by Suzy Hansen
When I told Dr. Henderson-Camara about the drunk man, she nodded. “Well, a man of his generation wouldn’t be looking at you out of respect.”
“Because I am a younger woman,” I said.
She waited patiently.
“Oh, sorry. Because I am white.”
“And also because he is self-conscious,” she said. “What happens sometimes during these encounters with health care professionals is that they are so self-conscious they can barely even hear.”
I thought about my reporting trips in Turkey, in Egypt, in Greece, in Afghanistan, in America—my ten years abroad. I wondered how often it was that anyone told white Americans the truth.
The Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim visited the United States in the 1990s. Ibrahim had viewed America as an overweening and destructive empire, but according to the scholar Mara Naaman, when he arrived at the source of world power, he was struck by the poverty and suffering he saw. Perhaps he had imagined a place of frivolous, wealthy people enjoying the fruits of their reign over the rest of the world. Surely, he could not hold all of these poor, marginalized people responsible for the suffering of his own Egyptian people. In his novel Amrikanli, he attempts to resolve the fact that this empire had not only exploited other nations, it had exploited its own people.
Perceiving the terrible connection between racism at home and imperialism abroad, Ibrahim saw that perhaps if the empire did decline, it would, as Baldwin had predicted long ago, first decline from within. After my time in Mississippi, I left America knowing for sure that the promise of the country had not failed with the financial crisis or September 11; it failed long ago. It failed itself, its own people, and its own ideals, in places like the Delta, in Athens and Cairo and Kabul and Tehran and Soma, in places Americans like myself had long ignored, long denied, all in preservation of that innocence that sets us apart from most everyone on earth. We cannot go abroad as Americans in the twenty-first century and not realize that the main thing that has been terrorizing us for the last sixteen years is our own ignorance—our blindness and subsequent discovery of all the people on whom the empire-that-was-not-an-empire had been constructed without our attention or concern.
“But, ma’am, I have a question for you,” Ahmet, the Turkish miner who survived the Soma mine fire, had asked me. “Why didn’t you come before the fire? Why didn’t you think of us before?”
What I had wanted to say—but did not have the courage to say—were the reasons, Ahmet, I had not thought of so many things.
EPILOGUE
You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.
—JAMES BALDWIN
ON THE EVENING OF JULY 15, 2016, I was working at home when a friend from New York messaged to say she saw on Twitter that there was a military coup happening in Turkey. I immediately looked out the window, but for what, I do not know. “It’s either a military coup or a massive antiterrorist operation,” my Turkish friend, Aslı, said on the telephone. Army soldiers had taken over the main bridges in Istanbul, the ones that join Europe and Asia, the closeness of which I had, on my first day in Turkey nine years earlier, seen as hopeful.
Somehow I knew to go downstairs to the tekel, the only shop still open, to stock up on bottles of water, cans of beer, the remains of the Doritos and ketchup-flavored Ruffles, and to get cash out of the ATM. The hipsters of my neighborhood stuffed cans of Efes in their pockets; the shop owner asked everyone whether they were sure they didn’t need three packs of cigarettes. On the sidewalks, many people stood still, scrolling through their phones. Some had their heads cast back, searching the sky.
Then, suddenly, as if on cue from some internal coup-recognition instinct, the Turks started walking quickly, to get inside. I did as well, though I of course had only read about the Turkish coups: 1960, the tanks in the streets and a prime minister executed; 1971, torture in the prisons; 1980, pure terror, a country forever transformed; 1997, the charismatic Islamist mayor of Istanbul sent to jail and turned into a national hero. Was this Erdoğan’s fate? The leader born from a coup would be brought down by a coup?
Erdoğan had long warned that a coup against him was in the works, but the idea of a military coup happening in Erdoğan’s Turkey, in which he seemed to control every aspect of state power, was actually so ludicrous that for a long time that evening few of us believed it was real. When I first saw on TV the handful of Turkish soldiers standing on the Bosphorus Bridge, I said, “What is this? This isn’t a coup. Come on, this is Erdoğan.” Just minutes later, when I saw those soldiers actually shooting Turkish people, I said, “Where is Erdoğan? Can someone get him back here so he can save the country?” I was terrified, and irrational. But that response captures how many of us had seen Erdoğan over the last decade: as either Satan or Superman, and rarely anything in between.
