American Dreams?

In a chapter of The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World called “The Genie Leaves the Bottle,” author Richard Poplak goes to Cairo to talk to the charismatic Amro Hosny, a poet who translates Disney, Sesame Street and other American programs for an Arabic-speaking TV audience. With memorable passion and lucidity, Hosny articulates the struggle to create a locally meaningful approach to his interpretation that allows the humour and emotional nuance of the original show to sing through to its audience. He also expresses the profound frustrations of creating Al Shamshoon—The Simpsons in Arabic—in 2005, under the watchful control of the Saudi sheikhs who own the brand licence and maintain a level of puritanical control over the final product that ensured the rich satirical humour was watered down to nothing. Ultimately, even in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, Al Shamshoon failed. But the really frightening part is when we find out that Shrek is not even getting a chance to thrive in the colloquial. It is being “translated” into classical Arabic, “thus bringing to American pop the authority of the language of the Qur’an, and therefore a moral authority.”

This episode illuminates the crux of the global-versus-local dilemma facing contemporary makers of the mass Muslim culture that Poplak’s new book explores—a subject inspired in part by his own South African youth. As a boy growing up under the apartheid regime in Johannesburg, Richard Poplak kept prized clippings of American pop stars and Hollywood film ads to stave off the racist world view of the South African educational system: “I was obsessed with American popular culture, so much so that I viewed myself as American.”

Inspiration for a journey through the Muslim world strikes when Mr. Poplak exchanges a heavy-metal salute with an eleven-year-old Kazakh in her home town of Balkash—a girl who turns out to be a fan not only of digital dance games but of Jean-Claude Van Damme. Travelling to 22 cities across the Middle East and Asia, Poplak casts himself as a restless, ageless Everyteen, greedily seeking out “people just like me—the scrapbook geeks who spent their lives trying to interpret American pop culture, trying to decode it, trying to see what it meant in the context of their own culture and circumstances.”

Poplak is not interested in religious and political hardliners, but the culturally engaged free spirits—wealthy Gulf Arabs nostalgic for the movies, cars and kitsch of 1960s America, Lebanese talk show producers, Iranian heavy metal fans—to see how they interpret pop for their own purposes. The result is a collection of wildly disparate journeys whose strength lies in the sheer diversity of cultural forms with which Poplak is willing to engage, combined with his accurate, thoughtful persistence in tracing their origins. There is no way to predict where the Batmobile will take us next or what we will find when we get there. Poplak’s decision to walk around Tripoli listening to Lionel Richie’s “Hello” on repeat—for four hours—strikes me as a painfully maudlin exercise in search of a point, while his encounters with Palestinian rap artists in Ramallah and Ramla deliver flashes of genuine brilliance:

The author professes no loyalty to conventional religion or political ideology, but he does evoke something of the fervent believer when confronted by the spectacle of a righteous “ass-kicking,” to which the Batmobile contains several admiring references, when wandering through Cairo while listening to Odious (“a Euro-based Egyptian band that effectively married heavy metal to Eastern music … all in the service of making ears bleed”), meeting video gamers playing Grand Theft Auto in Ramallah and encountering Zach, an eleven-year-old boy in Kabul who makes a specialty of American-style wrestling moves. The kick-ass smartly sums up both the American pop cultural zeitgeist in whose thrall Poplak roams the eastern continents and the gonzo, rude-boy glee with which he wields his pen. He is proud of being bodyslammed and powerbombed by Zach—it means the cultural universe is unfolding as it should, that imagination has a visa to everywhere, that ideas have no racial profile.

But Poplak nevertheless wonders whether a young person’s access to pop culture in the Muslim world means access to a different and better social and political future. His optimism is duly tempered with a sober awareness of pop’s potentially homogenizing drawbacks—and its tendency to blithely ignore the material and political privations of the places it colonizes.

Talking with an Afghan bodybuilding giant named Hotak who, wondering why well-loved icons like Schwarzenegger will not visit Afghanistan, gets suddenly teary-eyed, Poplak nods sympathetically: “I got a momentary sense of what it must be like to live in Kabul, or any place like it. You could only snatch at your dreams … There was … an inherent cruelty in living under the thrall of American pop culture. It gave you but the slightest of tastes, just enough to let you know you were starving.”

Does watching and listening to pop in the Muslim world induce the same cultural amnesia out of which newcomers to America, moving toward the American Dream, have spun some of the most celebrated fiction of the past century? Does pop give the Afghan bodybuilders and the Indonesian punk rockers a genuinely constructive way out of the reality of oppressive governments and poverty? Or does it erase their cultural past with an empty distraction?

In its final few pages, The Sheikh’s Batmobile hits a bit of a cul-de-sac. Charged by a Tehran percussion artist with the duty to “keep it metal, my brother,” Poplak clearly feels he ought to make some grand conclusion about the failed geopolitics of the last decade, but only can manage a half-hearted gesture: “we could live in ignorance of how much the cultures of the Muslim world share with America, or we could try to explore those links.”

It is an oddly tentative suggestion, coming from a writer who spent two years in vigorous pursuit of those links. The Batmobile journeys are each too singular to be swept into an overarching theory. Their most potent idea is surely not that pop brings emancipation—you need human rights and the rule of law for that—but the fact that artists in Tehran and Jakarta are keeping alive cultural forms that here at home have long been pronounced the victims of commercial overkill. Questions about what it means when a Muslim performs rap or writes a reality TV script are only illuminating to the extent that they successfully inject those forms with new meaning. In perhaps the same way that the 13th-century Persian mystic Jalaluddin Rumi sells more books in the United States than any other poet, the dreams generated in Indonesia or Palestine are already circling their way around to eager audiences in Los Angeles and Montreal.