some scholars contended that the alleged children did not belong to Jefferson but were instead sired by a relative, and that the actual Hemings was probably far too young to have been romantically involved with Jefferson. A major network was reportedly interested in making Chase-Riboud's book into a movie, but was urged by Jefferson's official biographer to shelve it, according to Chase-Riboud.

Jefferson, who established the University of Virginia and is considered a "founding father" of the country, had also written against miscegenation, or relations--on or off the books--between blacks and whites. "Why was miscegenation ever a crime?" Chase- Riboud wondered in the Los Angeles Times interview. "Because it went against the myth that the races were pure." Fictitious or not, the putative romance between Jefferson and Hemings as chronicled in Chase-Riboud's book struck a chord that has endured; the biracial romance even made its way to the screen in the 1995 movie Jefferson in Paris. Yet Chase-Riboud was also keenly interested in showing that the American character owes much to both black and white culture and the once-covert ties between the two, and whether the events that occurred in Sally Hemings' life were real or not, such deeds and links have been an integral part of American history. "White and Black mean nothing by themselves but only in relation to each other," she pointed out to V.R. Peterson in Essence.

Chase-Riboud continued to write not "historical fiction," but rather "fictionalized history" in the tradition of E. L. Doctorow and others, with works such as 1986's Valide: A Novel of the Harem. Set during the peak of the Ottoman Empire in Eurasia, it presents a "biography" of a Martinique woman sold by pirates to an actual sultan for his harem. Renamed Naksh-i-dil (Embroidered Tongue), she becomes a favorite of the ruler's, gives birth to a son, is made one of his official wives, and when her son becomes sultan in 1807, is elevated to "Valide," the highest achievement for a woman in such a society. As such, she was given charge of the harem, and Chase-Riboud interweaves into the narrative discussions of feminism, women as chattel, and the impossibility of true romantic love in a society where women and men remain inequals legally and economically. New York Times Book Review writer Wendy Smith faulted the "baroque trimmings" garnishing Valide's prose in some passages but termed Chase-Riboud's themes "provocative." "Particularly intriguing is Ms. Chase-Riboud's analysis of the harem, a much more vivid character than any of the book's individuals."

Chase-Riboud penned a continuance of sorts to the Sally Hemings tale with a 1994 novel, The President's Daughter. In it, she presents a fictionalized biography of Harriet, daughter of Hemings, whom Jefferson had arranged to be sponsored in Philadelphia by a French émigré. He gave Harriet $50 when she left Monticello, but actual history loses her at this point; Chase-Riboud recreates what might have occurred since Harriet was allegedly fair-skinned enough to pass as a white. In The President's Daughter, she does pass and receives a college education, marries a wealthy man--then his brother--and is able to witness some great historical events of the mid-nineteenth century.

Courted Controversy

Chase-Riboud took great pride in her work and acted vigorously to protect it from copyright infringements. She proved that Philadelphia playwright Granville Burgess's 1987 play entitled Dusky Sally infringed on her historical novel, Sally Hemmings. In 1991 a judge agreed that Dusky Sally shared too many similarities to passages from Sally Hemings, and barred the play from further production or publication. "When you make a big leap of imagination based on historical events, it is not fair that this kind of imaginative effort pass into the public domain just because historical figures are involved," she told New York Times writer Roger Cohen.

Though by now a well-respected visual artist and acclaimed writer, it was Chase-Riboud's 1989 novel Echo of Lions that would catapult her to the front pages in the late 1990s. The work chronicles the actions of one Joseph Cinque, the real-life leader of a slave rebellion on board a Spanish ship in 1839. After he and several other captives broke from their chains and killed the officers of the slave ship L'Amistad (Spanish for "friendship"), one surviving officer tricked them into sailing to America, where they were arrested and tried. John Quincy Adams argued the case before the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the Africans and won it. Cinque and the others received their manumission. As Chase-Riboud explained to Paula Giddings in Essence, she felt the story had too long been "just a footnote in history," and merited greater notice.

Prior to its publication, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday, liked Chase-Riboud's work so much that she sent the manuscript to film director Steven Spielberg and his Amblin Entertainment production company. Amblin flew Chase-Riboud from Paris to Los Angeles, met with her, then declined to offer her a deal for the movie rights. Chase-Riboud said they never returned the actual manuscript. Dustin Hoffman later legally optioned Echo of Lions from Chase-Riboud and hired a screenwriter to adapt it, David Franzoni, who asserted he never read it, wishing to fictionalize the story himself. Several years later, after Hoffman's option expired, an executive at Spielberg's new studio, Dreamworks SKG, met with Debbie Allen, who had long known about the Amistad incident and had been trying to drum up financing for a fictionalization of it. Spielberg eventually committed to directing a film version of Franzoni's screenplay after another writer improved its first draft's dialogue and scenes. Like Echo of Lions, the screenplay's story was told through the voice of Cinque.

Chase-Riboud learned of the movie's production in late 1996 and hired a prominent attorney who had won Art Buchwald's plagiarism case against Paramount Studios for the Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America. She obtained the script and found several similarities, including the wholly fictional character of a black abolitionist printer (in the movie played by Morgan Freeman), a discussion between Adams and Cinque that has no historical basis for fact, and a line where a prisoner on the ship compares its mast to the shape of a Christian cross. In response, Dreamworks SKG hired a prominent entertainment lawyer Bert Fields, who claimed that Chase-Riboud had lifted passages from a 1953 book on the Amistad rebellion, William A. Owens' Black Mutiny. Chase-Riboud argued that the similarities were based on passages from John Quincy Adams's journals, a valid historical document. Copyright law allows the creation of characters and events based on actual historical fact, but to use fictional characters or elements from one work in another, without giving due credit, is a violation of the law. There was no historical evidence, for instance, that Adams and Cinque ever spoke privately, yet both Echo of Lions and Amistad had such scenes.

