Exotic Crush

So this week's theme at the Barcelona Poetry Workshop is Exotism, a topic that's close to my heart. But what does the word mean?

exotic (adj.) 

1590s, "belonging to another country," from Middle French exotique (16c.) and directly from Latin exoticus, from Greek exotikos "foreign," literally "from the outside," from exo "outside" (see exo-). Sense of "unusual, strange" first recorded in English 1620s, from notion of "alien, outlandish." In reference to strip-teasers and dancing girls, it is first attested by 1942, American English.

Exotic dancer in the nightclub trade means a girl who goes through a few motions while wearing as few clothes as the cops will allow in the city where she is working ... ["Life," May 5, 1947]

As a noun from 1640s.

A controversial notion, isn't it? You like what is foreign for being foreign, alien, strange, outlandish... but the unfortunate implications it carries are several;

Moderation and Adaptation:

To qualify as "exotic", it must not be so alien as to be alienating, no so strange as to be weird. Things presented (marketed) to us as exotic are often very lite versions of the original, redesigned specifically for our comfort. 

Typically, foreign food will be markedly different in host countries from how it normally is in its native land. Beauty standards are also quite area-dependent, and exotic women being beautiful by their own standards might not appeal so much to foreign audiences:

I can't believe I'm unable to find a collection of National Geographic photos to illustrate my point. Still, have a classic example:

Oh, the humanity!

This also applies to fictional, extraterrestrial life, and is the entire reason why Kirk keeps snogging Green Skinned Space Babes

[Insert Kirk Pick-up Line Here]

rather than really, inhumanly alien aliens

Here's lookin' at you, kid!

On the other hand, pictures from Delacroix and other Orientalist authors are readily and massively available. Which leads me to my next point:

Fetishization and Objectification:

The Indian snake charmer is being objectified by the Moor audience, and we objectify the whole scene in turn: recursion! 

Wait, you're missing a sexophone!

I think this point has been driven home in the last few decades, but do have a look at this classic book on the topic if you have the time. If you're short on it, though, let me share with you this poignant excerpt from Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks;

“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.

“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me.

“Look, a Negro!” The circle was a drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.

“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.

I could no longer laugh, because I already knew there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity, which I had learned about from Jaspers. Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other … and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea. …

I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin’.”

France's first powdered chocolate brand, Banania
featuring a Senegalese colonial infantryman,
praising it in pidgin Frech: "sho' good eatin'"

“Look at the nigger! … Mama, a Negro! … Hell, he’s getting mad. … Take no notice, sir, he does not know that you are as civilized as we. …”

My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, re-colored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up.

All round me the white man, above the sky tears at its navel, the earth rasps under my feet, and there is a white song, a white song. All this whiteness that burns me. …

I sit down at the fire and I become aware of my uniform. I had not seen it. It is indeed ugly. I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is?

Where shall I find shelter from now on? I felt an easily identifiable flood mounting out of the countless facets of my being. I was about to be angry. The fire was long since out, and once more the nigger was trembling.

“Look how handsome that Negro is! …

“The Palace Guard,” painted in 1900 by Ludwig Deutsch (1855–1935). Head aloft, shoulders thrust back, a Nubian soldier stands fearsome sentry in front of a towering carved-wood entrance, his vein-laced forearms gripping a lustrous spear. “It has intricate detail, great light,” Gabr muses, pointing to the guard’s imperious gaze. “That’s pride.”

“Kiss the handsome Negro’s ass, madame!”

Shame flooded her face. At last I was set free from my rumination. At the same time I accomplished two things: I identified my enemies and I made a scene. A grand slam. Now one would be able to laugh.

Desensitization and Disinterest:

Is there a more crushing fate than that of being a fad, a passing fancy, a has-been? As a certain singer who made a fair bit of coin on exoticist sensibilities, "it's what they call, the rise and fall..."

It's sort of the culture-wide equivalent of fading beauty, when you know that something superficial, something that is in the eye of the beholder, is all you have going for you:

Beyond Infatuation: True Love

The feverish excitement of meeting a new and enticing person, when settling down, can sometimes make place for a much more reliable and deep affection, one based on a deeper knowledge of the person's inner being and becoming, of their hopes and fears, their drives and demons, their principles and contradictions, their identity and difference. The same can be said of getting to know a new culture. The outer exotic, Them, becomes the inner familiar, Us. The fatuous, violent appetite becomes keen, powerful cordiality. The once mere lovers, are now true companions... and still lovers, hopefully...

It's a sound full of smiles in a tense atmosphere

which are hoping and breathing in this twisted time

It's the sound that offers twists and travels,

clamors, and faces,

It's the sound of marriages

Chorus:

If we sang in every colour

We'll make them dance, the bodies and hearts

If we're all together, it will be enough

If we gather our voices we will be heard

It's the sound that enlightens, shares and gathers

The beautiful districts dancing with the large ensembles

Those who wish for a friendly country, believe in a different national identity

It's the sound that dreams in reality, changes mentalities, sunders melancholy

It invents, it creates and overthrows established clichés and forgets all their funk

All the codes are banned and revised, we will put baggy trousers up the Elysée

No more quotas in football; no matter what we'll just keep the best

Weasels and fascists are just the same;

It is when there's too many that problems are raised

We see Yacine marry Delphine and not just pour la rime

(Chorus)

It is the sound that rewrites history

Everyone, on the streets, let us sing of hope!

The hope that, to change this world

we'll inevitably meet since the earth is round

Hope that things can move forward

that we love all the accents when we're speaking in French

The hope that one day it will be normal to see

a big bloc party at the National Assembly

The képis, the police, the kippas, the chador,

the bacwards-worn caps all fight the same fight,

The bohos, the proles, the bourgeois, the well-off, the street rats,

You are all invited on the track

It is the dance of a future that's slightly utopic

But this time needs hope

We must let ourselves be a little dreamy and believe it to see it