I‘m very much looking forward to seeing the new Sacha Baron Cohen movie. It’s a spinoff from his popular British television series, Da Ali G Show, and features Borat, a fictional TV reporter from Kazakhstan, played by Cohen. The movie’s ostensible title is Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
I should confess that I am not one of Cohen’s greatest admirers–I find his “Ali G” character tedious–but Borat is another matter. With his Turkish-style moustache, 1970s wardrobe, surreal vocabulary, and generally clueless demeanor, Borat is a broad (but not too broad) impersonation of a TV personality in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Moreover, from a commercial standpoint, Cohen has struck pay dirt: Borat seems to have annoyed Kazakhstan’s authoritarian government, which has darkly hinted that the Borat character might be “serving someone’s political order.” Indeed, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry was obliged to shoot down rumors that President Nursultan Nazarbayev intends to raise the subject when he meets with President Bush this month.
I take some interest in all this because, unlike Sacha Baron Cohen, I have actually been to Kazakhstan, interviewed President Nazarbayev, and exchanged pleasantries with Kazakh TV reporters. Strictly speaking, Kazakhstan is about as remote a destination as any journalist could want: flat, windswept, bleak, hidden behind the Alta mountains from western China and ringed by rusting factory towns, asbestos-bound pipelines, and nuclear lakes. The population is half Kazakh and half Slavic, the Slavs having been exiled to “virgin lands” by Stalin and Khrushchev.
Of course, Borat is a comic creation–boorish, lascivious, anti-Semitic–and his credulity and fractured English are wildly overdrawn. But as with most such inventions, there is a kernel of truth in Cohen’s bag of tricks.
Just as there really are some beefy southern sheriffs and wisecracking Brooklynites, some of the people I met in Kazakhstan seemed straight out of Central Casting. President Nazarbayev himself, a pleasant, moon-faced autocrat, received me in an office festooned with rococo furniture and golden draperies. Its gigantic scale confirmed a theory of mine: that the size of a statesman’s residence is in inverse relation to his country’s significance.
I was in Kazakhstan ostensibly to report on its first parliamentary elections–the president’s Fatherland party did remarkably well–but public acquaintance with the franchise was, shall we say, limited. At the polls, more than a few people approached me, thinking I was a visiting Russian, to seek “guidance” in choosing the right candidate.
At one polling place in the capital city of Astana, I asked an election worker if she might have a sample ballot to spare. Dressed in a crypto-military uniform–and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Frau Farbissina in the Austin Powers films–she literally reared back in her chair, widened her eyes, and declined to dignify my impertinence with a response.
I did manage to collect several English-language brochures from the government information agency, ostensibly for NGOs and election observers. I have one before me now entitled What a Candidate for Election to the Majlis of the Parliament of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Presenting Them Persons and the Members of Organizing Bodies Should Know About Elections.
And what about Kazakh cuisine, you might ask? As far as I could tell, the Kazakhs live on an unremitting diet of horsemeat, which, as a sometime rider, I was disinclined to consume. In the village of Kovondoi, high on the steppes, my presence was celebrated by the arrival of several charming peasant girls in national costume, bearing a huge tureen filled with pasta for an afternoon feast. As we sat down to gorge–me, the girls, election officials, and an exiled Ukrainian farmer who was chairman of the local “wheat brigade”–I realized the meal was not pasta at all, but steamed fat, in various forms, and from inside what creatures I dared not inquire.
Surely the metaphor for my journey emerged when I flew on Kazakh Air from Almaty to points north. The overhead compartment, contrary to custom, was open, and over the first several rows it was stuffed with straw. A neighboring passenger, a Munich businessman, asked me if I knew why there was straw on board, and I remember making a joke (in fractured German) about the aircraft’s engines, horsepower, and nourishment. He didn’t laugh.
In due course, the plane took off; and as it banked to the left and rose in the sky, bundles of straw shifted overhead, releasing a shower into the aisle and all over me and my German companion. If only Borat and his camera crew had been on board!
PHILIP TERZIAN
