“When we see Blacks,” Genet wondered “do we see something other than the precise and sombre phantoms born of our own desire? But what do these phantoms think of us, then? What game do they play?”
Edmund White, Genet: A Biography, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993) 494.

 For the people of Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq

The other is a production of desire; and exoticism is one angle where a large group of textual and visual narratives are conditioned within the production. Postcolonial theory made us realize the criticality of our positions in relation to such materials, and called for a theoretical decolonization to be implicated within the reading.

This is a well-known plot from A, the colonizer to B, the colonized, and the constant relationship that ricochets back and forth between the observer and the observed. A produces textual and visual narratives of B, transforming B into something else than it really is and these narratives turn reality into a futile issue, for the dominant fictions overcome the reality of the other. In fact, when A talks of B, A talks of itself, its fears and its lusts. In this production of desire, there exists an intricate relationship between the gaze and the constructed narratives. Many apt readings and theorizations were made critiquing this plot of desire with/during physical and psychological decolonizations during the recent histories.

In his book Colonial Harem published in 1986, Malek Alloula wrote about the postcards showing Algerian women taken in the early years of 20th century where the gazes of Western photographers attempted to possess and hence colonize them. He investigated the phantasm of possessing Oriental women through the transparency of the spaces created within the postcards, ”where bodies are taken without any possibility of refusal”i Those postcards sent back to Europe disseminated visual narratives of this phantasm of possession, that is, the desire about how A wanted to see B. In his introduction, Alloula claims that the immense amounts of postcards should now be sent back; in other words, the gaze of A should be reversed, B should look back at A so that the centuries of old metanarratives can be deconstituted.

A recent film about the 70s in Haiti titled Vers le sud by Laurent Cantet talks about Western white women staying in a hotel by an exotic beach of Haiti. There they are accompanied by attractive young and old black men, their phantoms of desire, as quoted from Genet in the epigraph of this article. Thus, the gaze is not only concentrated on the women but also on the men, exoticizing both as the observed object of desire. When the leader within the group of white women, Ellen takes a naked snapshot of her very young and glamorous lover, Legba lying on the bed, one is initially reminded of other colonizing gazes that documented the object of desire by trying to possess it and later disseminating them via postcards. Secondly, because of Legba’s specific pose on the bed one is reminded of Gauguin’s famous painting Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892).

Uncannily, there’s a spirit of death watching Legba that is present in Ellen’s photograph that is an obvious exotification of the other. A spirit of death which Legba is aware of and which Ellen and her rival Brenda can feel but don’t want to know about for they are protected within an exotic illusion. The spirit of death is the political opression and turbulence in Legba’s country. His body is found deceased on the exotic beach at the end of the film. The rivals Ellen and Brenda leave the island, both facing the fact that they can’t possess Legba, not even knowing what he has really thought or felt about them in their encounter.

Juxtaposing the exotic illusion and the non-exotic fact of Legba, Cantet is very dexterous in his strategies and where he positions himself as a maker. He almost irritates his viewer by letting the ambiguity of Legba, the phantom of desire, remain in suspense juxtaposing the phantasm and the fact without any direct and concrete interpretation of the situation.

Nonetheless, the story continues to recreate itself, taking different faces and masks as the mentality of the colonizer remains intact. As Turkish artist Huseyin Alptekin says “The issue of the ‘other’ and ‘otherness’ has been discussed for the last fifteen years and become a cliché, but the problem still exists.” A very recent visual analysis of this continuity came from Michael Haneke. In Caché (2005), he mingles the personal past, the feeling of guilt and the collective memory as another example of his critical look on white western bourgeois society. Caché is about A’s terror faced with the sudden change in the usual relationship between A and B, the observer and the observed; in other words, when B reverses the gaze onto A. A video shot of a parlor in a good neighbourhood in Paris opens the film with the voice over of two people discussing the image. In the second scene, we understand that this is a discussion between Georges and Anne Laurent, watching an anonymously sent tape on their tv, trying to understand the motives of the person who has sent it.

Other anonymous tapes and postcards showing an image of a sick child spitting blood keep continue to be sent during the film. In fact, the recipient of the tapes is Georges Laurent, and inadvertently, the contents in the tapes refer to his secret troubling childhood memory: The memory of the Algerian child, Majid, adopted by his family after the boy’s parents died in the Paris police massacre in 1961.

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