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

by Suzy Hansen

Everything surprised me then.

By then I would also wonder whether the western Anatolian roads might have looked familiar because the Americans funded much of Turkey’s postwar reconstruction with Marshall Plan money, everything from its roads to its schools to its military bases.

Yet I chose the stark, colorless desert photo of hundreds of tiny, faceless refugees sprawled across a hillside,

crossing from Syria to Iraq, because in 2014, what other photo could you choose? It wasn’t a time of dancing.

mine. I had in mind a scientific excavation, and instead, as seemed to be common in the years I lived abroad, the excavation I ended up with was historical.

there wasn’t money for much else beyond the home, but Turkish families supported one another reflexively; a miner would work his whole life just to build two-room houses for his three sons.

When the men changed shifts, they said to one another, geçmiş olsun, or get well soon, even hakkını helal et, which is a way Turks forgive one another, if they fear it is the last chance to do so.

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.

provincial

For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones.

Who do we become if we don’t become Americans, at least not in the way we always understood the word?

as if twenty-nine was a little too late to be finding myself.

“Each man will be undertaking perhaps as difficult a task as there is, namely, that of interpreting a people, or a group, to itself and to others,” one of ICWA’s early prospectuses read in 1925. “Such a task requires … something beyond hard work and good intentions, something even beyond knowledge; sympathy, insight, the mellowness of time, the gift of expression are indispensable.”

I had no idea that the people of the Middle East had been feeling betrayed by Americans for a hundred years. I had no idea that they had ever thought so highly of the United States in the first place.

You cannot grow up in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States of America and live abroad in the twenty-first and not feel it all the time.

But if I learned something about America in Turkey—or later in Egypt or Greece or Afghanistan or Iran—it felt like a disruption.

as if I would ever deposit a precious piece of my wardrobe into some policeman’s cardboard box.

history. I once read that children who grow up hearing beloved family narratives have stronger senses of direction in life; for example, kids who know how their grandmother escaped the Holocaust with diamonds sewn into her jacket, or how their grandfather integrated the high school football team, find it easier to imagine their own life’s purpose. Those without a narrative feel anxious and insecure. There is no cultural self to find, no spicy-smelling kitchen in which to rediscover distant cultural memories, no crimes or mistakes to learn from and redeem, no historical events to compare to current ones. My immigrant grandparents did what the United States of America told them to do: wipe the slate clean. The price of entrance was to forget the past. I was moving to Turkey in part because I had nowhere else to go.

That was my sense of the outside world: where Americans went to be hurt or to hurt others.

Only a few years after September 11, we had in fact become less introspective.

What we didn’t know to ask was how we would be feeling or acting if we knew Iraqis. Not “knew” them as in calling an Iraqi on the phone, but knew them as in their history, their experience, their history and experience with the United States. I do not remember having a sense of the Iraqi people, of an Iraqi family, of an Iraqi man, a normal Iraqi man—a doctor or a postman or a teacher, like someone you grew up with. Even if I did, I am simply not sure my brain would have known to test itself with the potential horrors that might befall that man: if this person was ripped apart by a cluster bomb, tortured in a prison, shot at an intersection while driving, his brains blown apart, his leg torn from his side, his wife and daughter and son screaming and crying in pain, all because of your country’s military, your government, and because of you.

Empathy was infrastructurally impossible.

Charles Crane, or why he had gone to Ottoman Turkey, or the significance of his King-Crane report,

Look up

The idea of Baldwin in Turkey somehow placed America’s race problem, and America itself, in a mysterious and tantalizing international context.

Nobody Knows My Name,

Read

I couldn’t change because I didn’t know what was wrong with me in the first place.

use. As an American abroad now, you do not have the same crazy, smiling confidence. You do not want to speak so loud. You feel always the vague risk of breaking something. In Turkey and elsewhere, in fact, I felt an almost physical sensation of intellectual and emotional discomfort, trying to grasp a reality for which I had no historical or cultural understanding.

Even when I disagreed with America’s policies, I always believed in our inherent goodness, in my own. I would never have admitted it, or thought to say it, but looking back, I know that deep in my consciousness I thought that America was at the end of some evolutionary spectrum of civilization, and everyone else was trying to catch up.

This was a kind of nationalism so insidious that I had not known to call it nationalism; this was a self-delusion so complete that I could not see where it began and ended, could not root it out, could not destroy

inculcation

Globalization, it turns out, has not meant the Americanization of the world; it has made Americans, in some ways, more like everyone else.

Yet just as black American writers once desperately urged their white friends to come to terms with their violent but intimate relationship, foreigners have been constantly asking Americans to listen to them.

Her question echoed an experience I had in 2012 when I met an Iraqi man. Over the course of our conversation I asked him what Iraq was like in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was growing up. He smiled. “I am always amazed when Americans ask me this,” he said. “How is it that you know nothing about us when you had so much to do with what became of our lives?”

soldiers who waited until they practiced the killing and torture themselves to realize that something was wrong.

“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?”

The Istanbul airport was modern and efficient, European, and what struck me first was how foreign it did not feel,

obsequious;

“Don’t confuse freedom with happiness,” someone said to me in those years.

No one with the same set of constructs I had was watching me, and I had the space to look at everything so differently that I actually felt as if my brain were breathing.

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.

I didn’t speak the language, so those first months I lived in a state of white noise and visual bliss. I was forced to look, and to see.

I’d read somewhere that 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. Everything in Turkey seemed antithetical to where I came from.

I was the exact opposite of the Americans I’d met my first night in town, who complained about the food, the taxi drivers, the fact that no Turks spoke English. I loved everything, operating in a state of constant emotional genuflection before this secret society that had let me in.

I had been good at languages in school in that way Americans are—to prepare for tests but never to actually speak them—

Turkish was the Ironman of languages, one that shared almost no words with English,

Turkish felt like a purposely designed obstacle course, all the g’s and k’s stuck in odd places, as if the founders of the Turkish Republic, who reformed Ottoman Turkish into a new language for a new nation, wanted foreigners to know their place.

no one else knew what to do or how to react to September 11, as if emotions came from the memories of other emotional experiences, not from an organic place.

Political office, it seemed, was not just about politics but about Turkish identity.

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.

laicism,