Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  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. I have television memories of world events; even in my mind they appear on a screen: Oliver North testifying in the Iran-Contra hearings, the scarred, evil-seeming face of Manuel Noriega, Gorbachev and the maplike purple mark on his bald head; the movie-like quality, all flashes of light, of the bombing of Baghdad during the first Gulf War. Mostly what I remember of this war in Iraq was singing on the school bus—I was thirteen—wearing little yellow ribbons and becoming teary-eyed as I remembered the MTV video of the song.

  And I’m proud to be an American

  Where at least I know I’m free

  That “at least” is 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 gift, our superpower.

  By high school, I knew that communism had gone away, but never learned what communism had actually been (“bad” was enough). I read Invisible Man, but the only black people I knew were the ones on TV shows, or, again, on the news—like Yusef Salaam, one of the accused boys in the Central Park jogger case, his beautiful face instantly looking guilty to a stupid white girl because he dared to be proud. I am not sure I had any idea whatsoever what Islam was. Yusef Salaam was just a funny black name to me. Religion, politics, race—they washed over 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.

  Racism, 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 of Marlboro and Deal, which were known as Jewish; in the way Hispanics seemed exotic. Much of the Jersey Shore was segregated as if it were still the 1950s, and so prejudice was expressed through fear of anything outside of Wall, anything outside of the tiny white world in which we lived; people who live in such towns can go their whole lives without knowing about anyone different from them, aside from the racist, prejudiced, exotic representations they see on TV. If there was something that saved us from being outwardly racist, it was that in small towns like Wall, especially for girls, it was important to be nice, or good, and so this pressure tempered tendencies toward overt cruelty when we were young.

  I was in high school for the Rwandan genocide and the war in Bosnia, but I was conscious of none of it at the time. During my senior year, I learned twentieth-century American history through the lyrics of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The song lists the world’s horrors and accomplishments—Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television—and then, in a way, exonerates Americans of all of it. We didn’t start the fire / No we didn’t light it / But we tried to fight it. Many years later, I unearthed a research project I made about the song. It looked depressingly like an elementary school art project. No doubt I’d used an encyclopedia to discover the events related to the lyrics: 1967, the Israeli-Palestinian war; 1968, the My Lai massacre. The stranger thing to me, however, at that time, was not even how bare-bones my description of each of these massive events had been—two lines for the H-bomb—but rather that I’d ever known about them at all. History, America’s history, the world’s history, would slip in and out of my consciousness with no resonance whatsoever.

  I was lucky that I had a mother who nourished my early-onset book addiction, an older brother with mysteriously acquired progressive politics, and a father who spent his evenings studying obscure golf antiques, lost in the pleasures of the past. In these days of the One Percent, I am nostalgic for Wall’s middle-class modesty and its sea-salt Jersey Shore air. But as a teenager I knew that the only thing that could rescue me from the Wall of fear and Billy Joel was a good college. I wish I had paid more attention to that history lesson, though. At least then I would have known what “Nasser” meant before I went off to college, which was in the Ivy League.

  I went to the University of Pennsylvania. The lack of interest in the world that I’d known in Wall found its reflection in Penn, although here the children were wealthy, highly educated, and apolitical. During orientation, the Wharton School told its students they were “the smartest people in the country,” or so I had heard. (Donald Trump Jr. was there then, too.) At Penn, in 1999, everyone wanted to be an investment banker, and many would go on to bring down the world economy a decade later. But they were more educated than I was; in American literature class, they had even heard of William Faulkner. When my best friend from Wall revealed one night that she hadn’t heard of John McEnroe or Jerry Garcia, some boys on the dormitory hall called us ignorant, and white trash, and chastised us for not reading magazines. We were hurt, and surprised; white trash was something we said about other people at the Jersey Shore. My boyfriend from Wall accused me of going to Penn solely to find a boyfriend who drove a Ferrari, and the boys at Penn made fun of the Camaros we drove in high school. 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 of us being conscious of foreign events during my four years of college (1995 to 1999), except the first months of freshman year, when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. I hadn’t known who he was. There were wars in Eritrea and Nepal; Afghanistan, Kosovo, East Timor, Kargil. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed. Panama, Nicaragua—I couldn’t keep Latin American countries straight—Osama bin Laden, Clinton bombing Iraq—nope. Maybe I knew “Saddam Hussein,” which had the same evil resonance of “communism.” I remember Wag the Dog, a satire of how Americans started a fake war with “terrorists”—a word I never paused to question—to distract from domestic scandals, which at the time was what many would accuse Clinton of doing in Afghanistan during the Monica Lewinsky affair. I never thought about Afghanistan. What country was in Wag the Dog? Albania. There was a typical American callousness in our reaction to the country they chose for the movie, an indifference that said, Some bumblefuck country, it doesn’t matter which one they choose.

