Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  He walked away and went into the back of the house, talking to a cat that had been meowing like crazy. He spoke to him in Turkish. “Gel! Nemo! Gel!” I didn’t say anything in response to his American tangent because it sounded like the irrational rantings of a hard-core Kemalist who remains so convinced of his country’s destiny to be secular that he concludes the only reason many Turks are religious is that—of all things—the Americans were pushing them toward a more Islamic future. This seemed to me paranoia at its worst.

  “Istanbul in the sixties was much different,” he continued. “Much more civilized, more human. Baby, the population of Istanbul was less than one million. Almost everybody knew everybody else. It was beautiful, it was Byzantium, it was the empire. Istanbul was not a commercial or political or touristic center, but it was intense. Very few people but very intense happenings. Jimmy became such good friends with Yaşar Kemal”—one of Turkey’s greatest writers, a Kurd, and a committed leftist—“you wouldn’t believe it. They understood each other perfectly and they didn’t speak a word of each other’s language—talking about Dostoyevsky and Faulkner. They were singing blues. Yaşar’s a real mountain Kurd. They were singing Kurdish songs and drinking rakı.

  “Nineteen twenty-three to 1973—those were all Republican eras. We are the only group that’s feverishly holding on to secularism and the Republic. Then America started with NATO, other international treaties, and slowly but surely Turkey became a strategic partner—the most dangerous thing in the world to me. And dollars came in. Commerce.”

  “How did Baldwin talk about this?”

  “He always had this rage, this unbelievable rage against America. He already had this hatred from his Harlem days of the white American. The white American. He used to say there is no Negro problem in America, there is a white problem. After the assassinations, he lost all hope. Two things I would have loved to have seen Jimmy react to—one, 9/11, and two, Barack. I certainly don’t think Baldwin would have believed in 9/11. Most of the world thinks it was a plot by the CIA. Now it looks like a plot, because the American Middle Eastern policy went crazy. The most unjust war is what happened in Iraq.”

  “Wouldn’t the America of today be an America Baldwin would like to come home to?” I asked, because he had mentioned Obama.

  “That’s bullshit, that’s really ridiculous, sorry. It’s that simple, is it?”

  * * *

  WHEN BALDWIN ARRIVED on Cezzar’s doorstep in Istanbul in 1961, the fact that Turkey was a Muslim country had nothing to do with his decision, “except, perhaps, that it’s a relief to deal with people who, whatever they are pretending, are not pretending to be Christians,” as Baldwin said. Martin Luther King Jr. led a Christian civil rights movement, but many African Americans at the time predicated their resistance on the rejection of Christianity and the embrace of Islam—not only an alternative religion but a rejection of the white Christian West and all of its imperialisms. “In the realm of power,” Baldwin wrote in the 1960s, “Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty.” The Fire Next Time, the book that Baldwin would partly write in Istanbul, today reads like a foreshadowing of September 11:

  In order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.

  Muslim Istanbul became Baldwin’s refuge. At the time, the Ottoman Empire’s exhausted former capital was a no-man’s-land among Europe and the Soviet Union and the Arab Middle East. This lack of definition heightened the city’s appeal. “I feel free in Turkey,” Baldwin told Yaşar Kemal, who replied: “Jimmy, that’s because you’re an American.” He spent his years in Istanbul combing through the sahaflar, or secondhand book stalls near the Grand Bazaar, having tea in Sultanahmet, socializing heartily with Turks and foreigners alike—Marlon Brando paid a visit—and finishing his novel Another Country. He also put on plays with Cezzar, including John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, which is about gay men in a correctional facility. To Baldwin, the Turkish theater scene of the 1960s was more radical than America’s.

