Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  In fact, elements of the Deep State were rumored to have had ties to the CIA during the Cold War, and though that, too, smacked of a conspiracy theory, this was the reality Turks, and Emre, lived in. The sheer number of international interventions the Americans launched in those decades is astonishing, especially those during years when American power was considered comparatively innocent. There were the successful assassinations: Lumumba in 1961, Trujillo in 1961, Diem in 1963, Allende in 1973. There were the unsuccessful assassinations: Castro, Castro, and Castro. There were the much-hoped-for assassinations: Nasser, Nasser, Nasser. And, of course, U.S.-sponsored, -supported, or -staged regime change: Iran, Guatemala, Iraq, Congo, Syria, Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Argentina. The Americans trained or supported secret police forces everywhere from Cambodia to Colombia, the Philippines to Peru, Iran to Vietnam. Many Turks believed that the United States at least encouraged the 1971 and 1980 military coups in Turkey, though I could find little about these events in any conventional histories anywhere.

  But what I could see was that the effects of such meddling were comparable to those of September 11—just as huge, as life changing, as disruptive to the country and to people’s lives. The reason Emre may not have believed that September 11 was a straightforward affair of evidence and proof was that his experience, his reality, told him that very rarely were any of these surreally monumental events easily explainable. After all, was there much difference between a foreigner’s paranoia that the Americans planned September 11 and the Americans’ paranoia that the whole world should pay for September 11 with an endless global war on terror?

  In the midcentury, the CIA’s misdeeds were often executed by right-wing groups who attacked neutral targets, and then blamed leftist groups or Communists to justify even more violence, or regime change. Just as the Turks so often believed about terror in Turkey. The CIA’s ultimate goal was often what Emre suspected about the World Trade Center attacks: an excuse for wider war.

  * * *

  THE NEXT TIME a Turk, a young student at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University, told me she believed America had bombed itself on September 11—I heard this with some regularity—I repeated my claim about believing in the integrity of American journalism. She replied, a bit sheepishly, “Well, right, we can’t trust our journalism. We can’t take that for granted.” The words “take that for granted” gave me pause. Having lived in Turkey for over a year, witnessing how their own nationalistic propaganda had inspired their views of the world and of themselves, their newspapers and their school curriculums, I wondered from where the belief in our objectivity and rigor in journalism came. Why would Americans be objective and everyone else subjective? From where did we get this special power? I thought that because Turkey had poorly functioning institutions—they didn’t have a reliable justice system, as compared to an American system I believed to be functional—it often felt as if there was no truth; for example, a man would be murdered and no one would ever be able to prove who did it. Turks were always skeptical of official histories, and blithely dismissive of the government’s line. But was it rather that the Turks, with their beautiful skepticism, were actually just less nationalist than me?

  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? I had not questioned the institution of American journalism outside of the standards it set for itself, which, after all, was the only way I would discern its flaws and prejudices; instead, I accepted those standards as the best standards any country could possibly have. Likewise, if I had long ago succumbed to the pathology of American nationalism, I wouldn’t know it—even if I understood the history of injustice in America, even if I was furious about the invasion of Iraq. I was a white American. I still had this fundamental faith in my country in a way that suddenly, in comparison to the Turks, made me feel immature and naïve.

  I had come to notice that a community of activists and intellectuals in Turkey—the liberal ones—were indeed questioning what “Turkishness” meant in new ways. Many of them had been brainwashed in their schools about their own history, about Atatürk, about the supposed evil of the Armenians and the Kurds and the Arabs, about the fragility of their borders and the rapaciousness of all outsiders, about the historic and eternal goodness of the Turkish Republic.

  “It is different in the United States,” I once said, not entirely realizing what I was saying until the words came out. I had never been called upon to explain this. “We are told it is the greatest country on earth. The thing is, we will never reconsider that narrative the way you are doing just now. Because to us, that isn’t propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isn’t nationalism, it’s patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how freethinking we are, that we are free. So we don’t know there is anything wrong in believing our country is the greatest on earth. The whole thing sort of convinces you that a collective consciousness in the world came to that very conclusion.”

  “Wow,” a friend once replied. “How strange. That is a very quiet kind of fascism, isn’t it?”