  I became an adult in the go-go 1990s, the decade when, according to America’s foremost intellectuals, “history” ended, America triumphant, the Cold War won by a landslide. The historian David Schmitz writes that by that time, the idea that America won because of “its values and steadfast adherence to the promotion of liberalism and democracy” was dominating “op-ed pages, popular magazines, and the best-seller lists.” These ideas were the ambient noise, the elevator music, the echoes of my most formative years. But for me there was also an intervention—a chance experience in the basement of Penn’s library.

  I came across a line in a book, in which the historian was arguing that long ago, during the slavery era, black people and white people had defined their identities in opposition to each other’s, and the revelation to me, of course, was not that black people had conceived of their identities in response to ours, but that our white identities had been composed in conscious objection to
theirs. I’d had no idea that we’d ever had to define our identities at all, because to me, white Americans were born fully formed, completely detached from any sort of complicated past. Even now, I can remember that shiver of recognition that only comes when you learn something that expands, just a tiny bit, your sense of reality. What made me angry was that this revelation was something about who I was—how much more did I not know about myself?

  It was because of this text that I decided to study civil rights history, and partially why, after graduation, I picked up the books of James Baldwin, the first of which was No Name in the Street. Baldwin gave me the sense of meeting someone who knew me better, and with a far more sophisticated critical arsenal than I had myself. There was this line:

  But I 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.

  And this one:

  All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.

  And this one:

  White Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.

  I know why this came as a shock to me then, at twenty-two, and it wasn’t necessarily because he said I was sick, though that was part of it. It was because he kept calling me that thing: “white American.” In my reaction I justified his accusation. I knew I was white, and I knew I was American, but it was not what I understood to be my identity; for me, self-definition was about gender, personality, religion, education, dreams. I only thought about finding myself, becoming myself, discovering myself, which, I hadn’t known, was the most white American thing of all. I still did not think about my place in the larger world, or that perhaps an entire history—the history of white Americans—had something to do with who I was. My lack of consciousness was dangerous because it exonerated me of responsibility, of history, of a role—it allowed me to believe I was innocent, or that white American was not an identity like Muslim or Turk. About this indifference, Baldwin writes:

  White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, 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 anything worth learning.

  Young white Americans of course go through pain, insecurity, heartache. 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. My reaction to this was far different from the normal pain of rejection—it was the pain of suddenly sensing one’s inherent hopelessness, the exact opposite of the endless promise on which a white American life depends. Had not America’s terrible race history already determined my fate? The “Western party is over, and the white man’s sun has set,” was one of the last lines of Baldwin’s book.

  In 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. I still didn’t understand everything Baldwin wrote, I knew there was something that as a white American I was missing, and thus I knew that my ability to understand Turkey and the world around me would be inherently compromised. Baldwin’s books had an effect on my psyche, if only the beginnings of one. The philosopher Jonathan Lear has written that certain books can provoke an ethical transformation in their readers, and in his essay on the subject, he describes the types of people who might be in need of such an ethical transformation as those who live in “unjust societies”:

  Unjust societies tend to cloud the minds of those who live within them. Such societies hold themselves together not by force alone but by powerful imaginative structures that instill fear and complacency in the population. Those who, at least on the surface, profit from injustice tend to be brought up in ways that encourage insensitivity to the suffering on which their advantaged life depends. If we are inhabitants of an unjust social order, it is likely that our own possibilities for thought will be tainted by the injustice we are trying to understand. [italics mine]

  If people produced by an unjust society wanted to understand the world, they had to accept that they might not be ethical people, that there was something about how their minds worked that was fundamentally unethical. The levers and pulleys worked in an unethical way. The machine had been built by an unethical system, and eroded over time in an unethical environment, and only if people learned to anticipate the grinding of the gears would they be able to confront a world they had spent most of their lives disregarding.

