by Suzy Hansen
Some years after my Mississippi trips, I visited Iran as a tourist. In Tehran, I went to the SAVAK museum, which features in its exhibits the forms of torture and murder once devised and carried out between those very walls. Dummy models of Iranians are displayed: deranged-looking prisoners marching with right hands on shoulders in front of them; bloodied and scarred plastic faces of men in isolation cells; crazed-seeming figures with arms contorted behind their backs; enormously muscled prison guards administering electric shocks; naked, whipped, bloodied, wounded plastic dummies hanging from the walls. Over the loudspeakers, screams echoed through the halls. There was what appeared to be blood on the walls, and it was hot and musty inside. It went on and on, room after room of reenactments of torture, death, bloodletting: pouring hot water and sticking broken glass in the rectum, pulling out fingernails and teeth, beating people with copper whips, pinning them down on scalding bedsprings. There were helmets that magnified one’s own screams, so that when an Iranian was being tortured all he heard was his own endless terror. The SAVAK museum had all the aesthetic and olfactory details of a haunted house—it smelled in fact like the inside of a rubber Halloween mask—which made the walls filled with the photos of all of its prisoners, men and women, religious and leftist, all the more powerful. A special showcase had been done for the jails of prominent Iranian dissidents; in a corner cell sat a weak but defiant-looking plastic dummy of the Ayatollah Khamenei.
The tour guides, recognizing that my friend and I were Americans, wanted us to know, judging by how many times they said it, that SAVAK had been supported by the United States, that in fact the techniques were taught to SAVAK by the Americans. (There was no mention of the current regime’s ugly record of torture.) I was feeling faint, my coat and head scarf suffocating me, but I could hardly cut through the line—what if I offended the memory of the Ayatollah and drew attention to myself, the callous American, who didn’t care about what we had done to the people of this country? The man leading the tour made eye contact with me with a sense of urgency.
When I told this story recently to a wealthy Turkish journalist in her seventies, a real grande dame, she said to me, smiling, with a good dose of condescension and anger: “I hate to tell you this, but your CIA taught our generals their torture techniques as well.” She was referring to Turkey’s 1980 coup.
To the Iranians, “modernity” had meant Americans on their soil, billions of dollars in weapons, dictatorship and poverty, the SAVAK museum. In the region, “modernization” is, according to Said, “connected in the popular mind with foolish spending, unnecessary gadgetry and armaments, corrupt rulers, and brutal United States intervention in the affairs of small, weak countries.” Yet to this day, when a journalist like myself arrives in a foreign country, modernity is the measurement through which all standards of “success” or goodness are judged, and the rejection of modernity by men such as the Iranian ayatollahs or those in al-Qaida or in the Islamic State is reviled as barbarism and backwardness, with complete disconnection from what modernization projects actually meant to that country’s hapless subjects. Kapuściński seemed to have been writing about the imperial bloodlust of the Islamic State when he said almost forty years ago, of revolutionary Iran: “A nation trampled by despotism, degraded, forced into the role of an object, seeks shelter, seeks a place where it can dig itself in, wall itself off, be itself … This is why the gradual rebirth of old customs, belief, and symbols occurs under the lid of every dictatorship—in opposition to, against the will of the dictatorship. The old acquires a new sense, a new and provocative meaning.”
* * *
IN TURKEY, ERDOĞAN’S people had mimicked this return to the old as well. “What does modern mean?” someone once asked Atatürk. “It means being a human being,” he replied. Atatürk’s conception of modernity and humanity, however, had meant the desecration of a culture—of religious motifs and beliefs, and people who wore the fez and the head scarf, and people who liked to pray in public. The Kemalist elite who defined the fashions and politics of the country took the expression of modernity further, celebrating a vision of secular, Western gentility. Erdoğan’s own cultural revolution was to reinvigorate Ottoman themes in Turkish life: he spoke often of long-ago battles in Anatolia, some six hundred years old; he would build an Ottoman-style palace for himself decorated with life-size mannequins in Ottoman dress; his speaking events were soon accompanied by light shows and holograms depicting Mehmet the Conqueror on horseback invading Byzantium. Erdoğan even called himself the Conqueror. And in 2013, he proposed destroying tiny Gezi Park in the middle of Taksim Square in order to build a giant mall in the shape of Ottoman military barracks.