The night went on in its surreal way. A military jet bombed the Parliament building in Ankara. Taksim Square, up the street from my house, was occupied by tanks. Istanbul shook with tremendous booms that tweeters in Istanbul identified as bombs. I ran into my bathroom. It turned out, the booms were the putschists’ fighter jets, flying so low and fast, they broke the speed of sound. In my neighborhood, windows shattered. But the coup failed.
The coup plotters, allegedly, were members of the Gülen movement, the one that had so tenderly inducted me into the world of Istanbul journalism in 2007, the one that wiretapped my journalist friends’ phones, the ones whose schools I visited all over the world, from Kabul to Houston. By then Erdoğan had subsumed almost all of the institutions in the country; his only remaining enemy, it turned out, was the one from within. Neither Erdoğan nor the Gülenists, those who felt they couldn’t control the military that once oppressed them, ever truly got over their obsession with dominating the Kemalist state. Its own violence and impenetrability had long ago created in both of them a natural and, apparently, pathological desire to capture it.
The attempted military coup of 2016 was a fracturing of Islamist power, rooted in a long history, and likely one that would emerge ever more important to understand in the years to come. It took me ten years to correct the crude categories I had once imposed on this country; that the so-called Islamists were a group of diverse longings, politics, and histories; and that the so-called secularists were not one monolithic group, either, but Alevis, Armenians, liberals, atheists, devout people, gays, Kurds, leftists, feminists, nationalists, and people who didn’t care about politics or religion at all. The question now was whether in Turkey any such diversity would survive.
* * *
TURKEY BY THEN had already become a different place. By 2016, either ISIS or Kurdish militant groups had bombed Istanbul, and greater Turkey, some thirty times, including at the Istanbul airport, which I had observed on my first day as the airport of a stable country. The Turkish state had gone to war with the PKK again, and the cities of southeast Turkey looked like parts of Aleppo, blocks of buildings completely collapsed, rubble for miles. In Istanbul, raids against ISIS, or the PKK, or drug barons, seemed to occur every night, with police helicopters constantly circling the sky. Young people who were excited about Istanbul four years ago talked about relocating. “I don’t want to raise my children here” was a common refrain among the half of the population who didn’t vote for Erdoğan. The gaggles of foreigners walking down Istiklal Caddesi, their necks craning in delight as mine once had at Istanbul’s many treasures, stopped coming.
Three million Syrian refugees now lived in Turkey. Housing projects Erdoğan had built on top of old Roma encampments, or had begun in run-down Kurdish neighborhoods, became largely occupied by families from Damascus and Aleppo. It would have been strange ten, even five years ago, to hear men arguing in Arabic in the street, but Arabic was everywhere now, even back on shop signs in Beyoğlu, like it was a century ago, before Atatürk made the sh
opkeepers and schools take down that beautiful script that to him was backward in every way. It wasn’t just Turkey; Athens, which I visited twice again in 2015, had become similarly deluged with refugees. Turkey and Greece, the two countries where the post-1945 world order began, had become the dumping grounds for all the broken products of that century: the war refugees and economic migrants, the terrorists and their hangers-on, the collapse of Europe and the collapse of the Middle East. The migrant and refugee phenomenon—the refusal of humans to accept the circumstances dealt to them—had begun to seem like the worldwide revolution so many had once predicted. They protested with their feet, they rebelled against borders, against passports, and against the absence of cooperation among nations, and they defied regional categories that kept them living in a disintegrating Middle East. Refugees rebelled against the superficial idea of East and West, for which Turkey had not been the bridge, I realized, but the wall that had once kept the two apart.
