Canter Bridge

For the very sensitive, the sages’ reflections on the paradigmatic foreign woman make for tough reading.

‘It just goes to show you’—the vocabulary of offended morality leaps too easily to the lips—’how bigoted, sexist, and self-excusing religious men can be.’

Perhaps. That would be plausible reading of these chapters’ excoriation of the scheming, death-dealing, seductive prostitute of foreign accent who inhabits their lines. Like most moralistic readings of literature that has stood some modicum of time’s testing, however, it would be a cheap and tawdry treatment of material that yields its riches only to more patient mining.

If only one can excuse thinkers who breathed the airs of a different age from the awkward burden of our momentary self-obsessions, it is possible to see beyond the scandal that is raised when the loose, foreign woman is made the icon of something dangerous. This requires a discipline of the reader’s over-ripe reflexes and a determination to penetrate the presumably responsible thought of the ancients rather than to flog them with one’s less enduring bigotries.

Think for a moment.

The foreign woman is exotic. We mistake her nuances for primary colors for we have no competence in reading her ways. If she is foreign to us, we are emphatically foreign to her and rendered naive by that fact. It is far more difficult to take her seriously, for her politeness can be mistaken as reverence, her purr as simmering desire. With the girl next door, such self-flattering conclusions come less naturally.

Think again.

The foreign woman is often right here in my path becaused of the economic need that drives migration to entrepeneurial streets far from a family’s comforts. Every zona rosa lady is somebody’s daughter.

Think one more time.

The foreign woman’s desire for you—yes, even for you— has more to do with making a down payment on a flat back home or buying milk for a hungry daughter than for those rippling attributes of yours that women closer to home have somehow failed to appreciate.

She is dangerous. It is not wrong for the sage to recognize this, even if his understanding of gender and propriety are different than ours.

Indeed, a close reading indicates that the point is not ethnic purity or feminine wiles. Rather, the ‘zarah’ stands for something. Indeed, some scholars have so captured her metaphorical character that they have postulated a referent for her imagery that is more national than sexual. Probably, they have taken a good point too far, leaving behind the compelling allure of breast and thigh when it is this very sexual heat that makes her so capable of undoing a good, young life and turning it bitter.

This is didactic literature, meant to impress a tender life with the dangers that lurk, meant to save souls before they become imperiled, intended to warn the young that there exists a good path and a bad one and that only one is worth choosing though the other beckons more forcefully. This is an acquired taste, a moral reductionism into two ways that is all the more powerful for its conscious avoidance of nuance.

A man must choose. A woman must consider her paths. The young are dead meat when found in the sights of the moral precariousness that haunts a life that is good only after adequate choices lined up in the same direction.

An over-sensitive reading may well harvest a short-lived satisfaction at its own aesthetic superiority. Such pleasure—like others—lasts for a moment.

Then lives collapse and poverty envelops.

Who feels good then?