Baroque Cross-dressers in the Orient: Severo Sarduy and Pierre Loti

The Cuban neobaroque nomad-writer Severo Sarduy’s (1936-93) “Oriental” journeys started in the Middle East, precisely in 1961, in Turkey. Going back one hundred years in time, a similar pattern is observed in the life and works of the renowned French travelogue-writer Pierre Loti (1850-1923), who arrived in Constantinople in 1876. For these writers who both tackled the notion of sexual and national identity in their works, the “Orient” represented a journey, a quest, a moving away from the Center, as well as a cruise towards self. This paper investigates this overlooked connection and argues that the Ottoman practice of tebdil-i kıyafet (cross-dressing; self-disguise) plays a crucial role in the formation of Severo Sarduy’s neobaroque aesthetics, whose idea of the “Orient,” as I will argue, subconsciously replicates nineteenth-century French Orientalism reverberated in Loti’s writings. To demonstrate this, I compare parts of Sarduy’s masterpiece De donde son los cantantes (1967, From Cuba With a Song) to Pierre Loti’s well-acclaimed novel Aziyadé (1879) and zoom into two core gestures found in these texts: a strategical (mis)use of the local dressing practices and an exotic conceptualization of the “Orient,” which go hand in hand. As the paper brings together these two writers who have never been studied together, it analyzes their desire to travel along a route vers l’est and capture the allure of “Oriental” places. In turn, I conceptualize the notion called “transgressing/transdressing baroque aesthetics” and use it to identify traces of the traveler’s quest to access alternate forms of self-making and identitybuilding in the “East.”