  Baldwin lived for a time in a grand old house on the Bosphorus called the Paşa’s Library, named for the nineteenth-century intellectual Ahmet Vefik Paşa. It hung from a cliff over Rumeli Hisarı, from where Mehmet the Conqueror launched his attack on Byzantium, and near Robert College, which had been established by American missionaries a hundred years before. In a black-and-white film made by the Turkish director Sedat Pakay, Baldwin sits at his desk in front of the window with the view of the Bosphorus, a glass of whiskey by the typewriter and a cigarette in hand, watching the U.S. Navy ships skulk through the water. “The American power follows one everywhere,” he said. America “has dragged itself, and may well have dragged the world, onto the very edge of a kind of unimaginable conflict, which could be the end of all of us, and has done it out of a really weird determination to protect something called the American way of life, which used to be called manifest destiny.” While Istanbul was an escape from the horrors of the sixties at home, according to Zaborowska, Turkey sharpened Baldwin’s sense of America’s “imperial presence” abroad. For him, it was “a revelation” to see the functioning of “power politics and foreign aid … in that sort of theatre.” Those were the early days of the Turks’ waning love affair with America. They still saw America as a benevolent safe port, a delusion Baldwin sought to cure.

  What was the nature of this “imperial presence” that he was noticing in Turkey in the 1960s, a country that had seemed to me in the scope of America’s history abroad so much less important than Vietnam or Central America? He described the country as a “satellite on the Russian border” where one learned about “brutality and the power of the Western world” by “living with people whom nobody cares about, who are bounced like a tennis ball between the great powers,” very much reminding me of what Rana had said about the cartoons. Baldwin’s observations from long ago felt like time capsules. Turkey had mostly avoided any direct military confrontations with America, and so, in the era of Iraq and Afghanistan, I had not been much interested in their relationship. But if Baldwin recognized it, something must have been happening there, a different kind of influence.

  It began, Cezzar would tell me, in 1946, when the USS Missouri sailed up the Bosphorus and docked in front of Dolmabahçe Palace, ostensibly to deliver the remains of the Turkish ambassador to the United States, Münir Ertegün (father of Atlantic Records cofounder Ahmet). The visit was widely received as a declaration of American support for Turkey against the Soviets. In preparation for the event Turks washed their cars, repainted their shops, and inspected their brothels. The word WELCOME was strung between the minarets of mosques. “When the ship anchored,” writes the academic Aylin Yalçın, “applause, shouts and songs of the crowd revealed their enthusiasm and joy.” That week, President Harry Truman’s special envoy met with then president İsmet İnönü, to establish their commitment “to democratize Turkey.”

  Cezzar remembered that day the sailors came ashore, too.

  “In the forties, the Americans made a big gesture. The Turkish ambassador to Washington died, and they put his body on the biggest, most powerful war machine of the time, the Missouri. Huge, beautiful, right there, we used to go to school down there—in Karaköy.” He was pointing out the window, down below to the shores of the Golden Horn. “And they took us on board—everyone could go. The American sailors who we’d only seen on film—in their beautiful white uniforms—gave us chocolates and sweets. It was the beginning of some sort of treaty—when they started giving money to Turkey. The soldiers gave the children chewing gum.

  “And then the next day the whole class was sick. We all had diarrhea. The teacher had to send us all hom
e. Nobody knew what had happened to us. We had not seen chewing gum before. We thought it was chocolate. They gave us so much. We all swallowed the chewing gum.

  “And that was the beginning of the American influence in Turkey!”

  * * *

  THE MISSOURI LEFT BEHIND a people infatuated with America. In those first years, the Turks drank Coke and 7Up, ate American foods, played with American toys, and listened to American music. Turkish kids read Little Women and Pollyanna, and comic books about American frontier history that, according to Yalçın, taught “Turkish children to love the white Americans and hate the Indians,” a love affair that would not last long. They would soon have the experience Baldwin had as a child, of watching American Westerns and realizing he was not John Wayne or Gary Cooper, but that the Indians were him. Some twenty years earlier, Baldwin had warned that if America was not “able, and quickly, to face and begin to eliminate the sources of this discontent in our own country, we will never be able to do it on the great stage of the world.” By the time he had gotten to Istanbul, the Americans had already laid claim to Turkey. I was slowly discerning through Baldwin and Cezzar a connection between the way Americans had defined their identity as white people against the identity of black people, and the country’s relationship with the rest of the world.

