by Suzy Hansen
As an adult I hadn’t had a strong sense of what life should look like. I rarely imagined my wedding day, or the man I would marry, the house I would live in, my financial status, or whether I would have children. It wasn’t always that way. My mother recently found piles of notebooks of mine from when I was a small child that were filled with plans for my future. I wrote out what I would do at every age—I was very ambitious: when I would get married and when I would have kids and when I would open a dance studio. This sort of planning stopped when I left my small hometown for college. The experience of going to a radically new place, as college was to me, completely upended my sense of the world and its possibilities, a transformation that happened again when I moved to New York, and again when I moved to Istanbul. All change is dramatic for provincial people. But the last move was the hardest. In Turkey, the upheaval was far more unsettling: after a while, I began to feel that the entire foundation of my consciousness was a lie.
For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans—who do not know that is what they are—and has a trajectory unique to the history of the United States. In recent years, however, this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. We can no longer travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with us, the unfamiliar contours of ourselves. After I moved to Istanbul, I bought a notebook, and unlike the confident child I wrote down not plans but a question: Who do we become if we don’t become Americans, at least not in the way we always understood the word? I asked it because my years as an American abroad in the twenty-first century were not a joyous romp of self-discovery and romance, the kind we see in movies; mine were more of a shattering and a shame, and even now, I still don’t know myself.
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IN 2007, I won a writing fellowship that sent Americans abroad for two years at a time. I had applied for it on a whim. No part of me expected to win the thing. I never thought I would leave New York. I was almost thirty and my friends were coupling off and would soon be making loads of money to support their firstborn. Even as they wished me congratulations, I detected a look of concern on their faces, as if I was crazy to leave all this, as if twenty-nine was a little too late to be finding myself. I had never even been to Turkey before.
The fellowship had been created in the 1920s by Charles Crane, a Russophile and scion of a plumbing-parts fortune, whose company’s in-house magazine, Valve World, published headlines such as “King Hussein of the Hejaz Enjoys the Crane Bathroom.” After World War I, according to his biographer David Hapgood, Crane concluded that “Americans and especially American policy-makers were not well enough informed about the rest of the world,” and began sending young men abroad for sometimes as long as ten years at a time as part of his Institute of Current World Affairs (ICWA). I suspected, given the nascent imperial era in which it was conceived, that the fellowship doubled as some sort of low-grade intelligence-gathering operation. After I moved to Turkey, and Turks began calling me a spy, an American friend suggested that maybe I was a postmodern spy—a spy who didn’t know she was a spy. “Well, it’s true in a way,” he said drily. “Like all foreign correspondents, you’re sending back information that, no matter how you intended it, will no doubt be used in the worst way imaginable.”
The objective of Crane’s fellowship in truth seems more benign. “Each man will be undertaking perhaps as difficult a task as there is, namely, that of interpreting a people, or a group, to itself and to others,” one of ICWA’s early prospectuses read in 1925. “Such a task requires … something beyond hard work and good intentions, something even beyond knowledge; sympathy, insight, the mellowness of time, the gift of expression are indispensable.” In those years, the United States was not yet a superpower. Despite its occupations of the Philippines and Cuba, and its long history of slavery, its image for many abroad was still that of the anti-imperialist, rebel nation, a country that had, for the most part, resisted the worst temptations of colonialism and imperialism, instead preaching an unprecedented kind of liberation theology for the world. When President Woodrow Wilson famously argued in his Fourteen Points speech that all citizens deserved the right to determine their own political fates, he helped inspire leaders from all over the former Ottoman Empire—Eleftherios Venizelos of Greece, Sa’ad Zaghlul of Egypt, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of Turkey—to fight for independence from foreign rule. In the 1910s, some perceived America as a messiah rescuing the world’s peoples from the evils of Europe.
Yet these foreigners overestimated Wilson’s knowledge of or interest in their part of the world. Wilson had no idea so many ethnicities and religions even existed. “You do not know and cannot appreciate the anxieties that I have experienced,” he admitted, “as a result of many millions of people having their hopes raised by what I have said.” Even forty years later, the Egyptian president and fervent nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser would remind the United States that though the Americans had forgotten the principles of Woodrow Wilson, the Egyptians had not.
