From Tashkent to Tbilisi
Brigands, burqas, and bushy eyebrows: Central Asia and the Caucasus in Soviet cinema
My ability to speak Russian like a native constantly brings about assumptions about my ethnic heritage, from jokes about vodka and imitations of Russian accents to comments about how I should be used to cold weather, whenever I so much as shiver. I, along with many Russian-speaking Central Asians and Caucasians (i.e. from the Caucasus) from countries belonging to the former Soviet Union, are caught in an identity limbo. How, for example, do I explain why it is that I’m more fluent in Russian than my native Juhuri, a Jewish variety of the Iranian Tati language closely related to Persian? Today, I force myself to wrap my tongue around the few Tati phrases I know, in a desperate effort to preserve what is left of my identity – an identity that is falling like sand through the spaces between my fingers. In the past two generations, my family’s heritage was subdued under Russian dominance; and now, as immigrants, we’ve had to adopt new American identities.
My inability to speak Tati isn’t merely an accident of assimilation, but a calculated victory of Soviet leadership, which aimed to replace indigenous identities with an ‘international Soviet’ one, favouring Russian culture as an elite ‘big brother to all other nations’.
Borat and the cultural legacy of the Cold War
Illustration by Kazakhstani artist Erden Zikibay
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 backwards due to their cultural and political juxtaposition to the mythic ideals of Americanism.
Immigrants are not surprised by the Latino vote
So here’s the thing. I noticed a trend in the rhetoric of many Democratic politicians, liberal media outlets, friends, and coworkers when they talk about basically anybody who isn’t white. When discussing politics, social disparities, and economic strife, the aforementioned groups often use the term “Black and Brown individuals” to, uhh, I dunno…lump in a bunch of very different people into one all-encompassing label. If this doesn’t sound problematic to you, let me explain.
Yes, America has a long and ugly history of racism, chattel slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and the legacy of these tremendous stains on the fabric of this country affect the lives of Black Americans. This is true.
But who are these brown Americans you speak of? Are they Mexicans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Iranians, Iraqis, Egyptians, Indians, and Pakistanis? Do we really think it wise to label multiple ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups under the same moniker? Do Southeast Asian communities count? Do Asian communities count? How far does this term “brown” extend?
By virtue of being immigrants to the United States, these groups share a common experience of migration, resettlement, integration, language learning, resilience, and hardship but outside of this, their views vary widely on social issues. One thing does unite them, however, and it is their struggle to make lives for themselves. The success of most immigrants in the US actually makes them some of the most pro-American American voices in key states.
Reading Camus’ “The Plague” while living through one
When it comes to the works of Albert Camus, a long-dead Algerian-born French novelist and philosopher, I’ve only read The Stranger.
It was okay.
I think the problem was that by the time I had read the novella, none of the ideas were particularly profound to me. It had a sort of a been-there, done-that kind of feel, even though perhaps Camus was the one who started the trend that I had only heard of from other philosophers and novelists who may have come after.
The Plague is different.
I found that through all of the unnecessary prose, which was not at all present in my only other Camus experience (The Stranger), The Plague is both harrowing and oddly comforting.
Triple Threat
Ain’t talkin’ ’bout no One Yemen Road
In the middle of A-WA’s US and European summer 2017 tour, Franz Afraim Katzir of Sephardic Heritage in D.C. (SHIN-DC) and I were given the opportunity to sit down and catch up with the firestorm of fierce girl power that are the Haim sisters: Tair, Liron, and Tagel. The group has gained popularity for its modern, yet traditional songs based on Yemenite Jewish folk music, and sung in the Yemenite Jewish variety of Arabic. Rolling Stone included A-WA on its ‘Ten New Artists You Need to Know’ list in June 2016, and their debut single, Habib Galbi (Dear of My Heart), has garnered nearly eight million views on YouTube.
Katzir learned a lot about the sisters during their 2016 visit to D.C., when he first met them and the Jewish-Iranian hip-hop artist Mana Eini over a dinner in celebration of Habib Galbi‘s release. The sisters grew up in a family of six siblings in a small village in Israel, which at the time was home to around thirty families.
Women Pioneers of Film: A Quick Glance
When discussing film history and the directors, producers, and inventors that brought us today’s film industry, we usually hear an endless slew of male names.
Edison, Dickson, Griffith, DeMille, on and on it goes. Well, women did play a huge role in film’s early history, not just as beautiful silent film actresses such as the prolific Lillian Gish but also as directors, producers, and screenwriters, many of whom were later “forgotten” or purposefully left out of the film industry once it became a respected field to work in. So let’s right this wrong and highlight a small handful of awesome women film pioneers.
Alice Guy-Blaché, (pictured above) — According to Columbia University’s Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), Alice Guy-Blache’s first film was made in 1896 and she “directed, produced, or supervised almost 600 films.” Guy-Blaché was also an early pioneer who experimented with synchronized sound, a technology that wasn’t perfected until the late 1920s. According to mic.com, her name is listed on around a 1,000 different films in her time.
From “Mountain Jews,” Fried Dumplings
Like with many Sephardic communities, Chanukah was never traditionally considered an important holiday for Kavkazi Jews, also known as “Mountain Jews” of the Eastern Caucasus Mountains from Azerbaijan and Southern Russia (primarily Dagestan). We’re a small community of Jews who traditionally speak a language called Juhuri, a derivative of the Middle Persian language that predates modern Persian.
According to our oral tradition, we came to the Caucasus Mountains from Persia and were part of the tide of Jews who were taken as captives to Babylon from Ancient Israel and flourished with the success of the Achaemenid-era Persians over the Babylonians. Our region came under the influence of Russia in the 19th century, when it was given to Imperial Russia by Qajar Iran under the Treaty of Gulistan, and then later incorporated into the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Secrets of the Caucasus
Lev Nussimbaum: from Eastern European Jew to Caucasian Muslim prince extraordinaire
Since the widespread Rachel Dolezal scandal, which involved an American woman claiming to be of African-American descent, discussions about cultural and ethnic appropriation have become increasingly heated and reconsidered. As controversial as the scandal may have been, it was certainly far from being anything new. There have been numerous cases throughout history where Europeans, for instance, have appropriated the cultures of others and misused them towards their own benefits and ambitions. When this occurs in relation to ‘Eastern’ peoples, it is often accompanied, one may argue, by a heavy dose of Saidian Orientalism. As a Jewish native of the Caucasus with an Eastern Mizrahi upbringing, at one stage in my life I became particularly interested in the life of Lev Nussimbaum, an Ashkenazi Jew from Eastern Europe who posed as an ‘exotic’ Muslim prince from Aran (renamed ‘Azerbaijan’ in 1918) and to have documented his adventures under the pseudonym ‘Essad Bey’, and later – according to American author Tom Reiss – ‘Kurban Said’. In his book The Orientalist, Reiss examines Nussimbaum’s life, and how he shed his identity as a European Jew to become the famous Azerbaijani author. Under the pen name Kurban Said, Nussimbaum’s work (as per Reiss’ findings) became so popular that the love story Ali and Nino (currently being made into a film by director Asif Kapadia) came to be revered as the national novel of Azerbaijan.