Dimensions of the Gaze: Lessons from Cambodia

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I could feel them immediately, the swarm of eyes gawking at me from every crevice of the airport the moment I set foot out of the plane. The stares were heavier on my body than the broiling summer heat even! I was travelling alone in Cambodia for two months, this part of the world I had never been before, and I had never felt quite so exotic in my entire life until that experience (and I have never felt that exotic since). Regardless of where I went, I was a spectacle. In “Staring: How We Look,” Rosemarie Garland-Thompson notes that, “The force of curiosity makes something into a curiosity” (64). Everywhere I went in the country I was met with people asking to take pictures with me and sometimes people asking to take picture of me. I was met with double-takes, pointing, staring, whispering and comments and questions of all flavors. Suddenly I would feel people’s hands plunged deep into my hair or swabbing my skin with their fingers to see if the black rubbed off. I even had awkward encounters with strange old men asking for my hand in marriage. It was as if my sun stained skin made me a lightbulb and they were moths so fascinated with my glow they could not help but be hypnotized, as if they could not help but want to engage with me.

Naturally, at first I was taken aback by my hyper visibility, but over time I became desensitized to it and even amused by it. The kind of gaze that was most often bestowed upon me while I was there was one of curiosity and of first exposure to an African person. It did not feel the same as the time when I was in a Walmart in New Jersey, waving and making doughy eyes at a cute toddler and her mother jerked her away. It did not feel the same as when I was wandering the streets of New York City and had a man throw his head out of the window and make slurping noises at me as he sped past. It did not feel the same as the kind of gaze I have slanted (and jerked away when I was caught) so many times at a homeless person sleeping on the A-Train in New York City or at a mentally ill person behaving in ways I did not expect on that same subway train or all these other forms of the gaze that left me aware of my social place as a black woman in the West or rendered someone else an object in my eyes with no hope of becoming subject.

The difference was that most of the encounters I had in Cambodia almost always ended in an interaction of some kind, whether it was people waving at me, or stumbling through our language barrier to ask me questions about my hair or about where I come from, or even something as simple as holding my gaze and smiling when I turned to look back. Do not get me wrong, I did not enjoy feeling strange or alien or “other,” and at times even feeling like an object of entertainment, but still, there was something different about the gaze that was an invitation to engage, a doorway to seeing the other beyond the eye.

Funnily enough, I spent much of my time in Cambodia critical of my own “Western Gaze” as a tourist in Cambodia. All the staring I experienced was juxtaposed with my own staring. I was brought to a place of deep reflection on being a tourist, and my own gaze on this place and its people, who to my western eye were mythical almost, objectified, exoticized - “orientalism as consumption of the East by the West without contributing to it” as described in a blog post by the Crunk Feminist Collective. I thought about the photographs practically gushing out of my camera of sacred temples, and monks, and festivals and floating villages, and a families on motorbikes. I thought about the visits to orphanages that were offered to tourists like me, as if they were museums. Few of those instances of gazing opened up avenues for interaction, and thus for a humanizing of the Cambodian people I was looking at.

There is an obscured power dynamic that exists in averting one’s gaze or in the disengaged stare, the detached and distant observing anthropological eye. Garland-Thompson remarks that while curiosity is “a blunt instrument…[it] overtakes; it mows down and gobbles up the object of its contemplation,” it is also a possible entrance into vulnerability and relationship that “puts one in another’s face”(65). The West’s fear of curious staring, preoccupied with politeness and is residue of historical middle class norms of propriety, makes is so that, “To stare, then, is to barge into someone else’s place, prying into someone else’s life,” (65). In other words, curiosity and looking remain an uninvited invasion into someone else’s world which ensures that the one who has been looked at remains an object of curiosity, and that the one averting the gaze has power over the interaction which makes him/her a subject. The gaze that seeks to probe without wishing to interact with and know the other as a subject is a gaze of power.