Charles Crane understood those hopes. After the war, in early 1919, President Wilson had dispatched Crane and a theologian named Henry Churchill King to travel throughout the former Ottoman Empire. In the spirit of self-determination, Wilson wanted to learn what form of governance these newly liberated peoples desired for themselves. Neither Crane nor King had spent much time in the region before. In those years, the entire army of the United States was one-twentieth the size of Germany’s, and even smaller than Romania’s or Bulgaria’s, and it had no intelligence service in the Middle East, save for a single spy dispatched to Arabia during World War I as a Standard Oil speculator.
Crane and King interviewed thousands of people: Druze and Maronites, Turks and Armenians, Arabs and Jews. What they heard was that the people of the Middle East longed for independence, but they might accept the guardianship of the United States, a country about which they knew little except that it had not enslaved much of the world as had the British and the French. The great Turkish feminist Halide Edip Adıvar said to Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) that the Americans were “the least harmful solution.” Many Arabs, Crane and King reported, even lauded America’s “genuinely democratic spirit” and believed that “America had no territorial or colonial ambitions.” Everywhere people told Crane they loved the American president and some even “knew the Fourteen Points by heart.”
Crane’s was the first survey of its kind. American government officials, however, ignored the findings of the King-Crane Commission, by then fully aware that the British and French had already hatched plans for carving up the region (known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement). Syria and Iraq became countries with haphazardly drawn lines running right through well-established communities, and French and British lackeys were installed as their rulers. President Wilson likely never read Crane’s report.
The events that followed were catastrophic: the Greek-Turkish 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 & Publisher, the editors wrote that American policy makers’ disregard for the report’s findings was “an awesome spectacle … of how an uninformed democracy might precipitate the gravest consequences.” They went on: “Wonderment has been expressed by Turk, Greek, Arab, Armenian, Jew, Syrian, and Druze, not to mention Europeans, as to what has become of the American Mission and its report, which they all dreamed would bring tranquility and a new order to the troubled Near East.” Middle Easterners never understood what happened to this “Great Hope.”
The exception was Turkey. Whereas Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, and Egyptians would still find themselves tethered to colonial rulers, the Turks won their independence from the Western powers and rebuilt their country themselves, an achievement
about which they would never fail to remind me. Only one more world war later, Turkey, showered with funds by the nascent American empire, began to reconstruct its fragile identity in vague imitation of its benefactor. I learned about the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in college; I knew then that millions of dollars had gone to two countries called Greece and Turkey. But when I moved to Istanbul, at age twenty-nine, I had never questioned whether these funds had been anything other than some benevolent American act. In my mind, the scene played out like a rich man in town building a new school; the American president showed up with a sack of money and dropped it on a desk, no strings attached, and the townsfolk cheered with gratitude.
As Crane’s organization had described, there is a difference between knowledge and that “beautiful place beyond it.” But what would I learn by leaving America that was beyond good intentions, beyond sympathy, beyond the luxury of time? What else was there? I had hardly studied World War I. I had no idea that the people of the Middle East had been feeling betrayed by Americans for a hundred years. I had no idea that they had ever thought so highly of the United States in the first place.
A young Turkish artist who had just returned from a decade in New York once said to me, during a brief hopeful era in Turkey, “Western history is a farce and everyone knows it. Perhaps we can take the values that Americans have abused for material gain and do something better with them.” I didn’t tell him that most Americans would have no idea what he was talking about—that I, to some degree, also did not—but by then that feeling of newly recognized ignorance was one I knew well. You cannot grow up in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States of America and live abroad in the twenty-first and not feel it all the time. If I learned something about Turkey, I received it, as unsophisticated but curious people do, as a happy addition to my mind. 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.