  It was a quiet kind of fascism that would mean I would always see Turkey as beneath the country I came from, and also that would mean I believed my uniquely benevolent country to have uniquely benevolent intentions toward the peoples of the world. That night of conspiracy theories, Emre had alleged that I was a spy. “That information is being used for something,” Emre said. “You are a spy.” As an American emissary in the wider world, writing about foreigners, governments, economies partaking in some larger system and scheme of things, I was an agent somehow. Emre lived in the American world as a foreigner, as someone less powerful, as someone who believed that one mere newspaper article could mean war, that one misplaced opinion could mean an intervention by the IMF, that my attitude, my prejudice, my lack of generosity could be entirely false, inaccurate, damaging, but that it would be taken for truth by the powerful newspapers and magazines I wrote for, thus shaping perceptions of Turkey forever. Years later, a journalist told me he loved working for a major newspaper because the White House read it, because he could “influence policy.” 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 how the body can begin to heal, only to fall back into its sicker state. I became so conscious of my assumptions that a new reflex began to emerge. Baldwin said the end of the empire necessitated the radical revision of identity. If the Turkish identity was so bound up in its relationship to the state, wasn’t ours? What was that state and what was that history?

  I began to read the newspaper differently. I could see how alienating it was to foreigners, the way articles spoke always from a position of American power, treating foreign countries as if they were America’s misbehaving children. I listened to my compatriots with critical ears: the way our discussion of foreign policy had become infused since September 11 with these officious, official words, bureaucratic corporate military language: collateral damage, imminent threat, freedom, freedom, freedom. I read history differently, too. That year Drew Gilpin Faust published a book called This Republic of Suffering, whose central argument is that Americans during the Civil War were barbaric. I realized that American pundits often described the Middle East as some foreign, chaotic, unraveling, atavistic, violent, inhuman place but were oblivious to their own extraordinarily barbaric history: the Indian wars, the tree-strung lynchings, the
My Lai massacre. And the American Civil War, which, as Faust writes, “produced carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time.”

  When the financial crisis struck, I could see from Turkey all the countries that were being felled by this distant mother ship, this strange empire that wasn’t. I thought of all the Wharton School investment-banker kids I went to college with in the 1990s, we being the earliest beneficiaries of the delusions of globalization, we who lived and thrived in this fantasy world that preyed not only on our own American people but on the people we never thought about very far away. I found myself ranting in bars at night about my classmates. “Those people know nothing about the rest of the world!” I said. “They have no idea that what they do affects the global economy! What their stupid games could mean for a farmer in Ukraine!” Maybe I said Turkey, maybe Egypt, maybe Guam. Who knows. I was so angry, I had so much contempt for them, and for Americans, and for myself, who also had no idea how that global economy, how anything, worked.

  * * *

  AFTER FIFTEEN MONTHS in Istanbul, I finally met Engin Cezzar on a raw winter’s day, when the clouds turned the Bosphorus a milky pewter and the air filled with the smell of burning coal. Around the same time a Polish scholar named Magdalena J. Zaborowska had released a book called James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade, and an Istanbul bookstore had showcased a new collection of letters between Cezzar and Baldwin. The book’s Turkish publisher gave me Cezzar’s phone number. It turned out he lived near me, in a neighborhood called Gümüşsuyu. The prospect of this New York–Istanbul connection was thrilling—and comforting. I showed up at Cezzar’s door expecting this Turkish theater actor to tell me the meaning of life, and dutifully carrying the newly published book of letters in my hand. When Cezzar opened the door, he looked at the book.

  “Well, don’t read Jimmy Baldwin in Turkish, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “Welcome.”

  Cezzar was about seventy-five, but spry and playful. A black-and-white photo of him I had found revealed a brooding dark face in which all its magnificent curves—his nostrils, his lips, his eyebrows, even the waves in his hair—seemed as if they had been composed in perfect union. Much of that unity had dissolved with age, but his voice, that piercingly clear stage voice, sounded like it hadn’t changed since his youth. He spoke in an old-school dramatic accent, as if prepared to launch into Shakespeare. Cezzar was a famous man, although I still didn’t understand enough about Turkey to know how “famous” a famous theater actor could possibly be in Turkey. His was also a mysterious generation—the Atatürk generation—born at the founding of the Republic but that experienced the intellectual freedom and social chaos of the 1960s. His huge windows looked out onto the Golden Horn, the mouth of the Bosphorus where it meets the Sea of Marmara; all these old Istanbullus, I thought, had procured the View long ago, apartments with windows as seemingly expansive as an aquarium. Gümüşsuyu’s position on the hill was so steep it felt as if you could slide into the water. Close to us, enormous, voracious seagulls crashed and cawed around two mosque minarets, threatening with open beaks to break through Cezzar’s vulnerable window glass.

  “The night before you called me I had a long, long dream and Jimmy was in the dream,” he said. “Jimmy was the lead! The place was huge and crowded, a big big big party. At least a thousand people, and I was there and I saw Jimmy, and Jimmy had a tray in his hands, like the ones the cigarette girls carry. I watched him for a little bit, and then he came near and then I showed myself. My God, what a meeting that was! Jimmy had risen from the dead. But he was in such good shape, so well dressed, so unbelievable, he was laughing—he laughed you know three mouthfuls when he laughed. So we had this beautiful reunion. And the next morning you called.”

