Where Love Lies I: The West’s Affair with the Exotic.

‘Portrait of Madeleine’, Marie-Guillemine Benoist (Image: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

We are told that love is a primal force: innate, ahistorical, transcendental and above society. But how can something be truly innate if it is a concept that exists within the act of telling? In 'Where Love Lies', columnist Mila Edensor interrogates the ideas that create the phenomenon we call Love. In placing Love back into cultural context, they show that the way we talk about Love dictates how we perceive it. Love lies to us when it claims itself as beyond culture. In truth, Love lies on the surface, in the language surrounding it, woven between our books and bodies, and importantly, in the present moment - as we mould the ideas that define love for ourselves and for generations to come.

“Aquela cativa, que me tem cativo” 

“That slave girl, who has me enslaved”

The Portuguese poet Camões must have felt very clever when he wrote this line. For you see, typically in poetry of this genre, in courtly love romance, the lover writes to a European noble woman far above his station. His anguish lies in her lack of reciprocity. This period of literature is dominated by thousands of lines written by very sad men, writhing under the ache of their feelings of unrequited love. Yet here in the late 1500’s, Camões has expanded the genre, changed it to now incorporate a slave, a colonial subject, a black woman. His ingenuity appears in his awareness as to how this new dynamic breaks from the genre’s norms. Almost playfully he writes:

‘Pretidão de Amor,

tão doce a figura,

que a neve lhe jura,

que trocara a cor’

‘Love’s Blackness,

is so sweet a figure,

that the snow swears,

it has changed colour’.

Snow, pale skin and whiteness – features that the genre saw as indistinguishable from the concept of beauty – have now been disrupted. He describes the beauty of this slave not as something that exists in its own right, but as something that contrasts the European standard. He defines her as subversion incarnate.

The first line’s interplay between “cativa” and “cativo” would have made obvious to the reader at the time that this is a poem that has shifted the traditionally noble status of the Lady to somewhere new. And it is here in this shift that we see the discourse of colonial Love begin to form.

But in our understanding of colonialism, why should we focus on historical understandings of Love?

The way we talk about Love touches on many societal facets. This discussion that defines what we perceive as an acceptable pairing, outlining specific forms of Love as legitimate. And in the process of defining certain pairings as an ideal, all demographic factors are taken into account. Passion, politics and power intertwine around our understandings of self, gender, race, nation and empire. Normative relationship dynamics reflect the wider political status quo, atypical dynamics clash against it. So, when presented with a given pairing, we ask ourselves if their dynamic fits within our wider narratives about the world. Do they complement and reinforce - or do they undermine them? All these questions arise within our perception and understanding of different relationships.

So now looking back to the Early Modern period, the beginnings of colonialism, we can see how Europeans were grappling with creating coherent narratives with which to govern interactions between their new imperial identities and these new and foreign peoples. Furthermore, during this period it was genre of courtly love romance, along with its tropes and accompanying dynamics, that was seen as the most legitimate and appropriate place to talk about Love.

Now faced with a foreign woman, a colonial subject, the question Camões was faced with was how to incorporate her within the genre, within European ideas of acceptable dynamics, and therefore within wider European narratives.

How was he to express Love to a woman of lower status, where the ideal dictates that she must exist above him, be of noble birth? How was he to objectify a woman with dark skin, where the traditional object of desire - the Lady - was defined by her paleness? We can find his method of reconciliation in his construction of a new object of desire, in the construction of the exotic.

From the onset, he names her ‘Bárbora’; a double entendre of both the name and “barbarian”. He later touches on the idea again, writing:

‘bem parece estanha,

mas bárbora não’

‘Well, she seems strange,

But barbarous – no’

But hold on? Is this affirmation against her barbarity something to be perceived as humanising, as dissenting from the narratives that dominated the wider imperial consensus?

For context, when writing the poem Camões was stationed in Goa as a soldier. In this military capacity, we can understand him as an active participant within colonialism. Furthermore, ‘barbarity’ was a feature attributed to cultures unknown to the Europeans.

Therefore, we can see this movement away from barbarity as synonymous with her movement and subsummation into European dynamics. Within this process she is no longer fully foreign; from a European perspective she has become known. The resultant change in perception comes from the narratives built around her, built with the purpose of reconciling the clashes present within the dynamic of a European man and a foreign slave.

He continues,

“Presenca serena

Que a tormenta amansa;

Nela enfim descansa

Toda a minha pena”

“Serene presence

That calms the storm

In her I now rest

All my pain”

This creates the romanticised image of the solider, battered by stormy seas, finding respite on new and foreign lands, and specifically within the women who live there. Camões has now created a new ideal pairing that comfortably aligns with the political status quo. Now within the Early Modern European mind, alongside the burgeoning understanding of the homeland and the colony, there were now two corresponding objects of desire:

The traditional, the noble, the chaste and pure woman of the homeland.

And in direct contrast: the novel, the slave, the sensual and sexualised woman of the exotic.

This exotic woman is not found beautiful because of her features in their own right. They are described as beautiful because of their strangeness. Exotic beauty holds those labelled with it in a middle place, in a state of both contact and contrast with the Europeans.

This middle place also reflects on the political level. Europeans demanded exploitative interaction, while simultaneously seeing colonial subjects as civilisational opposites, refusing to see those they imposed themselves on as having similarity or as equals.

In this sense, exoticism can be understood as the creation of a normative relationship dynamic, an acceptable and legitimised expression of Love, governed along colonial lines of power.

So now in the era of ‘post-colonialism’, does this fantasy of the exotic still exist?

How about in our passive acceptance of Thailand and Vietnam as destinations where European men travel with the explicit purpose of ‘indulgence’, be it in partying or the cheap purchase of sex. From mail order brides to the modern ‘passport bro’, why is it that the same dynamic, this remnant of the Early Modern period, keeps appearing again, again and again?

It appears that our perception of foreign bodies, of people who exist on the opposing side of the imperial dynamic has retained its shape throughout the centuries.

It would appear that the west remains in an affair with the exotic.