After the failed coup, Erdoğan’s purge began. It is difficult to keep count of how many people he has purged from government, military, financial, educational, media, and corporate institutions, but estimates range around one hundred and twenty thousand. Ahmet Altan, whom I interviewed in 2007, was among the hundreds of journalists who went to jail. Members of the democratically elected Kurdish party went to jail, too. One of the last remaining opposition newspapers, Cumhuriyet, where one of my closest Turkish friends worked, was nearly shut down. Theater directors were detained for staging Bertolt Brecht. Thousands of teachers belonging to the same union were fired. Stories of torture, even rape, began slowly drifting from Turkish jails. Erdoğan began talking about reinstating the death penalty. The period felt like the time after the 1980 coup, when the Turkish military had gotten rid of the entire left and allowed for Islamic conservatism to fill the vacuum. I don’t know what will someday fill this one.
For a while, anti-Americanism in Turkey spiked, largely because Erdoğan’s newspapers wanted to whip up that old reliable nationalism to distract from the government’s own mistakes. They claimed the Americans were behind the coup. My corner bakkal guys, İrfan and Bilal, whom I had known for seven years, even got angry at me for complaining when Erdoğan persecuted so many people. “This was a coup, Suzy!” they said. “Do you know what that means?” I didn’t think the Americans had anything to do with the 2016 coup, but there was another reason that the Turks’ suspicions weren’t strange: because in the 1980s and 1990s, it was entirely plausible that the CIA had supported the Gülen movement as part of its Islamic green belt against communism. We would never know.
My bakkal guys and I made up quickly, though, because most Turks, like most of the rest of the world, had long grown accustomed to distinguishing between the American government and American citizens, and also because my daily apple juice, as İrfan noted sincerely, had nothing to do with politics. What was more disturbing to me, actually, was to watch America dismiss its alleged role in the military coup, as merely crazy conspiracy theories. Once again, the Americans were ignoring their own long, tangled history with a foreign country. The United States influenced Turkey for seventy years. It reorganized its military, put soldiers on its soil, and meddled in its domestic and foreign affairs. When I moved here in 2007, many Turks told me that if America would invade Iraq in the careless, groundless manner it did in 2003, then there was no reason to think Turkey wouldn’t be next. This was the reality people lived in. The time had long passed when Americans should have learned to be more sensitive to the traumatized people of their former satellite countries. Sovereignty is a privilege that Americans take for granted. Much of the rest of the world still feels they must guard it with their lives.
After the coup, I even felt an unexpected sympathy for the Turkish people’s nationalism. I could see how this nationalism—especially at a time when nations from West to East seemed to be crumbling apart—was the force that for some repaired the wounds of a coup in remarkable ways. Even people who hated Erdoğan despised the idea of a coup more. That November, when the sirens went off signaling the anniversary of Atatürk’s death, I watched from my window. A man had stopped in the middle of the street. A woman paused on the curb. Someone got out of his car. Maybe these were people who didn’t subscribe to Erdoğan’s version of nationalism, but no matter; at that stage in world disorder, it was reassuring to see a moment of any nation’s harmony. Even if, toward the end of the siren, a lone, young girl in full black head scarf and dress strode in between the frozen people, walking briskly as if there had been no siren at all.
* * *
MONTHS LATER, DONALD TRUMP became the president-elect of the United States, and my country, too, seemed to collapse, if only psychologically, into angry factions. (The day after the election, my Turkish Pilates teacher said, “Now you are Küçük Türkiye,” or “Little Turkey.”) In retrospect, the schism was a long time coming for all of us. The twentysomething life crisis that had propelled me out of New York and into Istanbul might have been much deeper than any crisis of gender, class, or profession. My crisis, like many other Americans’, was about my American identity. Confusion over the meaning of one’s country, and over that country’s place in the world, for anyone, but especially for Americans, might be the most foundational identity crisis of all.