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IN THE WEEKS before my departure from New York, I spent hours explaining Turkey’s international relevance to my bored loved ones, no doubt deploying the cliché that Istanbul was the bridge between East and West. At first, my family was not exactly thrilled for me; New York had been vile enough in their minds. My brother’s reaction to the news that I had won this generous fellowship was something like “See? I told you she was going to get it,” as if it had been a threat he’d been warning the home front about. My mother asked whether this meant I didn’t want the pretty luggage she’d bought me for Christmas, imagining it wasn’t fit for the Middle East, and like most women of her generation quietly hoorayed her daughter’s adventure. My father, who feared that Islamic terrorists would soon bomb the entire Eastern Seaboard into the Atlantic, stayed up one night watching Pope Benedict’s historic 2006 visit to Istanbul on CNN. I woke up to an e-mail time-stamped 3:00 a.m. that read: “Did you know that Turkey is 99 percent Muslim? Are you out of your mind?”
It is astonishing to me now, but I remember that I, the New Yorker who believed herself so different from her origins, replied calmly: “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, no spicy-smelling kitchen in which to rediscover distant cultural memories, no crimes or mistakes to learn from and redeem, no historical events to compare to current ones. My 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.
Where I was from, few people chose to live abroad; many didn’t even go on vacation. My town was located by the Jersey Shore, two hours from New York, in a county both working-class and filthy rich that would one day turn red for Donald Trump. My extended family operated an inexpensive public golf course; I worked there in summers as the hot dog girl; politics in my life were limited to small-businessman woes and prejudices: taxes and immigrants and not much else. My town, populated almost entirely by the descendants of white Christian Europeans, had few connections to the outside world, perhaps by choice, and so their resentments and fears festered with little reason to ever be expressed to anyone but one another. I don’t remember much talk of foreign affairs, or of other countries, rarely even of New York, which loomed like a terrifying shadow above us, the place Americans went either to be mugged or to think they were better than everyone else. That was my sense of the outside world: where Americans went to be hurt or to hurt others. When I got into an elite college, I took this small-town defensiveness with me, but slowly discovered that the world was actually kaleidoscopic, full of possibilities.
So, of course, New York became the dream, the land of meaningful pursuits, a chance for absolution of my small-town sins. After college, I moved there and eventually got a job as a journalist at a weekly newspaper, The New York Observer, which was obsessed with New York. The newspaper was a formative journalistic experience, mainly because of its fatherly editor, Peter Kaplan, who wanted nothing more than for all of his kids to succeed. The month I started, in August 2004, the Republican Convention had come to New York. The 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.
By then, New York had morphed, thanks to the Internet, into a cocaine-and-steroids version of itself. Working in the media offered a measure of civic responsibility and literary expression, but mostly, I discovered that for many it offered a somewhat respectable path to the new Internet-based celebrity. Young people at that time seemed desperate to be recognized by an external force, something beyond conventional notions of fame. The writer Alison Lurie compared this “celebrity complex” to the process by which totalitarian regimes render entire groups or ethnicities “nonpersons”; instead, in the “so-called advanced democratic societies,” she wrote, people did this to themselves. 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. During that Gilded Age—perhaps the last true Gilded Age—poor people mysteriously disappeared as if in some dirty war, banks replaced any normal shop or café or restaurant on every block, there was a weird obsession with food, which—we didn’t know then—we would all soon be taki
ng photos of and posting online. Social media didn’t even exist, yet I already knew aspiring writers and ordinary folks who lived to be mentioned on one of several New York websites; it was so obvious already that appearing in the print newspaper didn’t bring the same addictive thrill. Real life had taken on not only the speed and amnesia of the Internet, but the mania and madness of Wall Street, as the writer Frank Rich put it at the time. 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.
There was a terrible fissure between this surreal New York and the reality outside of it: the invasion of Iraq, this new terror war. The frantic scrambling to read books on the Taliban and Sayyid Qutb and Islam itself—which seemed to many not one of the world’s three main monotheistic faiths but a newly discovered alien philosophy—didn’t continue after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t remember a whole lot of people buying books about Iraq at all, except for the ones that made the case for invasion, like Republic of Fear and The Threatening Storm. By 2005, the wars disappeared from television. Had the media become so elitist, so dominated by Harvard and Yale graduates, that none of us knew the soldiers fighting, didn’t feel impassioned by the wars? 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.
