Salam Pax: Who Is to Blame for Stereotypes?

The country of the United States has always been a country of immigrants and migrants. Immigrants have come from many lands and have experienced various degrees of success in adapting to life in the United States. And though the United States claims to be a country of freedom and liberty, its citizens prove otherwise. The United States is supposed to be the most powerful country in the world, holding around 4,386 post-secondary institutions (Wikipedia.com) handing out degrees to thousands of students, yet so many citizens remain ignorant and unopened. The United States’ “most powerful country” title can be blamed for some citizens’ competitiveness, which leads to a lack of openness to other countries and even newer citizens. That, among many other reasons such as pop culture and education, or lack thereof, can be responsible, but individual citizens can be held accountable if they do not make an effort to change his/her need of awareness.

In, the movie, House of Sand and Fog, an Iranian immigrant, Colonel Behrani, who fled Iran during times of conflict, now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He works odd jobs to support his family, and he yet he still maintains the appearance of being a respected businessman so as not to shame his family, his wife and children. When he finds the opportunity to buy a house for an incredible price, he takes it. Behrani then finds his family and himself in a both a civil and cultural conflict with the previous owner of the house, Kathy, and her lover, an officer. The officer threatens Behrani and his family with deportation, even though they have claimed citizenship in the United States. The officer’s ignorance begins when he finds out their last name of ‘Behrani’, he regards it at foreign and declares their place in the country can be temporary.

With a country like the United States where the idea of an American Dream is an idea all its citizens are supposed to be able to achieve, even figures of authority, like the officer, can be ignorant enough to believe and set stereotypes. In the film, Behrani works at both construction site as well as a convenient store. These occupations are both stereotypical for immigrant, particularly those of Asian culture. The use of language is also used to depict the cultural collision between the Behrani family and Kathy and the officer. Kathy has mentioned Mrs. Behrani spoke in broken English as if it made the family any less American. People often forget, or do not realize, that English was not created in the United States and that it’s been around for centuries, and in fact more people speak English in Asia than in all the Western countries combined.

The issue of language can be also be found in the book Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi. With over 10 million bloggers (Wikipedia.com) in the United States, thousands in which average American citizens post about politics. One might think that an Iraqi blogger who partially blogs about current events would be normal, but people had even questioned Salam Pax’s existence.

Blogger, Al from Culpepper Log, had mentioned that Salam’s site ‘look[ed] believable’ and that “if someone at the CIA were trying to construct a convincing fake Iraqi website for our domestic consumption, it would probably look someone like [Salam’s] ” (Pax, 26) and then regarded what was really ‘Arablish’ as some ‘cryptic personal notes’. The fact that Al had even found it difficult to consider that somewhere other than the United States a blogger was discussing issues on politics is both cause to believe he is one of ignorant Americans mentioned. He had also mentioned that “[Salam’s] English is convincingly rough, (Pax, 26)” which is an outrageous belief and stereotype that everyone who does not claim American citizenship cannot speak English. And that the only possible way Pax’s blog was real was because his English was not perfect.

As Wafa Sultan (2006) said “the clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.”

Pop culture can be blamed for the stereotypes people view of different cultures, particularly, and while talking about House of Sand and Fog and Salam