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

by Suzy Hansen

population exchange, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the dispossession of the Kurds and the Armenians, the subjugation of the Arabs, the rise of dictatorships, and more than a hundred years of turmoil that still lasts to this day. When the King-Crane report was later revealed in Editor &

But if I learned something about America in Turkey—or later in Egypt or Greece or Afghanistan or Iran—it felt like a disruption. My brain experienced the acquisition of such knowledge like a cavity filling: something drilled out, something shoved in, and afterward, a persistent, dull ache and a tooth that would never be the same.

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.

Republicans’ arrival felt like an insult to the city’s liberals, those who had voted for Al Gore and were against the war in Iraq. As reporters, we crashed the parties and made fun of the rubes. But to me they didn’t look much different from the New Yorkers. The Republicans were the world’s warriors, another power elite. They had come to a city that not-so-secretly celebrated and worshipped the winners, no matter their deeds.

September 11 had been just another dip in the market. During the most catastrophic years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, New York threw a giant party.

That very process I’d longed for when I moved to New York, the severing of my small-town identity, had only resulted in a new kind of ignorance, a disconnection from the rest of the country. To some sophisticates I met in New York, my apparent provinciality had been a kind of exoticism; I was a survivor of those horrible American places they glimpsed on Fox News. But New Yorkers were ignorant about them, too. And realizing this, suddenly, the New Yorkers I had so long admired and envied seemed to be the provincial ones—if they didn’t understand their own country, I wasn’t sure any of us could possibly understand the world.

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. The solution struck me as a facile

Who do we become if we don’t become Americans?

THIS IS A BOOK about an American living abroad in the era of American decline.

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.

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.

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.

thing as society” and that they should “ignore the suffering of others.” Brand

Donald Trump, a flailing foreign policy, the rise of inequality, daily shootings, the tragic plea “Black lives matter.” Incipient decline might account for the collective anxiety gripping the country, the fears and rages, what is, in the end, a desperate confusion.

confronting a powerlessness that the rest of the world has always felt, not only within their own borders but as pawns in a larger international game. Globalization, it turns out, has not meant the Americanization of the world; it has made Americans, in some ways, more like everyone else.

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.

Pakistani. He said: “There’s an America that exists inside the borders of the United States, which is a very different entity from the America that projects its force outside the United States … There are kind of two Americas.”

The historian Jackson Lears wrote that Americans of the early twentieth century displayed a “dependence on empire for their prosperity, for their racial, social, and even moral identity as a people, and for the power that undergirded their dreams of personal and national regeneration.”

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. If America was an empire, was there even a difference between “home” and “abroad”? Was it not all the same kingdom? Were we not locked in the same intimate relationship? Was not their pain very much ours? Might this relationship even be one, as Baldwin said, of love?

at that point, I still had no idea that with even those political views came an unassailable, perhaps unconscious faith in my country’s inherent goodness, as well as in my country’s Western way of living, and perhaps in my own inherent, God-given, Christian-American goodness as

“We learn a lot of lies, which is called history in Turkey,” he said. “They worship Atatürk, he’s a kind of superman. He cannot do anything wrong. Criticism about Atatürk is against the law. Some countries you can see only one man’s statue. In Turkey, it’s Atatürk. In Iraq, it was Saddam. In North Korea, it’s Kim Jong. If there’s only one kind of statue in a country, it means that country has a problem. The only goal of our education is to create obedient citizens who worship Atatürk and Kemalism.”

Martyrs’ Parks—connections I had never felt the moral compulsion to look for while traveling in, say, the Native American blood lands of Colorado or the old plantation fields of the American South. Suddenly, though, it was all I could think about—that I never made the same inquiries into my own country as I did here in Turkey. I judged the Turks; every time I read of another massacre, another disgrace, I somehow brought it to bear on the collective character of the people I was meeting, as if that history had formed them. But then what of mine, and what of me? We drove into the

we did not study world maps, because international geography, as a subject, had been long ago phased out of state curriculums. America was the world; there was no sense of America being one country on a planet of many countries. Even the Soviet Union seemed something

funny. We were free, at the very least we were that. Everyone else was a chump, because they didn’t even have that obvious thing—whatever it was, it didn’t matter, it was the thing that we had, and no one else did, and we were proud and special. Even more, it would always be there, since of course I had no knowledge of why or how we had gotten that freedom, or what it meant. We were born with it. It was our God-given

me like fuzzy things, troubled things that obviously meant something to someone somewhere but that had no relationship to me, to Wall, to America. I certainly had no idea that most people in the world felt those connections deeply.

anti-Semitism, prejudice—those things, however, on some unconscious level, I must have known. Those things were expressed in the fear of Asbury Park, which was black; in the resentment of the towns

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. In the end, I chose to pursue the new life Penn offered me. The kids I met had parents who were doctors or academics; many of them had already even been to Europe! Penn, for all its superficiality, felt one step closer to a larger world. Still, I cannot remember any

have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life.