There was very little green space in Istanbul. Gezi Park was a rare sanctuary for trees. So in response to Erdoğan’s decision, around fifty environmentalists in a city of fifteen million people pitched tents in Gezi to stop Erdoğan’s destruction of it. The police attacked them viciously, but within a week, the activists’ tiny sit-in spread to seventy cities. In Istanbul, almost every night, thousands of Turks streamed into Taksim Square and Gezi Park to celebrate what was a historic act of state defiance, the first of its kind in Turkey’s recent history.
I was skeptical of Gezi at first, and after a couple of days, as usual, had gone to seek counsel from Caner. His wife had just had a baby, and that day he seemed consumed by the new demands of his life. In 2007, when I moved to Istanbul, he was the prism through which I saw Turkey. Back then the central preoccupation was whether Abdullah Gül would be allowed to become president, and whether Tayyip Erdoğan would be allowed to be in government at all. Caner had gently reminded me that both the Islamists and the secularists were equally horrible. The rising AK Party was bad, but the old elite was worse; in any case, neither cared about the poor and the dispossessed. I was sure the Gezi Park protest was merely another battle between these two powers, a Kemalist revolt against the Islamist ruler, and I thought my friend would be cynical, skeptical, unromantic about the protesters.
“So what do you think?” I said after we sat down.
“It is incredible,” he replied, eyes shining. “I have never seen anything like this in my life.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “Really? This isn’t kids protesting supposed alcohol bans?”
“No, not at all,” he said. “As it turns out, the only thing that could have brought all of us together was something as innocuous as a park.”
For Rana, who by then was also married, to an American, and would soon have her own first son, it was a moment of political transformation; in future elections she would vote for a leftist party sympathetic to the Kurds. The 1980s generation, the kids who had been told to stay out of politics by parents terrified into submission by the 1980 coup, had learned from the nineties generation, who did not fear fighting the government. The Gezi Park protests were against economic disparities and police brutality, but also against a decade of Erdoğan’s omnipotence, the creeping sense that he was never going away. Long ago, he promised his people real democracy. Now he was attacking teenagers with water cannons and ripping out the last trees from their concrete-covered city. The Minister of Trees had become a heartless thief.
I had been suspicious of Gezi because of the roots of my early days in Turkey, its twenty-first-century renaissance. When I arrived, the army had been eased out of politics like a senile king, intellectuals wrote in the newspapers about the Armenian genocide and the suffering of the Kurds, and women’s rights had become part of the national conversation. Erdoğan had transformed the country’s infrastructure and services, building highways and hospitals and putting in place universal health care. Istanbul changed dramatically; Rana, who usually moaned that she wished she lived in Manhattan, began saying, “Istanbul is where everything is happening now.”
But Istanbul’s era of regeneration and repair started acquiring the feeling of a crime scene. The city was being tortured: its parks peeled away, its shoreline mangled, its gardens ripped up, its hills
sawed off for rich people’s towers and rich people’s malls, its woodlands bulldozed. The AK Party posted online sophisticated videos of entire neighborhoods, such as Okmeydanı, being replaced with new ones in fantastical urban regeneration schemes. Like a monster discovering this delicious country for the first time, the AK Party dammed the rivers, built hydroelectric and thermal power plants, and sent more men into coal mines—in part so the country would have enough electricity to eat up the forests and build hotels, and malls, and apartment buildings, and bridges, and tunnels, and airports. Nothing seemed to make Erdoğan happier than the smell of freshly laid asphalt.
