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by
Suzy Hansen
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August 17 - December 5, 2019
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
This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans—who do not know that is what they are—and has a trajectory unique to the history of the United States. In recent years, however, this national identity has become
Sykes-Picot Agreement).
that an objective American mind is first and foremost still an American mind. In
because I thought that as you went east, life degraded into the past, the opposite of progress. The idea of Baldwin in Turkey somehow placed America’s race problem, and America itself, in a mysterious and tantalizing international context. I took a chance that Istanbul might
American exceptionalism did not only define the United States as a special nation among lesser nations, it demanded that all Americans believe they, too, were born superior to others, a concept of goodness that requires the existence of evil for its own sustenance. How could I, as an American,
Historians and pundits struggle to explain disturbing phenomena: Donald Trump, a flailing foreign policy, the rise of inequality,
most Americans believe that everyone in the world wants to live in the United States. These were the sorts of things that seemed like obvious, factual truths to Americans. But then Hamid pointed out something that would be an obvious, factual truth to a Pakistani. He said: “There’s
“I was startled to discover that when I said I was from Pakistan I was met with blankness—as if, in 1991, no one knew that through the 1980s Pakistan had been America’s closest ally in its proxy war against the Soviets.”
“How is it that you know nothing about us when you had so much to do with what became of our lives?”
Murderers and pillagers who think the world owes them an apology, heroes even in the eyes of many of the millions who tried to stop the war. Maybe I include you, my friends, in my anger because you care, for what is the point of being angry at those who already made a commitment not to be human?
“But, ma’am, I have a question for you,” he said. “Why didn’t you come before the fire? Why didn’t you think of us before?”
their desserts with the pride and confidence of an artist. Turkish hospitality was not obsequious; to the contrary, they were the ones in control. It had the curious effect of making you feel beholden to them even as they catered to you, the illusion of a relationship formed. These
transforming the windows of the Asian side into a thousand copper fires.
the Byzantines believed that everyone, rich and poor, deserved a home with a view of the Bosphorus, rather than that it was the exclusive property of a wealthy few.
rarely saw homeless people in Istanbul, and slums never looked nearly as bad as they did in photos of Rio or Nairobi, and even this seemed to me proof of the Turks’ enduring
would not have thought it could look like this: better than us.
landed, a light perusal of which would have informed me that Turkish was the Ironman of languages, one that shared almost no words with English,
“She flew planes over Kurdish villages and dropped bombs on them and killed people.”
Dersim Massacre of the 1930s,
rejected Atatürk’s demands that their Kurdish region be Turkified. Atatürk, and his daughter, apparently, responded by killing some thirty to fifty thousand of them, thus depopulating the region of Kurds. Caner would not have forgotten about this, because his family was fr...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Turkey’s history was virtually impenetrable at first to an outsider; a double helix of twists and turns sharing few of the same twists and turns, phases and stages, revolutions and themes
political party names seemed to crop up every year: the Republican People’s Party and the Democrat Party, the Justice and Development Party and the Motherland Party, the National Salvation Party and the National Order Party and the National Development Party, the People’s Labor Party and the People’s Democracy Party, the Great Turkey Party and the New Turkey Party. The Communist Party still existed. The so-called Islamist political party embraced the West, and the secularist party did not. The Islamist party was capitalist, the secularist party was not. The country had been America’s and
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1930, you could buy the morning-after pill at the pharmacy, abortions were legal until the tenth week, but only 24 percent of women worked, and most girls seemed to call
the Ottoman Empire. During the nineteenth century, it was the Turks, not the Arabs, who constituted the world’s imaginary Muslim menace. The Ottoman Empire was a vast multiethnic territory, one in which the intellectuals, the wealthy, and the artisans were largely Armenians, Greeks, Italians, and Jews. Its overlords, however, were the Turkish sultans, or the “Terrible Turks,” and the Western world hated them. One editorial in an 1896 edition of The New York Times, for example, declared that the Turk being “driven out ‘bag and baggage’” was, according to the newspaper, “the inner most desire of
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that the fires in Istanbul’s Muslim neighborhoods were acts of arson.
Turkish soldier named Mustafa Kemal boarded a ship to Samsun, launched the war for independence, ousted the Western powers, and established the Republic of Turkey. The only people
Atatürk opted for Turkism, a nationalism based on race, and laicism, a social system based on extreme secularism, for which Atatürk would be greatly admired by both Hitler and Mussolini. The creation of the new Turk was a
The script was changed from Arabic to roman, and the language dramatically altered to eliminate
which sat on the heads of our nation as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism and hatred of progress and civilization.
“Turkish schoolbooks taught new generations of students to see their distant ancestors as Turkic tribesmen, even if their grandfathers had actually been Salonican greengrocers or Sarajevan tailors,” the historian Charles King writes. “Under the Ottomans,
That label was generally reserved for a country bumpkin more comfortable astride a donkey than in the sophisticated
ancient peoples of Central Asia who had migrated to Anatolia, India, and China, where they disseminated their ancient culture.
Atatürk elevated Central Asia’s significance to marginalize Ottoman and Islamic influence.
mentioned
Baldwin said the end of the empire necessitated the radical revision of identity.
documentary—more comfortable as a black, gay man there than Paris or New York—that made me apply for the fellowship
convinced of his country’s destiny to be secular that he concludes the only reason many Turks are religious is that—of all things—the Americans were pushing them
nineteenth-century intellectual Ahmet Vefik Paşa. It hung from a cliff over Rumeli Hisarı, from where Mehmet
manifest destiny.” While Istanbul was an escape from
I was infatuated with the way the architecture and smoking salons resisted modernity, the persistence of horse-drawn carts and traveling knife sharpeners and boza sellers calling out their wares. What I loved were the ways in which Turkey was different from America. But the similarities between Turkey and America were
the subjugation of new peoples, what an epigraph in a Herman Melville story calls “the empire of necessity.”
during World War II, the supposed “good war,” the Americans dropped the nuclear bomb.
One soldier he befriends “would blush crimson” when he saw misery because Americans were embarrassed by it, like innocents.
“even touch on the public debate as to whether or not there was any need to use such a weapon.” Hersey likely believed that his
doesn’t announce itself, as it seemed to in Turkey. In Istanbul, I had disparaged the mythmaking performed by museums and art spaces funded
“to praise, exalt, beautify, and glorify all that America has been and has done.”
Barack Obama. “For surely the word is Freedom
the academic Eric Bennett uncovered the history of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the most prestigious MFA programs in the country to this day. Iowa had been founded at a
The Istanbul Hilton would be America’s last commercial outpost before enemy territory. Even the hotel’s windows faced east