I knew Trump supporters, had grown up with them, had them in my family, and so I wasn’t as surprised as some when he won. Afterward, my sense was that the phenomenon was more incoherent, fuzzy, irrational than any of the articles about coal country; Flint, Michigan; or the white working class ever showed. But I did believe that in at least one way Trump voters were little different from anyone else in the country. They, like all Americans, had been told a lie: that they were the best, that America was the best, that their very birthright was progress and prosperity and the envy and admiration of the world. I did not blame those voters for Trump’s election, and I didn’t even blame them, in all cases, for their racism. I blamed the country for Trump’s election because it was a country built on the rhetoric and actions of white supremacy, by which I mean it was a country built on the rhetoric and actions of American supremacy. American supremacy, or “greatness,” or “exceptionalism,” had not, contrary to what many said painfully after the election, been a by-product of America’s melting pot, or of America’s celebration of diversity, or of its values of freedom, human rights, and democracy; it had been built on the presupposition that America was, and should be, the most powerful country on the planet. When both the most vulnerable and the most nationalistic sensed the slow draining of that power from their own hands, America began to break.
Trump also had been right about one thing: immigrants did get a free ride. They had been let into the country too easily. Immigrants did need stricter qualifications for citizenship. There was no doubt that the white European immigrants who one hundred years ago knocked on the doors of Ellis Island should have faced a higher bar for entry. They should have gotten a months-long education on the Americans’ destruction of its indigenous populations, on its history of slavery, on its persecution of darker-skinned immigrants, on its invasion and occupation of Cuba and the Philippines—and later, on its vast and endless empire—and they should have been made to swear that they accepted this ugly American history as their own, that they vowed to take responsibility for it and its repercussions, and that they promised to protect nonwhite peoples as much as they protected their white selves—forever. This vow should have been the price of American citizenship. Because clearly something did go wrong in America. Americans had been bound to myth, not history. They got a free ride. We got a free ride. I got a free ride.
This Trump phenomenon has also been referred to as “white fragility,” but white fragility is not just the problem of conservatives or red staters. White fragility also prevents elite white Americans from accepting—even with their meritocracy and Ivy League degrees and good intentions—that they, too, might not be exceptional, that they were the beneficiaries of a period of u
nprecedented national prosperity and military might, and that they, with their ignorance and even exploitation, had contributed to the anguish of foreigners and the pain of their own people. After Trump’s election, the Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote in The New York Times, “Empires rot from the inside even as emperors blame the barbarians.” He could see America so much more clearly than so many Americans could.
From abroad, when I used to hear President Obama say that America is the greatest country on earth, I never felt contempt. I felt like I did as a child, not wanting to admit to my parents I knew there was no Santa Claus. When I consider giving this book to my parents—and to my figurative parents, the older Americans far more invested in American myths than I ever was—I feel a physical pain in my heart. The hurt is automatic, it is from me, I cannot control it. It is common to say Watergate shattered American innocence, that Vietnam shattered American innocence, that September 11 shattered American innocence, that Trump shattered American innocence. But this was all wishful thinking. American innocence never dies. That pain in my heart is my innocence. The only difference is that now I know it. If there was anything fully shattered during my years abroad, it was faith in my own objectivity, as a journalist or as a human being.
I might know, too, what Baldwin meant when he said only love could assuage America’s race problem, but I can only grasp it when I think of romantic love. I did, after all, fall in love with Turkey. I fell in love with Istanbul, with Rana, with Caner, with all the Turks and Istanbullus who welcomed me; I fell in love with foreign men, with the cats of Cihangir, with the Anatolian roads, with even the smell of burning coal in winter. When you are in love, you feel a superhuman amount of empathy because, crucially, it is in your self-interest to do so. It wasn’t until I loved like this that I could understand why only love could solve America’s race problem, and by extension its imperial one: that it is not until one contemplates loving someone, caring about that person’s physical and emotional well-being, wanting that person to thrive, wanting to protect that person, and most of all wanting to understand that person, that we can imagine what it would feel like if that person was hurt, if that person were hurt by others or, most important, if that person was hurt by you. Only if that person’s suffering becomes your suffering—which is in a sense what love is—and only when white Americans begin to look upon another people’s destruction as they would their own, will they finally feel the levels of rational and irrational rage terrifying enough to vanquish a century of their own indifference.