Yet wasn’t this what these nascent modernizing democracies were supposed to do? Westerners, comforted that the Muslims liked money just as much as they did, saw Turkey as a reassuring success story, a country experiencing growing pains endemic to progress. I, too, had been distracted by this illusion of progress. I was enraged about Wall Street greed and income inequality, even the ravaging effects of capitalism itself, and yet still I had thought, somewhere deep down, that Turkey under Erdoğan was getting better because it was imitating the West. Even when I saw the evidence of the system’s ravages in America, I still saw countries like Turkey as “behind” us in some way, as if the course of maturity and democracy was to go through the same painful process we had. These ideas about my country and the world, no matter how often I challenged them, were foundational. Like many expatriates, I often reminded myself that I couldn’t understand everything about Turkey because I wasn’t Turkish. But the problem in seeing this foreign country clearly was not that I wasn’t Turkish; it was that I was American.
The other person processing the world like me, in fact, was Erdoğan. In one way, he exploited cultural nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire as a retreat from the depredations of Kemalist modernity, but in other ways, Erdoğan was destructive capitalist progress in human form. After the mining disaster in Soma—which will be forever linked to Gezi in my mind—Erdoğan suggested that he was not responsible for the Soma tragedy, because Turkey, just like England in the nineteenth century, was industrializing, and would suffer some of the same consequences every developing nation has experienced. Erdoğan even called the Soma massacre the men’s “fate,” as if it were what God had wanted. Erdoğan was revealing something else: his fervent belief in the divine power of the capitalistic system he learned from the West and used for his own ends. By 2014, Erdoğan’s lust for expansion would cause him to go to war, in Syria, and later in the eastern Kurdish lands of his own country. I had once unconsciously seen in Erdoğan’s up-by-the-bootstraps background my own mythical American story; I had not known then what inevitably comes with that narrative: the longing and imperative for imperial power.
In 2014, I had gone to Soma in May, a time when the farm hills glow golden and the sun begins to burn white, and met a sensitive, angry young man named Rıza, at a teahouse near the black-windowed union to which he belonged. Rıza was very smart, and he had heavy-hooded brows, under which his eyes seemed to fire bullets. He had been a rescue worker the day of the mine fire, but what really enraged him were the systemic problems that afflicted workers, all of which he could outline with sophisticated scientific precision. He was even angry enough to tell an American journalist something I had never heard any Turkish man—or any man period—admit before.
“My wife stays home all day because she can’t go visit friends because she has to calculate how much that will cost her,” he said. “I can’t even promise her a present. I don’t have time to spend with my kids. And because of this, and how much the men work, domestic violence is rising, as are divorces. We’re going crazy. They say Turkey is growing, but we are constantly shrinking.”
He seemed to be admitting to me that the stress of his life had been causing him to hit his wife. A liberal Turkish feminist and sociologist had once told me, at a time when a spike in domestic violence had caused many to cast blame on the AK Party’s Islamic conservatism, that domestic violence was often a response to other forms of violence in the country and even in the world: wars, militarization, poverty. Rıza wanted me to understand that the labor conditions of Turkey were not just making work dangerous; they were shattering the larger society and reshaping the Turkish soul. Rıza, who had never graduated high school, had just articulated in a sentence what a thousand textbooks could not: that when an economic system humiliated its workers, when the system was, essentially, violent, it meant the humiliation and abuse of women, children, an entire society. Atatürk’s new Turk had been remade into this traumatized man, forced to endure the habits of this new Turkey, Erdoğan’s Turkey, which sounded a lot like what I had seen at home, in Mississippi, in America.
I had been startled at first when the miners used the word “octopus” to describe how power was enforced in Soma. At the turn of the previous century, the Big Four railroad monopoly in America, owned by the dominant oligarchs of the time, had also been called the octopus, its tentacles reaching into every aspect of American life, controlling government policy and political parties and citizens. But even American industrialists of those earlier eras eventually had been forced to cooperate with leftist movements and unions to improve working conditions for their employees, not because they were decent but because they were pragmatic. The industrial magnates had something to fear: socialism, communism, an alternative system, anything for which capitalism could be rejected. Over time, the possibility of any alternative faded, and one hundred years later, Turkish coal miners were thrust into a world subsumed by globalization. They had no protection. Neither, it would turn out, did the American workers who angrily cheered on the presidential candidate Donald Trump. Turkey and the United States, as I had discovered, often shared the same fate. That week in Soma, in 2014, I read in a book called Turkish-U.S. Relations that since the 1940s, as part of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, “America tried to shape and orient the Turkish labor movement in ways that would not conflict with its own benefits,” and so the two longest periods of American imperial history—the Cold War and the age of neoliberalism—finally came together for me, in a coal mine, in Turkey.