Chase-Riboud made headlines when she filed suit trying to block the distribution of Amistad just before Christmas of 1997. "Scratch any screenwriter, that perennial victim of intellectual-property rape, and you'll hear cries of 'Go girl!' for Barbara Chase-Riboud," noted New York Times editorial columnist Frank Rich. This time, a Federal judge failed to find sufficient cause to block the release of the film, but did set a hearing on the dispute--Chase-Riboud also asked for $10 million in damages--for January of 1998, noting that "serious questions" were raised by a reading of both texts. Rich pointed out in his column that the credited screenwriter for Amistad, David Franzoni, gave "differing recollections...of just how little he knew about Ms. Chase-Riboud's novel (which he says he's never read) and when exactly he didn't know it."

Several days later, the New York Times then ran a story alleging that Chase-Riboud had taken passages from a 1936 book about harems for her novel Valide, and an African studies major in New York City came forward with similarities she found in The President's Daughter and a 1929 book titled Passing. In her defense, Chase-Riboud explained once more that she had borrowed from historical documents, not copyrighted creations from other artists. "My quarrel with Dreamworks is that they used my fictional events--my vision of Cinque and John Adams, my sequence of events. And they plagiarized them," Chase-Riboud told Margarett Loke of the New York Times. Loke's article contained two factual errors--one terming Chase-Riboud the plaintiff in the 1991 suit against Dusky Sally--which were corrected in the December 25 edition of the paper. In February it was announced that Chase-Riboud had settled with Spielberg's Dreamworks SKG for an undisclosed sum.

Continued Her Creative Output

In the meantime, Chase-Riboud continued to write, publishing Hottentot Venus in 2003. The historical novel tells the fictionalized story of an aboriginal South African woman named Sarah Baartman whose physical shape--enlarged buttocks and genitalia--intrigued freak show and circus audiences throughout Europe in the late eighteenth century. Upon her death, a French scientist studied her body in an effort to "scientifically prove" the racial superiority of whites. ALA honored Hottentot Venus with the best fiction award in 2004.

Chase-Riboud still pursues her art from abroad. She divides her time between an apartment in the Montparnasse section of Paris, a house on the island of Capri, and a Renaissance-era palazzo in Rome. She married for the second time in 1981 to Sergio Tosi. She has two children from her first marriage. In 1996 she participated in a group show at the Studio Museum of Harlem, "Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-65." After the Amistad case, she was working on winning approval for a planned work of monumental scale: Harrar, a proposed work commemorating the eleven million victims of the Middle Passage. Chase-Riboud conceived the work as two massive bronze obelisks with a chain wheel of bronze between them; eleven million links would make up the chain, and the obelisks would be engraved with the geographic place-names and African clans from where people were captured for transport as slaves. In 1998 she was commissioned to create a monument, titled Africa Rising, for the African Burial Ground Memorial at the U.S Federal Building in New York.

In 1999 Chase-Riboud became the first African-American woman to have a solo exhibition of drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Chase-Riboud's work in the permanent collections of, among others, the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), and Museum of Modern Art (NY).

Awards

Selected: Janet Kafka Award for Best Novel by an American Woman, 1979, for Sally Hemings; National Foundation for the Arts; Carl Sandburg Poetry Award for Best American Poet, 1988, for Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra; Van der Zee Achievement Award, 1995; Chevelier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France, 1996; American Library Association, Best Fiction Award, 2004, for Hottentot Venus.

Works

Selected writings

• From Memphis and Peking (poetry), Random House, 1974.
• Sally Hemings (novel), Viking, 1979.
• Albin Michel, 1981.
• Valide: A Novel of the Harem, Morrow, 1986.
• Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra (poetry), Morrow, 1987.
• Echo of Lions (novel), Morrow, 1989.
• The President's Daughter (novel), Crown, 1994.
• Egypt's Nights (poetry), 1994.
• Hottentot Venus (novel), Doubleday, 2003.

Further Reading

Books

• Black Writers, first edition, Gale, 1989.
• St. James Guide to Black Artists, edited by Thomas Riggs, St. James Press/Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, St. James Press, 1997.
• Barbara Chose-Riboud: Sculptor. Harry N. Abrams, 1999.

• Art Journal, Vol. 59, No. 3, Fall 2000.
• Boston Globe, April 2, 1989, p. B13.
• Critique, Vol. 4, Summer 1995, p. 258.
• Entertainment Weekly, December 12, 1997, p. 18.
• Essence, February, 1989, p. 30; December, 1994, p. 56.
• Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1994, p. E1; October 24, 1997, p. D5.
• New York Times, August 15, 1991; December 13, 1997, p. A15; December 19, 1997, p. A1; December 25, 1997, p. A2; February 10, 1998, p. A10.
• New York Times Book Review, August 10, 1986, p. 22.
• New Yorker, December 1, 1997.
• Publishers Weekly, February 16, 1998, p. 105.
• School Arts, February, 1996, p. 31.
• Smithsonian, March, 1996.
• Washington Post, February 26, 1989, p. X8; March 9, 1989, p. C3; December 25, 1994, p. X7; December 20, 1997, p. F2; December 21, 2003.

— Carol Brennan and Sara Pendergast