At the height of European imperialism, exotic postcards were an enticement to far-off lands that, thanks to the colonialists who sent them, would never be the same again. By Paul Theroux It seems as natural to dream of the exotic as to dream at all. We are born with an impulse to wonder and, eventually, to yearn for the world before the Fall in which we may be the solitary Crusoe, the guiltless adventurer, the princeling with a jewelled sword. Because the dream's perfection suggests that it is unattainable, man searches for proof that it is not. And whatever fantasy one has reveals one's peculiar hunger. It might be very simple: the sunny island paradise. Or it might be complex: the oriental kingdom of silks and plumes.
However ornate or imposing the architecture, the monuments, the palaces, they are the background; in the foreground of the exotic are people. Much of the lure of what we know of the exotic springs from photographs. In the beginning, photo-graphy was the proof that the exotic was not the confidence trick of the travelling painters or the sketchers on board the ships of discovery. What is it about a photograph that is so convincing? Perhaps, however fudged or posed, such photographs possess an accidental truthfulness, resulting from the undiscriminating lens rather than the selective human eye. They are representations of a complete world that is utterly different from that inhabited by people in whose dreams this exoticism was prefigured. Photographs of the exotic enlarge the meaning of the word.
Each such picture is an excitement, an invitation to the exotic and seems to repeat in its strangeness that this is a world that awaits further discovery. It holds out the promise (which is also the promise of pornography, a genre on which some of these images overlap) that you can enter this picture.
The first postal card - just a card for a message - was issued in Austria in 1869. By the end of the century this artifact had evolved into the picture postcard that was briskly used in the way it is now, as a hello, an I'm-all-right signal, and frequently a boast. Because it can so easily be read by a stranger, the message on a postcard seldom contains anything intimate or important, nothing crucial, never a secret, nothing you wouldn't want the postman to see. Why do travellers send postcards? To get a rise out of the people at home - to shock them, tempt them, one-up them. To deceive some people; to make them envious. To confirm their stereotype of the Other, to emphasise distance in a journey. Busy people send them. They are like very slow telegrams. They are a traveller's expedient, demonstrating economy of effort.
The apotheosis of picture postcards occurred at a time when the lure of the exotic was at a peak. They were sent in great numbers and variety at the height of European colonialism, in the decades before the First World War, when Britain, France and Germany ruled half the earth. The imperial powers exploited their colonies without improving them much, putting in railways and roads only where they made it easier to export a product. Most of the indigenous people were untouched by these efforts. So postcards such as those reproduced here represent the pretensions of a period of idealised innocence, when few outsiders travelled to these parts of the world; when it was possible to dazzle the people at home with such images. It was not a golden age but seemed to be. And it was a universe of almost inaccessible places. Scribbled on the back of one postcard, from Noumea on New Caledonia, is a reference to 'Notre long voyage de 45 jours'.
The paradox in the portraits of the warriors here is that though they are fierce-looking they are obviously conquerable. The Kik-uyu, the Ethiopian ('Cavalier abyssin'), the Tuareg in full battle gear, the Masai moran, the martial-looking Fijian, the soldierly Maori, all with shields and spears and clubs; none of them seems dangerous, only colourful and outdated.
One of the great cultural transformations of the present has been the abandonment of traditional dress in favour of cheap clothes made in India and China. These postcards represent a vanished world of peculiar costumes, maybe the last gasp of such dressing up - Korean wedding garb; the Nepalese girl with five necklaces; the 'Indian woman' (hardly more than a young teenager) completely decked out; the Chinese mandarin; an assortment of complex coiffures; 'Chérifa - Jeune fille Somali', enigmatic in her silk dress, the leopardskin beneath her feet, the apparel of chieftainship; and royalty, kings in formal regalia, like the Oba of Benin in his drum-like skirt, or the boy-child Kabaka of Buganda; the covered-up Moroccans, the Guatemalans in robes, a world of accessories and costumes.
In great contrast to the impenetrable thicknesses of age-old costumes and brocades, there is nakedness. The postcards are a record of the naked body around the world in all its postures. This is a reminder that the lure of the exotic is bound up with the world of bare, always brown breasts - Tunisian, Laotian, Ifugao, Samoan, Tahitian. Many of them are labelled, with a wink, 'Une beauté' or 'Jeunes femmes', 'A Zulu beau'. But we know them to be schoolgirls, dancers, musicians, brides and obvious prostitutes, amounting almost to vignettes, many of them subtly beckoning.
Here is 'Head hunter's home, Luzon', and the trussed and ghoulish-looking shrunken head from Ecuador, the 'Kaffir Wizard', who doesn't look dangerous, and the 'Dyaks, wild men of Borneo', who do look fairly menacing.
'Le maroc pittoresque' is the rubric on one postcard. That says a lot. Many of these images could be described as 'pittoresque', for that's one of the exotic's main qualifications. Because they are posed and so deliberate, many of these portraits unintentionally depict people as sculptural forms - the heap of marmoreal-seeming robes with one eye peeking out, 'Maur-esque de Blida'. They could easily be elaborate carvings.
There is no question of the authenticity in the modes of dress, and the weapons, the finery, the jewellery. I can speak to the Pacific clubs, which I have studied. Each form of Oceanic club shown here has a specific name and function - the short Maori patu for close combat, the Fijian kiakavo for breaking bones, the Samoan toothed club for cracking open the enemy's head. Some pictures of them exist, but these photographs give function and vitality to their ownership.
Ultimately this narrative of a lost world is less about the subjects than the ones intended to be thrilled or titillated or tempted to drop everything and leave home to crouch in the fo'c'sle. They say everything about the people who need to be furnished with images for our dreams. That would be us, the recipients of the postcards.
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