'Exotic' is a horrible, harmful word, and treating it as a neutral descriptor erases the experiences of those that it harms. It posits the value of a place as how excitingly different it is to outsiders, rather than how it's experienced by local people. It allows outsiders to coo over things we/they find sexy or strange, without giving a fuck about their context. It fetishises. It also carries a ton of racist baggage.
Thailand almost never gets portrayed in the West as anything other than Oriental Exoticland. From early travelogues to The King and I to The Windup Girl, travellers and expats sideline the actual characteristics of the place and the experiences of the people that live there in favour of self-fulfilling fantasies about how weird and different it is. This is so much the norm that many Western writers probably don't think they're doing it at all, and nor do their readers. But the assumption that an expat must be able to write Thailand well - by virtue of having lived a privileged life surrounded by imported home comforts and culture - is total nonsense. Living somewhere for a long time doesn't make you exempt, but it might make you think you are, which is a problem in itself. Just because I grew up in Thailand doesn't mean I don't need to constantly educate myself about Thai culture and the way my own culture promotes damaging representations of it.
In Imagining Siam*, Caron Eastgate Dann writes about the circular effect of the Western construction of the exotic East:
“because it is presented in this way by writers, readers expect to receive an exoticised description, and because it is expected by readers, writers feel encouraged, and perhaps even obliged, to fabricate tales of the weird, the exotic and the erotic.”
As both producers and consumers in Western culture, we reward this kind of behaviour, and throwing the word "exotic" around as a positive in reviews feeds the circle, as does pandering to the desire for exotica in writing. How do we break the circle? Not easily or immediately, for sure, but by listening to people whose cultures have been exoticised when they say it's shit, by looking long and hard at how and why we use the word, by refusing to use it uncritically, and not getting defensive when we do and are called on it - we might have a chance.
*which uses Said's concept of Orientalism to look at the way Thailand has been written by the West through the ages - I've just started reading it, and it's not a perfect book (some Anna Leonowens apologism, meh), but it seems pretty comprehensive, and very valuable as the first English-language study of its kind.
Good intentions aren't enough, because they can mask all manner of fail, conscious or un-. Case in point: this weekend, I received a Special Commendation for my James White Award shortlisted story, Train in Vain. This is a tremendous honour, and I'm thrilled and hugely thankful to the Award, its judges, and its supporters. I was happy just to be shortlisted, not least because it’s not the kind of story I usually write - an alternate history spy thriller - and I wrote it in part to grapple with some of the issues I had with the steampunk and spy fiction I was reading at the time. I don’t think I did a perfect job of it, but I hoped I'd written something that worked against the usual portrayal of the British in nineteenth-century Thailand as a "civilising" influence - and was glad that the judges thought such a thing was worth their time.
This is what the Award website has to say about the story (bolding mine):
Tori Truslow’s ‘Train in Vain’ is a compelling tale of exotic intrigue and intricate automata, told in breathlessly vivid and evocative prose. There is no let up in narrative pace in this highly believable blend of fantasy and adventure. There’s wit too, and a hint of darkness amid the exotic imagery. We were desperate to know how the story would be resolved and we’re convinced others will be as well.Now, this puts me in a rather awkward position. As I said, I'm tremendously grateful to be recognised, but I'm also deeply uncomfortable at the language used here, and I can't not say something. Whatever the merits/non-merits of this individual story are, it's another white-filtered representation of a country and culture that only ever gets represented in SFF by white authors, and this is a problem in itself, but especially so when that writing gets valued in terms of its exoticness.
Am I part of the problem here? Of course. I may not have meant to, but I probably did play into exoticism in this story. I contribute – however inadvertently – to the exotification of Thailand, and instead of being criticised, I’m praised for it. And round we go.
Exoticism is by no means the only problem in Western SFF (meet its mutually-enabling twin, "authenticity"), but it is far too commonplace, and if we genuinely want the specfic field to be a diverse one we need to stop letting it go unchecked. Or all we’ll have is false diversity where self-fulfilling Western fantasies forever drown out other cultures’ own representations of themselves.
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