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

Emre had told me how likely it was I would screw this up; he was saying to me: First, spy, do no harm.

ONCE YOU REALIZE that the way you have looked at the world—the way you viewed your country, your history, your life—has been muddled, you begin a process of shedding layers of skin. It’s a slow process, you break down, you open up, but you also resist, much like

There it was, the reason I had come to Istanbul in the first place, the words I 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. I now knew almost all of my perceptions of the “East” had been muddled not only by ignorance but by deeply buried, unconscious assumptions over which I once had no control. A feeling of melancholy fell over me, as if I had only moved to Turkey for a silly reason.

“I’m very sorry but this awful American policy is killing us. They want Turkey to be a mild Islamic republic. Horrific! If we can survive this, this Holocaust—there’s going to be a Holocaust—we’ll be all right. Secularism is our only weapon in the Middle East. We’re the only secular republic in the Middle East! But we’re always under the dollars of the American state. But to be secular is something else. Look at these other places in the Middle East—you can’t come around the table and shake each other’s hand. This is what America’s policies…”

“How did Baldwin talk about this?” “He always had this rage, this unbelievable rage against America. He already had this hatred from his Harlem days of the white American. The white American. He used

the realm of power,” Baldwin wrote in the 1960s, “Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty.”

order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and

their anguish and their crimes so long. Muslim

“The American power follows one everywhere,” he said. America “has dragged itself, and may well have dragged the world, onto the very edge of a kind of unimaginable conflict, which could be the end of all of us, and has done it out of a really weird determination to protect something called the American way of life, which used to be called manifest destiny.”

Those were the early days of the Turks’ waning love affair with America. They still saw America as a benevolent safe port, a delusion Baldwin sought to cure.

It began, Cezzar would tell me, in 1946, when the USS Missouri sailed up the Bosphorus and docked in front of Dolmabahçe Palace, ostensibly to deliver the remains of the Turkish ambassador to the United States, Münir Ertegün

THE MISSOURI LEFT BEHIND a people infatuated with America. In those first years, the Turks drank Coke and 7Up, ate American foods, played with American toys, and listened to American music. Turkish kids read Little Women and Pollyanna, and comic books about American frontier history that, according to Yalçın, taught “Turkish children to love the white Americans and hate the Indians,” a love affair that would not last long.

Denial and forgetting were crucial to the patriotism that held the idea of the Turkish nation together, and to its nationalism. They had been crucial to America’s nationalism, too. One of those many pieces of

Americans, going west—in essence, as the writer and Protestant clergyman Josiah Strong said in 1885, “creating of more and higher wants”—was the very meaning of true civilization. What that meant was that the Americans’ sense of freedom was always tied not only to the acquisition of new lands but to the subjugation of new peoples, what an epigraph in a Herman Melville story calls “the empire of necessity.”

With the closing of the western frontier, Americans turned outward. Most of this early phase of imperial history is portrayed in schools as an unfortunate turn of events.

The idea of good intentions would obscure the racism that enabled expansion.

Grandin explains that the ideal of a “rational man who stood at the center of an enlightened world,” that is, the white man, was conceived against “its fantasized opposite: a slave, bonded as much to his appetites as he was to his master.”

Among the highest levels of government, racism hid behind innocuous words of charity and imperialist actions that no one dared call by their name.

The suppression of the Native Americans, the insistence on slavery in a constitution that otherwise proclaimed the liberation of a people, and the economic necessity of territorial expansion would forever connect America’s racial history to its foreign policy,

Williams warned, they would continue to believe that “world power was thrust upon” them, and that “a unique combination of economic power, intellectual and practical genius, and moral rigor” enables America “to build a better world—without erecting an empire in the process.”