Borat and the cultural legacy of the Cold War
Due to the release of the highly-publicized film Borat 2 or Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, many Kazakh people are annoyed. As a former Soviet minority, I am trying to justify to myself that Borat 2 is okay to laugh at and enjoy and also support the Kazakh people, many of whom feel invisible when their voices of concern regarding negative blowback and stereotypes aren’t heard in the media.
“I chose Kazakhstan because it was a place that almost nobody in the U.S. knew anything about, which allowed us to create a wild, comedic, fake world. The real Kazakhstan is a beautiful country with a modern, proud society — the opposite of Borat’s version.” Borat’s alter-ego, Sacha Baron Cohen, told the New York Times.
The thing is — Cohen claims that Borat is meant to make fun of the west, or the “occident” in Saidian terms. The Americans, Brits, and other westerners who the films are marketed to are supposedly the butt of the joke, not the Kazakh people. There is truth to this, highlighted by the Borat character’s interactions with real people in the film. Many of these exchanges showcase the bias, racism, antisemitism, and misogyny that still exist in western societies and even in politics, as the case of Rudy Giuliani has taught us.
Having said that, I can’t help but feel that Kazakhs are being laughed at even though portrayals of Kazakhstan a la Borat don’t even touch or mimic the real Kazakh culture in any meaningful way. Baron Cohen himself acknowledged western audiences were mostly unaware of Kazakhstan’s existence and thus it was exactly the kind of place to spin a tale of a “wild, comedic, fake world,” in Baron Cohen’s own terms.
Doing that, however, is a classic page out of the orientalist’s playbook and is nothing new. Much like the west has been portrayed on screen as wild (ergo wild, wild west) due to the existence of indigenous peoples’, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and other parts of Asia have similarly been portrayed as barbaric and backward due to their cultural and political juxtaposition to the mythic ideals of Americanism.
That said, I can understand that due to comedic purposes, Baron Cohen didn’t exactly take all of this into consideration when making the original 2006 film. I do not mean to demonize Cohen in my criticism, but I do think it’s important to note that in his 2012 film The Dictator, Baron Cohen opted to use a fake country — Wadiya — to portray the gulf countries of the Middle East. Perhaps the names of most Middle Eastern countries sound all too familiar to Americans, who have been at war in Afghanistan for 20 years by some counts and whose memories of the Iraq War and Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime still loom at the forefront of their collective minds.
As a fan of Baron Cohen’s, I would have liked to see the same consideration for Borat’s country of origin. It is precisely because The Dictator’s Wadiya is a fake country and Borat’s Kazakhstan isn’t that I’m calling into question the American and Western European cultural landscape that made this odd reality possible.
The deck of Edward Lucas’s recent column in The Times put it simply: “Mocking East Europeans’ supposedly primitive behavior is the last refuge of respectable racism.”
I’ll take this a step further. It is not even Eastern Europeans that Borat is mocking by using the name Kazakhstan; it is Central Asians. While western audiences often view Kazakhstan and the rest of “the stans” as an extension of Eastern Europe (i.e. Russia) due to Central Asia’s Soviet history, westerners often forget that the former Soviet Union did not exist merely in Eastern Europe but, in fact, took up 1/6th of the Earth’s surface and occupied a large chunk of the Asian continent, too. Thus, stereotyping Kazakhstanis is not merely stereotyping other white people (which is also xenophobic), but in fact, marginalizes an Asian people who were conquered by Imperial Russia and later forced into the Soviet Union by the Bolsheviks.
This lack of understanding of the complex cultural and geopolitical landscape of the former USSR can be seen in prior uses of Kazakhstan’s name in American media. Wolfgang Peterson’s 1997 film Air Force One, starring Harrison Ford, is another example of Hollywood taking advantage of little-known Kazakhstan to paint a caricature of all former Soviet nations. Anyone from the former USSR could easily tell you that the villainous General Ivan Radek, played by German actor Jürgen Prochnow, and Baron Cohen’s Borat don’t even come close in likeness to resembling your average Kazakh for the simple reason that the Kazakhs are Asians.
