Notes on a Foreign Country Quotes

“But it is very, very rare that young white Americans come across someone who tells them in harsh, unforgiving terms that they might be merely the easy winners of an ugly game, and indeed because of their ignorance and misused power, they might actually be the losers within a greater moral universe.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“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.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“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”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“American exceptionalism had declared our country unique in the world, the one truly free and modern country, and instead of ever considering that that exceptionalism was no different from any other country's nationalistic propaganda, I had internalized this belief as the basis of my reality. Wasn't that indeed what successful propaganda was supposed to do?”
― Suzy Hansen , Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“This, I found, was what happened so often to me in Turkey: 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.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“It is common to say Watergate shattered American innocence, that Vietnam shattered American innocence, that September 11 shattered American innocence, that Trump shattered American innocence. But this was all wishful thinking. American innocence never dies. That pain in my heart is my innocence.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“In school, 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 more like the Death Star, flying overhead and ready to laser us to smithereens, than a country with people in it.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“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.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“We in the West still seemed to believe the old story of how a man transformed an Islamic empire into a secular republic: Atatürk came along, changed some rules, the people followed. Old Turkish textbooks didn’t portray the suppression of Islam as anything other than a liberation. But I began to question for the first time what it was like to suddenly lose your language, your mode of dress, your idea of the world. My assumption had been that any social revolution that resulted in a country becoming more “modern,” in the American sense, must have been a good thing. In Turkey, not only had this revolution been damaging, but it hadn’t worked. It was strange, I was as critical of the United States as I thought one could be. But 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 well.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“Ignorance is vulnerable to the atmosphere it is exposed to”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“There was a sense that we were there to get things done very quickly, what James Baldwin had called America’s “funny sense of time,” as if “with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“We were all patriotic, but I can’t even conceive of what else we would’ve been, because our entire experience was domestic, interior, American. We”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“The American dream was to create our own destiny, but it's perhaps an ethical duty, as a human being, and as an American, to consider that our American dreams may have come at the expense of a million other destinies.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“We cannot go abroad as Americans in the twenty-first century and not realize that the main thing that has been terrorizing us for the last sixteen years is our own ignorance—our blindness and subsequent discovery of all the people on whom the empire-that-was-not-an-empire had been constructed without our attention or concern.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“The Names, in fact, is a study in American ignorance; then as now, few Americans knew the difference between Sunni and Shiite, or how to pronounce Iran (“E-ron”). DeLillo’s protagonist, Axton, is a risk analyst for an insurance company that counsels multinational corporations on pressing questions about the world. Which country is risky? Where will the next bomb go off? Who creates the risk? Axton is also, as my Turkish friends liked to imagine I was, an unwitting agent for the CIA, the spy who doesn’t know he’s a spy. “Are they killing Americans?” is his main question. Axton and the Americans abroad can’t make sense of the world, can’t grab onto anything. They are not so much arrogant as confused. They perceive their vulnerability, their noses wrinkling at smells in the air: “Wasn’t there a sense, we Americans felt, in which we had it coming?” A Greek man named Eliades, with the aspect of a grumpy sage, says to the Americans: I think it’s only in a crisis that Americans see other 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. I will tell you. The whole world takes an interest in this curious way Americans educate themselves.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“But, ma'am, I have a question for you," Ahmet, the Turkish miner who survived the Soma mine fire, had asked me. "Why didn't you come before the fire? Why didn't you think of us before?" What I had wanted to say-but did not have the courage to say-were the reasons, Ahmet, I had not thought of so many things.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“My friends’ point was: While this class snobbery may offend your Western sensibilities, you, foreigner, are perhaps better off playing by the rules of this country, instead of your own. If I was going to live in Turkey, I had to learn to think like a Turk. These were not my rules to break.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“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.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“All change is dramatic for provincial people.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

“I might know, too, what Baldwin meant when he said only love could assuage America's race problem, but I can only grasp it when I think of romantic love. I did, after all, fall in love with Turkey. I fell in love with Istanbul, with Rana, with Caner, with all the Turks and Istanbullus who welcomed me; I fell in love with foreign men, with the cats of Cihangir, with the Anatolian roads, with even the smell of burning coal in winter. When you are in love, you feel a superhuman amount of empathy because, crucially, it is in your self-interest to do so. It wasn't until I loved like this that I could understand why only love could solve America's race problem, and by extension its imperial one: that it is not until one contemplates loving someone, caring about that person's physical and emotional well-being, wanting that person to thrive, wanting to protect that person, and most of all wanting to understand that person, that we can imagine what it would feel like if that person was hurt, if that person were hurt by others or, most important, if that person was hurt by you. Only if that person's suffering becomes your suffering —which is in a sense what love is— and only when white Americans begin to look upon another people's destruction as they would their own, will they finally feel the levels of rational and irrational rage terrifying enough to vanquish a century of their own indifference.”
― Suzy Hansen, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World