  My own love for Turkey, for Istanbul, had been in some ways shallow. I was infatuated with the way the architecture and smoking salons resisted modernity, the persistence of horse-drawn carts and traveling knife sharpeners and boza sellers calling out their wares. What I loved were the ways in which Turkey was different from America. But the similarities between Turkey and America were ones I never expected. The United States had been a tabula rasa, and so had the modern Turkish Republic. Denial and forgetting were crucial to the patriotism that held the idea of the Turkish nation together, and to its nationalism. They had been crucial to America’s nationalism, too.

  One of those many pieces of my own history I had forgotten, or had not known, was that the United States had had a relationship with Turkey, a kind of long-distance imperial relationship. Was I not of the place that had exerted power over them? Would not that assertion of power necessarily come with prejudice? For a year and a half, I realized, I had not been seeing Turkey plain. In 2006, before I left America, I had written about the Turks and the Armenian genocide: How does a people go about forgetting the past? Now I asked myself, How did I, and worse: What else did I not know?

  Before I left Engin Cezzar’s home for the last time, I asked: “When you went to the United States, where did they think you were from?”

  “Turkey. But no one knew about the place.”

  3.

  A COLD WAR MIND: AMERICA AND THE WORLD

  MAFIA BOSS: You’re the guys that scare me. You’re the people that make big wars. Let me ask you something. We Italians, we got our families and we got the church. The Irish, they have the homeland. The Jews, their traditions. Even the n____, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Carlson, what do you have?

  CIA OFFICER: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

  —THE GOOD SHEPHERD (FILM)

  WITHOUT BALDWIN I MAY NEVER have begun to see America in Istanbul, or Turkey itself. What Baldwin’s books illuminated and then stripped of its white readers was an unconscious certitude in their own cognitive abilities, even or especially among the well educated. He made me doubt my assumptions. Rana and I often discussed the meaning of ignorance. Whenever I learned something new in Turkey—no doubt wildly annoying to Rana—I would say, “See, no American knows that.” “No American knows we have our nuclear weapons in Turkey.” “No American knows James Baldwin lived in Turkey.” “No American knows Turkish kids once chose between American and Russian cartoons.” To me, Americans knowing every shard of historical detail might have meant a humbler American monolith and a less violent world. Rana would reply that Turks were ignorant, too; they didn’t know about the countries around them, about twentieth-century history, about their own Eastern Kurdish cities. Why did I think Americans should be different?

  In the 1960s, Baldwin had a similar conversation with a Turkish filmmaker. “American ignorance is a new phenomenon,” he said.

  It’s not the ignorance of your peasant in Anatolia, or any peasant anywhere … If you are dealing with people who do not know how to read and know they don’t know how to read, it is at least conceivable that you can teach them how to read. If an African peasant doesn’t know how to drive a tractor, or how to irrigate a barren field, he can be taught those things. But I don’t know what you do with the people who are ignorant in the way Americans are ignorant. Who believe they can read, and who read their Reader’s Digest, Time magazine, the Daily News, who think that’s reading, who think they know something about the world because they are told that they do.

  Baldwin was making the distinction between a lack of education and the ignorance of the complacently powerful, those who had faith that their esteemed institutions would teach them what they needed to know about the world. “You can’t expect people to know about countries they have never been to,” Rana said. But what if their own country had, in a way, been to that foreign country? If America had extended itself over the world, had even in spirit occupied many foreign countries, had not Americans in some way been there themselves? Had not a connection been made?