In fact, Kazakhs have more in common culturally and linguistically with Mongolia and Western China, where the Uyghur genocide is currently taking place, than to Russians and other Slavic people. The small minority of Kazakhs who live within China have also been subjected to the genocide and Kazakhstan itself serves as a refuge for those who have fled China as a result of it.
It seems the American propaganda of the cold war period has created such a powerful image of the former USSR, dominated by stereotypes of bear-wrestling and vodka-drinking, that many are in a state of confusion when they come in contact with a person from the nations in question who don’t fit those stereotypes.
Americans don’t even fully understand what an ethnic Russian looks like. Many Russians, like President Vladimir Putin, are fair-haired and light-eyed, and yet according to cartoons like the 1992 film Boris and Natasha: The Movie, Russians are portrayed as dark-haired, big-nosed, bushy-eyebrowed…Georgians? Armenians? Azerbaijanis? Who are these people exactly? I myself am a Persian Jew (or Mountain Jew, as we are also called) from Russia, and just that moniker alone calls into question every single Russian and Soviet stereotype.
Indeed, what might have caused the confusion was that Joseph Stalin himself, born Ioseb Besarionis dzе Jughashvili, was actually an ethnic Georgian and not Slavic at all. Indeed, Borat resembles Stalin in many ways and may be why Baron Cohen's dark hair and large mustache doesn’t draw suspicion from Americans when he claims to be Kazakh — again, need I remind you, they’re mostly Asian.
Westerners are only just starting to understand the diversity of the former Soviet states. Unfortunately, this seems to happen when there are large scale geopolitical conflicts, such as the Nagorno-Karabakh war. For instance, the current war has taught many that Armenians and Azerbaijanis have more in common with Turkey and Iran than they do with the Slavic cultures of Eastern Europe. Indeed, the Sovietization of the region has created generations who are primarily Russian-speaking but efforts have begun in those countries to reverse those effects.
When it comes to Borat, Americans’ cultural confusion of Soviet diversity is precisely why Baron Cohen could get away with using Kazakhstan, its flag, and its national symbols when he chose not to do the same with the gulf countries of the Middle East. Most Kazakh people in the west can recognize the complexities of the film, the good and the bad, but the fact that their unique culture is invisible to the point that no group that will stand up on their behalf can create unintended wounds for those young Kazakhs who will inevitably have to face mockery from their peers.
“There were children who were adopted from Kazakhstan in the US, and these kids were bullied at school. ‘You’re a prostitute, you drink urine.’” The Kazakh artist Erden Zikibay said in a conversation with Kazakh Podcaster and YouTuber Arman Aituganov. “They didn’t know anything about their native country since they grew up in the US. Then, such a big film came out and they got ridiculed at school.”
Zikibay was referencing an article in The Boston Herald titled Hey Borat: Don’t insult my kid! by Laura Crimaldi, and these concerns ring true for many other Kazakhs. Recently, Kazakhstani writer Aizada Arystanbek cited the #CancelBorat movement, which in her words, “started as an online petition (and currently has around 100,000 signatures).”
In her eye-opening piece, Arystanbek states boldly, “the same motifs of backwardness with which Baron Cohen portrays Borat are often used in Russia when discriminating against Central Asian people, justifying the colonization of the region by Tsarist Russia as a “civilizing mission”, and diminishing the long-lasting consequences of colonization, such as genocide and exposure to nuclear radiation.”
Indeed, western media’s conflation of “the stans” with their colonizers, Tsarist Russia, the USSR, and the modern Russian Federation, create unintended consequences within the western cultural sphere. Heavy activism against Islamophobia in the post-9/11 period by Middle Eastern Americans likely influenced Baron Cohen when creating “Wadiya” but due to Kazakhstan’s proximity to the culturally-accepted stereotyping of Russians and Eastern Europeans, few have advocated on the behalf of Kazakhs.