  He looked at me meaningfully for a long time.

  “That’s really nice,” I said. I was nervous. “You met Baldwin first in New York, right? Not here.”

  He began to tell the story of how he came to the fabled Actors Studio in New York in the 1950s, after a chance encounter with the Greek-Turkish-American director Elia Kazan, whose films included America America, based on Kazan’s own book about immigrating to New York. I felt plunged into a time when “America” meant something else entirely: an object of desperate yearning for Turkish actors and Greek directors, as if they, too, had merely been provincials from New Jersey who wanted to make it big in New York.

  “I went to the Actors Studio. Kazan said, ‘You’re a long way from home.’ And I said, ‘You’re a long way from home, too, baby; much longer—you’re from Kayseri and I’m from Istanbul.’” He laughed and continued: “And by then Jimmy had become Kazan’s assistant. To learn about the theater.”

  “Why do you think you and Baldwin hit it off?”

  “Very simple,” he said. “To begin with we were both strangers. I was more of a stranger, but he was a ‘nigger,’ for crissakes. And it was not a very good time for ‘niggers.’ Actually the worst time, perhaps. There was no other black boy, and I was the only—what?—stranger. I mean, I don’t know if you can call Italians foreigners? You can call Marlon Polish, he was there. Eli Wallach, he’s Italian. And Fonda, she’s straight American. Anyway, so Jimmy and I held on to each other—a very strange unspoken sympathy.”

  “And when did Baldwin come to Istanbul?”

  “Baldwin arrived three years after he promised he was coming,” he said. “‘Baby, I’m broke, I’m sick, I need your help,’ he said. I’d become very famous—even in Shakespeare’s time no one actor played Hamlet that long, which was two hundred consecutive shows—and so I had money and a house and wanted him to come. He knew me, loved me, trusted me. Then he became accustomed to Istanbul. People loved him. I introduced him to the Robert College crowd”—the American school—“all the professors there who were very good and very gay. Robert College is famous for that. Very well-read, very intellectual. I took him to Taksim bars, Pera, Beyoğlu—several others, Asmalımescit, taught him how to drink rakı. Then the shit hit the fan, Another Country came out and it was a big hit and everyone was after him. And he was being called back to New York to the marketplace. And he had to go.”

  “Had he been one of the few black people around in Istanbul?” I asked. “I read that people didn’t refer to him as black, but as Arap.”

  “No, not one of the only black people around,” Cezzar said. “Turkey’s very used to black people from the days of the empire, there were lots of black slaves brought into Turkey, they had become heads of the harem, the eunuchs, poor things. There are a lot of cotton pickers in the south of Turkey who came from Sudan. So people were used to it, it wasn’t a shock.”

  “So he didn’t feel racism here?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Was it hard being gay?”

  “Of course people knew he was gay,” he said. “He wasn’t hiding it. Jimmy never acted gay, but people came to know. He felt more comfortable as a gay man because men are affectionate here. Americans see it and say, ‘Look, it’s a Muslim country and they’re openly gay!’”

  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.

  “When he first got here, we were walking in front of the Marmara Hotel and in front of us were two soldiers, very ordinary soldiers, and they had linked pinkies—it’s very famous,” Cezzar continued. “It’s not like holding hands, it’s more an Anatolian tradition. Jimmy saw this and said, ‘My God, look at the way they are walking! They are holding hands! Oh, oh, what a beautiful country.’ Anatolian sol
diers always walk like this when they come to Istanbul because they are afraid of getting lost in the big city. That was very typical in the sixties. But the whole of the Ottoman Empire was gay. It’s true. You know that?”

  Those giant seagulls, the size of vultures, banged on the window with their beaks. Cezzar went to the kitchen to get some food and dutifully tossed it in the air.

  “Were the sixties an exciting time for theater here?” I asked.

  “For everything, baby!” He said “baby” like Baldwin did. “In 1960, there was this coup on the seventh of May and it was a very democratic coup. Very idealistic young officers, very well-read and cultured, they took down the party and my God they hung the prime minister, which is not funny at all, and then they made a new constitution—very liberal and open-minded. Very little censorship. So after the coup the Turkish theater took a great leap because the writers began to write freely and well and unafraid.”

  “So could you do those same plays you did in the sixties today?”

  “Are you kidding? That play we did in 1967—Fortune—if I put it on today, they would hang me. Or they would make me a suspect in the Ergenekon trial.”

  The Ergenekon trial was the one the government had been conducting against the Deep State, military officers, and secularist notables. Many Turks by then suspected it was corrupt, a way for the AK Party government to ruin the opposition once and for all. Cezzar continued—“I’m not kidding! If I did Hair today, they would shoot me. It’s awful!”—suddenly veering in a direction I hadn’t expected:

  “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…”