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

by Suzy Hansen

Modernism and Nation Building.

“You have to consider for a second that conservative religious people are different. Islam never experienced its renaissance, its enlightenment. And when it comes down to it religious people are not as liberal as we are, the way they live compared to the way we do.”

In other words, even if Erdoğan did not force you to wear the head scarf, your neighbors will shame you into feeling like you have

It is difficult to find memoirs of postrevolutionary Turkey in English—memoirs that describe the sensation of being unable to read street signs, of seeing women unveiled, of losing one’s identity and one’s, as Mardin put it, atmosphere and way of social relations.

A Mind at Peace, the 1949 novel by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar,

a rare glimpse of what it meant to experience both external and internal devastation: Istanbul ravaged by war and poverty; entire populations transferred out of the once cosmopolitan city; the loss of superpower status; the new Turkish Republican pressure to bani...

Islam had been even more than a civilization. It had been the air they breathed.

citizens; if you were openly religious, or had a religious vocation, then you were explicitly banned from high-ranking officer positions within the military, for instance.

Neither of us realized at the time that it was precisely because I was American that I did not think about money, not in this context anyway. I was consumed by this country’s cultural revolution. I had never been somewhere, I thought, where national and personal identity had been so deliberately and methodically engineered, and here I was watching the whole thing fall apart.

To get around Istanbul, for example, you could buy something called an Akbil, a tiny button that attached to your key chain and was usable on buses, metros, and ferries. To me, the Akbil was brilliant, a stunning invention, and proof that the ruling religious government at the time must be as modern as—possibly more modern than—any American party.

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.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah,

Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk

The Black Book, Pamuk

In Turkey, honor is more important than a good view of the Bosphorus.

I would, in the years to come, go through far fewer moments of harassment, ass grabbing, and home following in Istanbul than I ever did in America. The neighborhood was indeed watching.

The Turkish police, notoriously corrupt and violent themselves, had long ago faded from society as a proper regulating force, but neighborhood justice seemed to be more than mere punishment.

This delivery boy had denigrated not only my honor but the whole neighborhood’s—perhaps all of Turkey’s—and so it was up to ordinary Turks to win it back. They would beat him not only because he was dangerous but also because he didn’t know his place.

don’t say this to you because I think Turkish men are all so terribly violent that there is a high chance of something happening; I say it because if you get unlucky, you are really, really unlucky.”

I, too, believed that you could probably sooner get raped at a Georgetown University house party than anywhere in Turkey.

The dark joke was that even the murderer, at some point, exclaimed, “Oh no, this will be bad for the EU, won’t it?

the feet of their humiliators to join the Ring of the Civilized. In Turkey one man’s disgrace was everyone’s disgrace, just as one woman’s sexual mishap ruined the whole family.

Blood-Dark Track, the novelist Joseph O’Neill,

writes of nothingness in a country that ought to be full of something.

solipsistic

Although the landscape was beautiful, I often felt completely terrible, beset by a sense of menace that I couldn’t shake for the rest of the trip.

You’re learning about a country, you have read books, and so you know what bad things have happened, and where, and then you go to those places, and you can’t help but feel haunted by your knowledge of the invisible past.

Rana told me about a conversation she had with a Turkish man after September 11: “I was horrified, of course,” she said. “And I remember I spoke to a guy at a corner store that day who said something like Finally, it’s happened to them, too. We’re not the only ones.”

TV. If there was something that saved us from being outwardly racist, it was that in small towns like Wall, especially for girls, it was important to be nice, or good, and so this pressure tempered tendencies toward overt cruelty when we were young.

Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The song lists the world’s horrors and accomplishments

Class in America was not something easily delineated by large categories, certainly not ones most of us had any structural or intellectual understanding of; 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.

Even now, I can remember that shiver of recognition that only comes when you learn something that expands, just a tiny bit, your sense of reality. What made me angry was that this revelation was something about who I was—how much more did I not know about myself?

White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded—about themselves and the world they live in. White people have managed to get through entire lifetimes in this euphoric state … People who cling to their delusions find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn anything worth learning.

The philosopher Jonathan Lear has written that certain books can provoke an ethical transformation in their readers,

I was thirty years old, an age at which people either choose to grow up or remain stuck in the exploratory and idle phase of late-late youth.

This could only mean that in order to see a foreign country clearly, I would first have to excavate my mind.

The philosopher William James argued that all humans suffer from a blindness toward those who are different from them; it would forever be impossible for man, he warned, to fully sympathize with the “Other.”

As early as 1959, Williams went as far as to say that America needed a kind of truth and reconciliation commission about the history of twentieth-century American foreign policy and the relationship between that foreign policy and the domestic economy, a reckoning with the fact that America’s much vaunted prosperity and peace at home would simply not have been possible without its violence at home—and abroad.

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

fealty

“It is a shameful thing to win a war,” Malaparte writes. But Americans rarely feel that way, certainly not about the war in Europe—not even about the fate of Japan.

Censorship in America comes in quieter forms. It doesn’t announce itself, as it seemed to in Turkey.

Bennett believes that the University of Iowa not only drove writers away from exploring political ideas, but in the end undermined true artistic freedom.

The totality of Americanism was something that often an individual couldn’t see. It was too enormous, and too omnipresent.

When he visited New York for the first time in 1946, Albert Camus wrote in his journal that America was a “country where everything is done to prove that life isn’t tragic.” In his view, “one must reject the tragic after having looked at it, not before.”

greater appreciation for America, the most modern country of all.” The Americans were creating a world in which no other future would be considered but the American one, which was both the source of change and the unattainable ideal.

The financial crisis made me stop looking at my future as I once had. My generation, somewhere between delayed adolescence and starting a family, felt the new economic limits in America acutely; it was no longer clear that our lives would get exponentially better, as our country had always promised us.

as my friend Olga explained to me, would look at that souvlaki joint with the tables outside and tell you that a souvlaki and Coke cost only four euros, that that young man sitting there for hours was unemployed and didn’t want to sit in his apartment or he would kill himself, and that that elderly pensioner sitting with him had lost his pension and probably had been nursing that same draft of beer all day. The foreigner, the German bureaucrat, and the IMF representative couldn’t see that, and so for the young man and the old pensionless pensioner, there would be no limit to their suffering.

What the Americans did not know, the Greeks never forgot; a Communist Party member told me in 2010 that the Americans “first tested” napalm on the Greeks (it was after they used it on the Japanese during World War

Today, a Greek friend told me, Greeks still use the word “Peurifoy” to refer to the bullying manner in which a foreigner condescends to Greeks.