* * *
A FEW OF the Iranian academics working on the health houses project came with their wives to Mississippi from Iran in 2010. They were shocked by what they saw: “This is America?” they said.
I felt the same way when I went to the Delta with Dr. Shirley and Dr. Shahbazi and another doctor named Eva Henderson-Camara. The first thing you notice about the Delta, especially when you’ve gone looking for images of poverty, is that you don’t see any people. So much of it is bucolic and sun-dappled that at first it doesn’t seem poor. When I made this observation, Claudia Cox had replied sternly, “That’s because poverty in America doesn’t look like what y’all think. It used to be bare feet, now it’s Nikes. If I miss two months of work because I get sick, well, guess what? I’m in poverty. This is the new poverty. You don’t know.” The Delta was all segregated schools and unemployed men, drugs and poverty and sickness. There was no social life except for church and the juke joint. The porches of small houses sagged with the weight of old washing machines, televisions, and trash bags, as if a barricade against the world. The only place to shop for food was Walmart, Dollar General, or the Piggly Wiggly, and for some, these stores were fifty miles away. In what is one of the country’s most fertile regions, many people of the Delta shopped for their groceries at the closest gas station market.
“Imagine waking up every morning and this is all you see,” said Dr. Henderson-Camara, looking out the window. “And you think: Should I shoot myself now or later?”
Dr. Henderson-Camara, now in her sixties, grew up on a Delta plantation, a system that in Mississippi existed well into the 1970s. This plantation was her grandfather’s, and he “treated us just like any plantation owner would.” Kids worked much of the typical school year. Dr. Henderson-Camara escaped by winning a scholarship to Yale for a special program for disadvantaged students. She studied anthropolog
y before she went to medical school and could quietly analyze the most basic of human interactions and spin them into an artful anthropological story.
When we sat down with white nurses in the Delta, she got angry.
“There’s a lot of distrust,” Dr. Henderson-Camara said about health services in the area, leaning forward. “We don’t trust people who don’t look like us. Having grown up in a very segregated community, I know this for a fact. When you walk out that door they will laugh and say ‘I just told her that so she’ll stop asking me questions.’ But if you live in that community and sister Edna tells you something, you say, ‘Now, Edna,’ and she will say, ‘Okay, you got me.’ I have lived on a plantation and I have lived in the projects and people do not trust people who do not look like them. We are animals, dogs don’t trust strange dogs, and human beings are the same.”
“I don’t think that’s a problem here,” replied one white nurse we met. “I may be way smoozed.”
“I think you’re smoozed.”
“Do you?”
“I know you’re smoozed.”
“You think that people … are you saying … You’re saying that basically from a racial perspective…”
“If you’re not from the community—”
“But we are!”
“You are an outsider.”
“I don’t know, I have never been kicked out of a home.”
“Oh, you don’t get kicked out, you’ll just be told a bunch of lies.”
I remembered the first patient I had gone to see with Claudia Cox. He was fifty-six but looked about seventy and lived in a stale, small house with two limp dogs tied to a tree in the front yard. He was having seizures, and besides not having Medicaid and not having any refills on his prescription, the man was clutching a coffee cup in the afternoon and looked to be drunk. When Cox asked him in her smooth, warm Claudia Cox way if he had been drinking, he said no. The entire time he didn’t look me in the eye—he actually didn’t look at me, not once. Cox saw the man at the clinic the next day. This time when she asked him whether he’d been drinking, he said, “Aw, baby, you know…”