Leviticus and Numbers

10 Indicting YHWH

10 Indicting YHWH Interpreting Numbers 25 in Oceania Nāsili Vaka’uta The Bible, of all books, is the most dangerous one, the one that has been endowed with the power to kill. (Bal 1989:8) The Bible does not demystify or demythologize itself. But neither does it claim that the stories it tells are paradigms for human action in all times and places. . . . Perhaps the most constructive thing a biblical critic can do toward lessening the contribution of the Bible to violence in the world, is to show that certitude is an illusion. (Collins 2003: 20, 21) What I intend to do here is simple and straightforward.1 First, I will begin with a brief overview of popular European depictions of Oceania, which will serve as a contextual platform for my reading of Numbers 25. Second, I will discuss Anne McClintock’s concept of “porno-tropics,” some aspects of which will also inform my reading. Third, I will reread Numbers 25 as an Oceanic islander, and from the perspective of island women.2 Oceania Depicted Speaking of island women, I want you to ponder the following images of Polynesian women painted and/or taken by Europeans. (Viewer discretion is advised.) 179 Illustration 1 Illustration 2 Illustrations 1–2. Old depictions of Tongan women from the Godeffroy album.3 180 | Leviticus and Numbers Illustration 3 Illustration 3. “The Seed of Areoi,” by Paul Gauguin.4 Such sexualized representations of Polynesian women continue today in tourist literature distributed worldwide. I would like to make three points based on these images. First, the visual and literary depictions of Oceania—by those who crossed our boundaries—are preoccupied with island women, as if there were no men in the islands. This is the colonial feminization of Oceania. Second, island women are portrayed as promiscuous figures who offer themselves to be penetrated by imperial white male travelers/intruders. This is the colonial sexualization of island women. This imperial (mis)representation can be found in works like Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which talks about the so-called sexual freedom of Samoan women, and Paul Gauguin’s visual depiction of Tahitian women (The Writings of a Savage [1978], Noa Noa [2009], and Gauguin Tahiti [2011]) in nude and seminude states. The visual portrayals of women represent a common perception that Polynesia is a white man’s paradise, a place of sexual freedom with women readily available to be viewed, and perhaps more. Third, the feminization of Oceania has in some ways turned the region into what McClintock in her classic work Imperial Leather calls the “porno-tropics” of the European or imperial imagination. Indicting YHWH | 181 The “Porno-tropic” Tradition McClintock defines “porno-tropics” as the European tendency to sexualize foreign (non-European) women as “a fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears” (McClintock 1995: 22). She also speaks of a “porno-tropic” tradition that goes as far back as European explorers such as Christopher Columbus. In 1492, Columbus feminized the earth as a cosmic breast to which the epic male hero is a tiny, lost infant, yearning for the Edenic nipple. That image, according to McClintock, is invested with an uneasy sense of male anxiety, infantilization, and longing for the female body. At the same time, the female body is figured as marking the boundary of the cosmos and limits of the known world. In the European porno-tropic tradition, unknown continents are depicted as “libidinously eroticized”; women are figured as the epitome of sexual aberration and excess. The hallmarks of the porno-tropic tradition are its obsession with the feminization of foreign lands and the sexualization of foreign women. In the following, I summarize McClintock’s description of the process of feminization. First, feminized foreign lands are spatially spread for male exploration, then reassembled and deployed in the interests of imperial power. Second, in feminized lands, women served as boundary markers, and female figures are planted like fetishes at the ambiguous points of contact. At the contact zone, women serve as mediating figures, by means of which men orient themselves in space as agents of power and knowledge. Third, unknown lands are considered “virgin” territories, awaiting exploration, discovery, and naming. Feminizing terra incognita is a strategy of violent containment. Fourth, feminizing foreign lands appears to be no more than a familiar symptom of male megalomania, and thus betrays...