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

by Suzy Hansen

What Gezari was characterizing was the particular trajectory of American liberalism, which for people from minority races and cultures had become only superficially inclusive, and which was further undermined by an economic system so corrupt that it could not sustain all livelihoods. Acceptance to this system was always dependent on

Gülenist businessmen founded holding firms, publishing companies, newspapers, radio stations, and, crucially, schools. Turgut Özal championed them.

Our administration of all these little empires had rendered all of us into half-hearted automatons; no one believed in the words they were saying, and yet this language was about real things: flesh and death and war, people’s homelands, and their children.

So often walking through Kabul, I wished I’d never come to Afghanistan. It was my mere existence, I felt, that did damage enough. I wanted nothing else but to withdraw myself.

But it was darker than this, wasn’t it? We all wanted to hold on to this imperial dream, because the loss of the empire meant we might someday be the ones who were ruled. It meant we would not be the strongest, it meant we would not chart our own course, it meant all the freedoms we believed ourselves divinely ordained for, all the power to “be whatever you want to be”—everything that made up the meaning of our American lives—would be gone. We couldn’t stand it. We couldn’t stand a world

Dr. Shirley was the first black doctor to do his residency at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. For a decade, he worked at the Delta

Between 1970 and 1979, the number of Americans in Iran jumped from eight thousand to fifty thousand. The scholar James A. Bill writes that “as time passed and the numbers grew, an increasingly high proportion of fortune hunters, financial scavengers, and the jobless and disillusioned recently returned from Southeast Asia found their way to Iran.” Conservative and rural Iranians who came to Tehran for work found themselves alienated and bewildered by the Western clothes, values, and behavior celebrated in their capital city, its magazines and miniskirts. “We found ourselves wondering,” one Iranian said, “is there any room for our own culture?”

him.” America and NATO had this diplomatic immunity

arrangement in many countries, including Turkey, and it was deeply insulting to local people. The Shah’s “Great Civilization” was for many Iranians another grand humiliation.

To the Iranians, “modernity” had meant Americans on their soil, billions of dollars in weapons, dictatorship and poverty, the SAVAK museum. In the region, “modernization” is, according to Said, “connected in the popular mind with foolish spending, unnecessary gadgetry and armaments, corrupt rulers, and brutal United States intervention in the affairs of small, weak countries.”

forced into the role of an object, seeks shelter, seeks a place where it can dig itself in, wall itself off, be itself … This is why the gradual rebirth of old customs, belief, and symbols occurs under the lid of every dictatorship—in opposition to, against the will of the dictatorship. The old acquires a new sense, a new and provocative meaning.”

But Istanbul’s era of regeneration and repair started acquiring the feeling of a crime scene.

progress. I was enraged about Wall Street greed and income inequality, even the ravaging effects of capitalism itself, and yet still I had thought, somewhere deep down, that Turkey under Erdoğan was getting better because it was imitating the West. Even when I saw the evidence of the system’s ravages in America, I still saw countries like Turkey as “behind” us in some way, as if the course of maturity and democracy was to go through the same painful process we had. These ideas about my country and the world, no matter how often I challenged them, were foundational. Like many expatriates, I often reminded myself that I couldn’t understand everything about Turkey because I wasn’t Turkish. But the problem in seeing this foreign country clearly was not that I wasn’t Turkish; it was that I was American.

belief in the divine power of the capitalistic system he learned from the West and used for his own ends. By 2014, Erdoğan’s lust for expansion would cause him to go to war, in Syria, and later in the eastern Kurdish lands of his own country.

workers, when the system was, essentially, violent, it meant the humiliation and abuse of women, children, an entire society. Atatürk’s new Turk had been remade into this traumatized man, forced to endure the habits of this new Turkey, Erdoğan’s Turkey, which sounded a lot like what I had seen at home, in Mississippi, in America.

railroad monopoly in America, owned by the dominant oligarchs of the time, had also been called the octopus, its tentacles reaching into every aspect of American life, controlling government policy and political parties and citizens. But even American industrialists of those earlier eras eventually had been forced to cooperate with leftist movements and unions to improve working conditions for their employees, not because they were decent but because they were pragmatic.

FEW OF the Iranian academics working on the health houses project came with their wives to Mississippi from Iran in 2010. They were shocked by what they saw: “This is America?” they said. I felt the same way when I went to the Delta with Dr. Shirley and Dr. Shahbazi and another doctor named Eva Henderson-Camara. The first thing you notice about the Delta, especially when you’ve gone looking for images of poverty, is that you don’t see any people. So much of it is

“That’s because poverty in America doesn’t look like what y’all think. It used to be bare feet, now it’s Nikes. If I miss two months of work because I get sick, well, guess what? I’m in poverty. This is the new poverty. You don’t know.” The Delta

The Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim visited the United States in the 1990s. Ibrahim had viewed America as an overweening and destructive empire, but according to the scholar Mara Naaman, when he arrived at the source of world power, he was struck by the poverty and suffering he saw. Perhaps he had imagined a place of frivolous, wealthy people enjoying the fruits of their reign over the rest of the world. Surely, he could not hold all of these poor, marginalized people responsible for the suffering of his own Egyptian people. In his novel Amrikanli, he attempts to resolve the fact that this empire had not only exploited other nations, it had exploited its own people.

After my time in Mississippi, I left America knowing for sure that the promise of the country had not failed with the financial crisis or September 11; it failed long ago. It failed itself, its own people, and its own ideals, in places like the Delta, in Athens and Cairo and Kabul and Tehran and Soma,

The attempted military coup of 2016 was a fracturing of Islamist power, rooted in a long history, and likely one that would emerge ever more important to understand in the years to come. It took me ten years to correct the crude categories I had once imposed on this country; that the so-called Islamists were a group of diverse longings, politics, and histories; and that the so-called secularists were not one monolithic group, either, but Alevis, Armenians, liberals, atheists, devout people, gays, Kurds, leftists, feminists, nationalists, and people who didn’t care about politics or religion at all. The question now was whether in Turkey any such diversity would survive.