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

by Suzy Hansen

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.

I was a thirty-six-year-old unmarried childless woman living thousands of miles away from her family, and had long subscribed to typical Western ideals of individualism. But with seven years of distance from New York I had come to believe that it was the Turkish family that held Turkey together, it was the strongest thing. Soma had a wholesome Mayberry quality to it, a sense of conservatism and distaste for provocation. All around the main square the watchful pillars of the community stood at the ready: the mosques, the men’s teahouses, the mining company offices, the police, the ruling government’s AK Party office, the mayor’s hall, and, in the center of it all, in a large, black-reflector-windowed building, Türk-İş, the union that represented the coal miners of Soma.

“In Turkey, they restrain Islam. They make the women take their head scarves off and put them in a box before they are allowed to enter university campuses”—as if the women themselves did not mind this humiliating and inconvenient experience, as if I would ever deposit a precious piece of my wardrobe into some policeman’s cardboard box. At that time, Western thinkers heralded Turkey as the one successful Muslim country, and its secularist founder, Atatürk, as the kind of dictator even a liberal could love. I wasn’t just trying to reassure my father; apparently I feared Islam in those days, too. We had all lost our marbles after September 11. I was inflicting myself on Turkey without good or sentimental reason. I had no connections to the country, but then again I had no connections to anywhere. I was American, two times removed from any European provenance or familial 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,

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.

Only a few years after September 11, we had in fact become less introspective. The compassionate efforts to understand our new, uncertain world were replaced by an ever more certain set of ways to manage it—money, marriage, brownstone, children, organic market, Pilates—all of it fueled by a sleazily exuberant stock market.

For journalists this failure of imagination had larger repercussions, of course, because we informed the public, and because as the so-called liberal journalists we were extremely arrogant. We revered our supposedly unique American standards of objectivity, but we couldn’t account for the fact—were not modest enough to know—that an objective American mind is first and foremost still an American mind.

I never paid much attention to the history of Charles Crane, or why he had gone to Ottoman Turkey, or the significance of his King-Crane report, but I understood that I had been chosen for the fellowship for a reason somewhat in line with his philosophy—because the committee wanted to see what would happen if they dropped an ignorant person into a foreign place. I doubt that Charles Crane imagined that, in 2007, almost a hundred years after America’s first world war, an American would be as ignorant as me.

Nobody Knows My Name,

How would we live our lives? I couldn’t change because I didn’t know what was wrong with me in the first place. Baldwin had counseled a surprisingly simple and bewildering antidote to America’s race problem, to white people’s absence of tragedy and fear of death and irredeemable “innocence”—his remedy was love.

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.

Incipient decline might account for the collective anxiety gripping the country, the fears and rages, what is, in the end, a desperate confusion. For the first time since World War II, the lives of American citizens, who have long been self-sufficient and individualistic—the masters of their own fates—have become entwined with the fate of their nation in a palpable

internationalize history or, in the words of the historian Erez Manela, “to examine how the United States has been reflected in the world, in the histories of other societies,” which suggests that entire nations—billions of lives—cannot be studied without considering the intervening history of the United States. A profound moral event has taken place, something bigger than what is cheerily reduced to McDonald’s signs in Shanghai, or disparaged as mere anti-Americanism. Anti-Americanism is not some bitter mental disorder inflamed by conspiracy theories and misplaced furies and envy. It is a broken heart, a defensive crouch, a hundred-year-old relationship, bewilderment that an enormous force controls your life but does not know or love you.

I had been invested in an idea of the East’s inferiority without even knowing it,

Language Theory, which was, in the words of the anthropologist Ayşe Gül Altınay, “a racialized conception of the history of all civilization

laicism

an Istanbul-specific, ferry-bound peace.

rakı

Their generation was liberal-minded but apolitical, obeying the dictates of a new capitalist economy that demanded large salaries to survive.

Turks, for liberal-minded women like Rana, this debate brought with it much higher stakes, of course: her fear of an Islamicizing country was little different from the fear of a pious woman in a secularist one. Forced

Erdoğan.

confident generation came Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the man who was the leader of Turkey when I arrived and who is still as I write this sentence more popular than an Adele song.

told this joke with the typical irony and sly grin that he and his Kurdish friends employed regularly—when they teased one another about not really being Turks, when they called one another “peasant,” when they derided ethnic music in favor of “modern” contemporary pop music, all as if pretending to suck up to an invisible Turkish minder. This humor protected as much as it might have isolated them.

had also stolen Pippa’s cash and camera; newspapers claimed there was a photo of Karataş on it, perhaps hours or minutes before he turned on her. Karataş had then used the camera at a relative’s wedding, taken pictures of people dancing. Karataş told the police that he’d raped Pippa and then panicked, so he strangled her to death.