  * * *

  BACK THEN, MY DAYS in Istanbul dissolved into the nights, a formless kind of existence. I had no office to go to, no job to keep, and I was thirty years old, an age at which people either choose to grow up or remain stuck in the exploratory and idle phase of late-late youth. Starting all over again in a foreign country—making friends, learning a new language, trying to find your way through a city—meant almost certainly choosing the latter. I spent many nights out until the wee hours—like the evening I drank beer with a young Turkish man named Emre, who had attended college with a friend of mine from the States.

  We sat outside in a passageway in Tünel, a neighborhood where the streets were packed with tiny tables, which young Turks filled every night, smoking and drinking beer and having tea. The din rattled off the old buildings until it built into a roar. A friend had told me that Emre was one of the most brilliant people he’d ever met. I was gaining a lot from his analysis of Turkish politics, especially when I asked him whether he voted for the AK Party, and he spat back, outraged, “Did you vote for George W. Bush?” until which point I had not realized the two might be equivalent. Then, three beers in, Emre mentioned that the United States had planned the September 11 attacks.

  I had heard this before. Conspiracy theories, as I thought of them, were common in Turkey; for example, when the military claimed the PKK, the Kurdish militant group, had attacked a police station, some Turks believed the military had done it; they believed it even in cases where Turkish civilians had died. In other words, right-wing forces, like the military, bombed neutral targets, or even right-wing targets, so they could then blame it on the left-wing groups, like the PKK. To Turks, bombing one’s own country seemed like a real possibility.

  “Come on, you don’t believe that,” I said.

  “Why not?” he snapped. “I do.”

  “But it’s a conspiracy theory.”

  He laughed. “You Americans always dismiss these things as conspiracy theories. It’s the rest of us in the world who have been the victims of your conspiracies.”

  I ignored him. “I guess I have faith in American journalism,” I said. “Someone else would have figured this out if it were true.”

  He smiled. “I’m sorry, there’s no way they didn’t have something to do with it, and now this war?” he said, referring to the war in Iraq. “It’s impossible that the United States couldn’t stop such a thing, and impossible that the Muslims could pull it off.”

  Around that time a bomb went off in the Istanbul neighborhood of Güngören. When I went there the following day, old and young men were repairing the shattered windows of a clothing shop under the blank, watchful eyes of naked mannequins, and a handful of policemen clutched riot shields opposite tiny pink girls jumping around in empty fountains. Huge red Turkish flags hung from balconies where families drank tea; one woman had stretched a flag across the frame from which the glass of he
r window had been blown out by the bombs. The terrorists had targeted a pedestrian street in a middle-class neighborhood of no significant political or religious character. There were no Byzantine treasures or European corporate headquarters there, either. Just a civilian cross section of working, living, breathing Istanbul, shopping before bedtime. The second bomb exploded out of a garbage bin after 10:00 p.m., killing 17 people and injuring 150, thanks to a tactic the Iraq War had made cruelly familiar: set off one bomb, draw hundreds of concerned citizens to the scene, then set off the other. One witness caught an image of the second bomb exploding, on his cell phone.

  “Who does everyone think did this?” I asked my young cabdriver, who’d lived in Istanbul his whole life. “Maybe al-Qaida?”

  “Could be,” he said.

  “Not the PKK?”

  “Could be,” he replied again.

  “This is the problem when something like this happens now,” a friend said later. “You think: It could be the PKK, it could be DHKP/C [a radical leftist group], it could be al-Qaida, it could be the ‘Deep State’—it could be anyone!”

  The Deep State, or mafialike paramilitary organizations operating outside of the law, sometimes at the behest of the official military, was another story. Turks explained that the Deep State had been formed during the Cold War, as a way of countering communism, and then mutated into a force for destroying all threats to the Turkish state. At the time, prosecutors had launched what would become known as the Ergenekon trial, which alleged that a group of ultrasecularists and nationalists, including military officers and journalists, had been behind the majority of Turkish crimes in the last few decades. (The Ergenekon mafia apparently had been named for a Turkish myth in which the Turks are descended from wolves.) Many believed it had killed the Armenian writer Hrant Dink, threatened the life of Orhan Pamuk, and had been involved in hundreds of extrajudicial killings of Kurds since the 1990s. Could one group possibly be responsible for all these acts? It strained credulity. But the point was that Turks had been living for years with the idea that some secret force controlled the fate of their nation.