Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

by Suzy Hansen

It is still not clear if the United States—a country formed in great measure by those who have themselves escaped vast catastrophes, famines, dictatorships, persecution—it is far from certain that the men and women of this nation so full of hope and tolerance, will be able to feel that same empathy towards the other outcast members of our species.

Americans are surprised by the direct relationship between their country and foreign ones because we don’t acknowledge that America is an empire; it is impossible to understand a relationship if you are not aware you are in one.

“How is it that you know nothing about us when you had so much to do with what became of our lives?”

If the decline of the American empire may require, as Baldwin suggests, a radical revision of the individual identity, perhaps Americans have to more deeply understand what that imperial identity was in the first place.

nothing short of revolution will ever redeem you.

To look at the world from a new perspective is to feel as if the ropes holding you to the earth have been cut.

and I had the space to look at everything so differently that I actually felt as if my brain were breathing. In fact, I felt like a child.

The impact of merely seeing foreign things with my own eyes was the equivalent of reading a thousand history books. I found that I was watching life more carefully, that every nerve was alive to my environment.

As we pulled farther away from the shore, the European side of the city expanded into a thousand new angles; something about the hills and curves and magnificence of the point of view meant that you always felt you were seeing the Old City for the first time. To this day, on those ferries, even in my darkest moments, I feel nothing but complete joy, as if immediately thrust into a state of meditation I cannot achieve on land, or on any other boat—an Istanbul-specific, ferry-bound peace.

Here’s the thing: no one ever tells Americans that when they move abroad, even if they are empathetic and sensitive humans—even if they come clean about their genetic inability to learn languages, even if they consider themselves leftist critics of their own government—that they will inevitably, and unconsciously, spend those first months in a foreign country feeling superior to everyone around them and to the nation in which they now have the privilege to live.

class was a constellation of a million little materialistic cultural signifiers, and the insult, loss, or acquisition of any of them could transform one’s future entirely.

I knew I was white, and I knew I was American, but it was not what I understood to be my identity; for me, self-definition was about gender, personality, religion, education, dreams. I only thought about finding myself, becoming myself, discovering myself, which, I hadn’t known, was the most white American thing of all. I still did not think about my place in the larger world, or that perhaps an entire history—the history of white Americans—had something to do with who I was. My lack of consciousness was dangerous because it exonerated me of responsibility, of history, of a role—it allowed me to believe I was innocent, or that white American was not an identity like Muslim or Turk.

Rejecting the word “empire” had long been a way for Americans to avoid taking responsibility for acting like one, which was a habit embedded into the American character from the moment of its birth.

The Americans were in active denial of their empire even as they laid its foundations.

In order for Americans to believe in their own superiority, they also had to avoid questioning their own lives and the system in which they lived.

It was possible that our highly valued American individualism might have been the ultimate force that detached citizens from the actions of their government, and from the fate of the country as a whole.

But in the process weren’t all foreign countries condemned to failure so that the United States could remain the ideal? These countries would be selected as candidates in need of endless salvation by the United States

Distance, distance, distance was the American way, a frigid, loveless distance, a kind of power and violence that destroyed intimacy in all its other manifestations, that destroyed empathy in all of its imperial citizens, in us, in me.

But it was darker than this, wasn’t it? We all wanted to hold on to this imperial dream, because the loss of the empire meant we might someday be the ones who were ruled. It meant we would not be the strongest, it meant we would not chart our own course, it meant all the freedoms we believed ourselves divinely ordained for, all the power to “be whatever you want to be”—everything that made up the meaning of our American lives—would be gone. We couldn’t stand it. We couldn’t stand a world in which we might one day be the Afghans. We could not imagine it and so, from Kabul, we never left.

The Iranian who has been harassed at work, who encounters only grumpy bureaucrats looking for bribes, who is everywhere spied on by the police, comes to the mosque to find balance and calm, to recover his dignity. Here no one hurries him or calls him names. Hierarchies disappear, all are equal, all are brothers, and—because the mosque is also a place of conversation and dialogue—a man can speak his mind, grumble, and listen to what others have to say. What a relief it is, how much everyone needs it. This is why, as the dictatorship turns the screws and an ever more oppressive silence clouds the streets and workplaces, the mosque fills more and more with people and the hum of voices. Not all those who come here are fervent Muslims, not all are drawn by a sudden wave of devotion—they come because they want to breathe, because they want to feel like people.

We cannot go abroad as Americans in the twenty-first century and not realize that the main thing that has been terrorizing us for the last sixteen years is our own ignorance—our blindness and subsequent discovery of all the people on whom the empire-that-was-not-an-empire had been constructed without our attention or concern.

Trump also had been right about one thing: immigrants did get a free ride. They had been let into the country too easily. Immigrants did need stricter qualifications for citizenship. There was no doubt that the white European immigrants who one hundred years ago knocked on the doors of Ellis Island should have faced a higher bar for entry. They should have gotten a months-long education on the Americans’ destruction of its indigenous populations, on its history of slavery, on its persecution of darker-skinned immigrants, on its invasion and occupation of Cuba and the Philippines—and later, on its vast and endless empire—and they should have been made to swear that they accepted this ugly American history as their own, that they vowed to take responsibility for it and its repercussions, and that they promised to protect nonwhite peoples as much as they protected their white selves—forever. This vow should have been the price of American citizenship. Because clearly something did go wrong in America. Americans had been bound to myth, not history. They got a free ride. We got a free ride. I got a free ride.

I might know, too, what Baldwin meant when he said only love could assuage America’s race problem, but I can only grasp it when I think of romantic love. I did, after all, fall in love with Turkey. I fell in love with Istanbul, with Rana, with Caner, with all the Turks and Istanbullus who welcomed me; I fell in love with foreign men, with the cats of Cihangir, with the Anatolian roads, with even the smell of burning coal in winter. When you are in love, you feel a superhuman amount of empathy because, crucially, it is in your self-interest to do so. It wasn’t until I loved like this that I could understand why only love could solve America’s race problem, and by extension its imperial one: that it is not until one contemplates loving someone, caring about that person’s physical and emotional well-being, wanting that person to thrive, wanting to protect that person, and most of all wanting to understand that person, that we can imagine what it would feel like if that person was hurt, if that person were hurt by others or, most important, if that person was hurt by you. Only if that person’s suffering becomes your suffering—which is in a sense what love is—and only when white Americans begin to look upon another people’s destruction as they would their own, will they finally feel the levels of rational and irrational rage terrifying enough to vanquish a century of their own indifference.

The American dream was to create our own destiny, but it’s perhaps an ethical duty, as a human being, and as an American, to consider that our American dreams may have come at the expense of a million other destinies. To deny that is to deny the realities of millions of people, and to forever sever ourselves from humanity.

If this project of remembrance requires leaving the country, then so be it, because it is not an escape; we will find our country everywhere, among the city streets and town squares and empty fields of the world, where we may also discover that the possibility of redemption is not because of our own God-given beneficence but proof of the world’s unending generosity.