What psychological suffering these people have endured, I thought. First, the humiliation of World War I, and now the torture to get into the European Union, always this endless process of kissing the feet of their humiliators

Ring of the Civilized.

rangy

said that what Americans didn’t understand about Muslim men around the world was their sense of “humiliation” by the West. “The real challenge is to understand the spiritual lives of the poor, humiliated, discredited people who have been excluded from its fellowship,” he wrote. What drives men “is not Islam or this idiocy people call the war between East and West, nor is it poverty; it is the impotence born of a constant humiliation, of a failure to make oneself understood, to have one’s voice heard.”

Istanbul—in a somewhat desperate attempt to connect America and the world through James Baldwin—I focused my efforts on finding Engin Cezzar, the Turkish actor who first invited Baldwin to Turkey.

After all, was there much difference between a foreigner’s paranoia that the Americans planned September 11 and the Americans’ paranoia that the whole world should pay for September 11 with an endless global war on terror?

I wondered from where the belief in our objectivity and rigor in journalism came.

Why would Americans be objective and everyone else subjective? From where did we get this special power? I thought that because Turkey had poorly functioning institutions—they didn’t have a reliable justice system, as compared to an American system I believed to be functional—it often felt as if there was no truth; for example, a man would be murdered and no one would ever be able to prove who did it. Turks were always skeptical of official histories, and blithely dismissive of the government’s line. But was it rather that the Turks, with their beautiful skepticism, were actually just less nationalist than me?

realized that American pundits often described the Middle East as some foreign, chaotic, unraveling, atavistic, violent, inhuman place but were oblivious to their own extraordinarily barbaric history: the Indian wars, the tree-strung lynchings, the My Lai massacre.

heard on that documentary—more comfortable as a black, gay man there than Paris or New York—that made me apply for the fellowship and move to Turkey because I couldn’t imagine how complex Istanbul could be.

then the next day the whole class was sick. We all had diarrhea. The teacher had to send us all home. Nobody knew what had happened to us. We had not seen chewing gum before. We thought it was chocolate. They gave us so much. We all swallowed the chewing gum.

What Baldwin’s books illuminated and then stripped of its white readers was an unconscious certitude in their own cognitive abilities, even or especially among the well educated.

American empire, for American citizens, was difficult to locate, I would discover, because it had long ago developed ways of preventing its own citizens from knowing the contours of its existence.

which he recognizes as a distinctly capitalist one, that was “founded on the conviction that in the absence of beings who suffer, a man cannot enjoy to the full his possessions.”

expression of divine justice.”

In his review of the book, Gore Vidal pointed to a moral failing: that because it recorded the effects of the bomb in standard, objective American journalistic style—for which American journalists are usually lavished with praise—it had, crucially, avoided the larger political questions surrounding the bomb’s discharge.

whether the American style of journalism merely records history, rather than reckoning with it.

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

phrases such as “Who Lost China?” “Who Lost Vietnam?” “Who Lost Iran?”—would become embedded in American psyches, and were automatically deployed by editors and headline writers.

Iike Why can't johnny read fearmongering

“American studies” departments were popping up to establish America as a distinct civilization, an endeavor that grew out of the era of Cold War attempts to counter the popularity of Marxism. Similarly, the University of Iowa writing program’s patrons were Luce-like conservatives crusading for the United States in the Cold War. They wanted to design a literature program that “fortified democratic values at home and abroad.” To start, the University of Iowa founders sought out specific types of American writers. They disregarded people who were devoted to social justice and leftist causes that, in their view, were juvenile. They encouraged, instead, those writers whose work was “preoccupied by family and self.” Once in the classroom, University of Iowa professors taught their students to avoid politics in favor of composing literature that would illuminate the human and smaller moments of life. As Bennett observes, a specific sensibility spread across America’s landscape of fiction, one that celebrated beautiful sentences and quiet observations, suburban malaise and inward-looking anxieties, a literary form that would naturally tend toward the domestic. “Today’s creative-writing department specializes in sensory and biographical memory,” Bennett writes, “such as how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt.”

Turkish professor of architecture told me, “You need to research Conrad Hilton to understand America’s influence in Turkey.”

ice water (rare in Istanbul then), the latest technological gadgetry, and unsurpassable hamburgers. The Hilton was there to discourage American customers from spending too much time in a foreign culture, from considering other ways of life. When I had visited the Hilton, I thought it was an emissary for corporate America, but had not considered that it might be a Cold War outpost for America itself.

creating a global citizenry of American moderns who believed they came to their admiration for America on their own. If I had not known that magazines, plays, books, writing programs, newspapers—even hotels!—had all been produced to shape my sense of America’s greatness,

necessarily, but only as long as it was the kind of criticism “that respects the existing systems and never touches the roots.”

“We must embark on a bold new program,” Truman said, “for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” Truman’s words had the magical effect of turning a colonial endeavor into a humanitarian mission, in effect saying to the developing world, “We can help you be like us.” “Modernization” would end up being the Americans’ cleverest euphemism for empire building after 1950, and though the history of “modernization theory” has

people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes.

Pundits scoffed that the Greeks had brought their stupendous crisis upon themselves, as if some deficit in their collective southern character, some deeply embedded depravity, had compelled them to destroy Europe.