  The more I realized how little I knew about Turkey, the more it seemed that the American claim to exceptionalism necessarily obscured something about America itself. My problem was that not only had I not known much about the Middle East, but what I did know, and how I did think, had been an obstacle to original and accurate and moral thinking. This could only mean that in order to see a foreign country clearly, I would first have to excavate my mind. I would have to take apart the myths about America—as I had with Turkey—one by one. The American empire, for American citizens, was difficult to locate, I would discover, because it had long ago developed ways of preventing its own citizens from knowing the contours of its existence.

  * * *

  THE BRITISH HISTORIAN Tony Judt once observed that Americans have a strange allergy to the word “empire.” Thomas Jefferson referred to the U.S. as an “empire for liberty,” the state of New York is called the “Empire State,” but still the word sounds reactionary to Americans, like a leftist harangue, perhaps even just too old-fashioned and out-of-date for a modern superpower. Non-Americans, like Judt, use the words “empire” and “imperial” casually. In Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a Chilean man accuses Changez, who is Pakistani and works on Wall Street, of working for an “adopted empire” as a “modern day janissary.” I once saw an Egyptian man post on Facebook, “I am going to the Empire today,” in regard to an upcoming trip to New York City.

  But Americans, I noticed, only began using the word with relative comfort after the financial crisis, when the “empire,” whatever it meant, appeared to be on the verge of precipitous decline. Only then, with the balm of self-pity and perhaps their own American brand of hüzün, did it become easier to accept that they, the onetime anti-imperial revolutionaries, the world’s foremost lovers of freedom and independence, might be little different from the British suppressing an Indian revolt, or the French colonizing Algeria, or the Belgians divesting Congo of its resources. Rejecting the word “empire” had long been a way for Americans to avoid taking responsibility for acting like one, which was a habit embedded into the American character from the moment of its birth.

  Americans learn a folksy, even dorky version of American history; I remember the Puritans in their funny clothes, Plymouth Rock, drawings of the Pilgrims breaking corn with the Indians, George Washington sitting on a boat in some river. Those are a child’s memories, but the takeaway was a romantic notion of struggle and discovery. From a distance, this history looks far different. The German political sociologist Claus Offe argues that taming a land covered in wilderness meant for the settlers a return to a premodern stat
e; to survive, the early Americans had to reenact, in double time, the phases of European civilization: first as hunters and gatherers, then as farmers, and, finally, as industrialists. Thus, from the nation’s first colonial settlement, the American people enjoyed an unprecedented opportunity for rebirth, which came with a nearly ritualistic form of amnesia. Becoming an American demanded that they forget their history—it made them forever innocent.

  The Americans could replicate this process over and over through westward expansion, the ultimate free-for-all for white people. From abroad, bitter-sounding observers noted something odd about this obsession with freedom; D. H. Lawrence warned that the shout of freedom “is a rattling of chains, always was.” But for Americans, going west—in essence, as the writer and Protestant clergyman Josiah Strong said in 1885, “creating of more and higher wants”—was the very meaning of true civilization. What that meant was that the Americans’ sense of freedom was always tied not only to the acquisition of new lands but to the subjugation of new peoples, what an epigraph in a Herman Melville story calls “the empire of necessity.”

  With the closing of the western frontier, Americans turned outward. Most of this early phase of imperial history is portrayed in schools as an unfortunate turn of events. At the turn of the century, revolts in sugar-rich Cuba against the Spanish gave the Americans an excuse to intervene, thereby acquiring their first economic satellite, for which they would often tolerate the brutality of local rulers. During this Spanish-American War period, the Americans also established a foothold in Asia, in the Philippines. This distant imperial endeavor inspired a rabid debate at home; intellectuals at the time worried what kind of country their nation was becoming. The philosopher William James argued that all humans suffer from a blindness toward those who are different from them; it would forever be impossible for man, he warned, to fully sympathize with the “Other.” But the Americans, as they had from the beginning, had reason to believe in their own unique abilities to bring civilization to the uncivilized. As Christians they possessed a messianic faith in the purpose of their Promised Land to guide the rest of the world to heaven.