by Suzy Hansen
Who do we become if we don’t become Americans? We are benevolent and ordinary and we are terrible things, too; we are missionaries and oil speculators, racists and soldiers, bureaucrats and financiers, occupiers and invaders, hope mongers and hypocrites. The American dream was to create our own destiny, but it’s perhaps an ethical duty, as a human being, and as an American, to consider that our American dreams may have come at the expense of a million other destinies. To deny that is to deny the realities of millions of people, and to forever sever ourselves from humanity. I went abroad for the same reason everyone else does: to learn how to live. Whoever Americans become after this time of reckoning, it will, hopefully, not be about breaking from the past but about breaking from the habit of its disavowal. If this project of remembrance requires leaving the country, then so be it, because it is not an escape; we will find our country everywhere, among the city streets and town squares and empty fields of the world, where we may also discover that the possibility of redemption is not because of our own God-given beneficence but proof of the world’s unending generosity.
NOTES
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INTRODUCTION
Soma’s main street looked like many Turkish towns: Quoted in Suzy Hansen, “It Had the Strange Light of Hell,” New York Times Magazine, November 26, 2014.
“King Hussein of the Hejaz Enjoys the Crane Bathroom”: David Hapgood, Charles R. Crane: The Man Who Bet on the People (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2001), 79.
“Americans and especially American policy-makers were not well enough informed”: Ibid., 91.
“Each man will be undertaking perhaps as difficult a task as there is”: Ibid., 92.
“You do not know and cannot appreciate the anxieties that I have experienced”: Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 215.
“the least harmful solution”: Quoted in Patrick Kinross, Ataturk (New York: William Morrow, 1969), 188.
“genuinely democratic spirit”: “Report of American Section of Inter-allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey,” August 28, 1919.
“knew the Fourteen Points by heart”: Hapgood, Charles R. Crane, 60.
“an awesome spectacle”: “Report of American Section of Inter-allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey,” August 28, 1919.
“celebrity complex”: Alison Lurie, “The Revolt of the Invisible Woman,” New York Review of Books, May 9, 2013.
“tragedy”: James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Random House, 1961), 12.
“This is the way people react to the loss of empire”: Ibid., 25.
“headmistress of our country”: Russell Brand, “I Always Felt Sorry for Her Children,” Guardian, April 9, 2013.
“There’s an America that exists”: Quoted in “Freedom of Speech, the Second Person, and ‘Homeland,’” New York Daily News, October 24, 2012.
“which decides what price some other country’s civilian population must pay”: Quoted in Kamila Shamsie, “The Storytellers of Empire,” Guernica, February 1, 2012.
“dependence on empire for their prosperity”: Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 279.
1. FIRST TIME EAST: TURKEY
“‘I’ve been traveling around our country for a year’”: Quoted in “Why America Napped,” Suzy Hansen, Salon.com, October 2, 2001.
“because it’s being pitched to the world as righteous retaliation”: John Edgar Wideman, “Whose War,” Harper’s Magazine, March 2002.
“reality instructors”: Clifford Geertz, “Which Way to Mecca?” New York Review of Books, June 12, 2003.
“to arouse the West”: Ibid.
“If all Turkey’s leaders come from the same Islamist background”: Quoted in “Sex and Power in Turkey: Feminism, Islam, and the Maturing of Turkish Democracy,” European Stability Initiative, June 2007.
“driven out ‘bag and baggage’”: “Christians and the Turk,” New York Times, June 21, 1896.
“a community of individuals who have in common”: Quoted in Üner Daglier, “Ziya Gokalp on Modernity and Islam: The Origins of an Uneasy Union in Contemporary Turkey,” Comparative Civilizations Review, vol. 57 (2007): 58.
“republic must be forced through”: Quoted in Kinross, Ataturk, 379.
“it was necessary to abolish the fez”: Quoted in Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 56.
“Turkish schoolbooks taught new generations”: Quoted in Charles King, Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul (New York: Norton, 2015), 189.
“a racialized conception of the history of all civilization”: Ayşe Gül Altınay, The Myth of the Military Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 22.
“a bare hillock”: Christopher de Bellaigue, Rebel Land: Unraveling the Riddle of History in a Turkish Town (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 153.
“Turkish architects today abandoned domes”: Behcet and Bedrettin, “Turk Inkilap Mimarısı,” 1933; quoted in Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building, 56.
“The temples that the Egyptians”: Quoted in Bozdoğan, ibid., 106.
“appealed particularly to ‘planners’”: Ibid., 6.
“the universal trajectory of progress”: Ibid., 106.
“leaving them in their underpants”: Quoted in Hale Yilmaz, Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2013), 133.
“What was the woman of fifteen years ago”: Quoted in Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building, 82.
“What does the word ‘modern’ mean?”: Quoted in Kinross, Ataturk, 432.
“The advance in little more than a decade from the veil”: New York Times, June 20, 1937; quoted in Altınay, The Myth of the Military Nation, 45.
“No one who’s even slightly Westernized”: Orhan Pamuk, Snow (New York: Knopf, 2005), 203.
“There is something called ‘neighborhood pressure’”: Quoted in Cüneyt Ülsever, “An Analysis of the AKP,” Hurriyet Daily News, May 26, 2007.
“They’re all orphans of a civilization collapse”: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, A Mind at Peace (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2008), 219.
“Atatürk has had to force through everything”: Quoted in Karlheinz Barck and Anthony Reynolds, “Walter Benjamin and Erich Auerbach: Fragments of a Correspondence,” Diacritics 22, no. 3/4 (2008): 81–83.
“Ours was the guilt, loss”: Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (New York: Vintage, 2006), 211.
“Western leaders have been scouring”: Andrew Purvis, “The 2004 Time 100,” Time, April 26, 2004.
“did not think the novel was about Africa at all”: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (New York: Knopf, 2013), 190.
2. FINDING ENGIN: TURKEY
In those early years, Turkish women often asked me what I thought of Turkish men: Suzy Hansen, “There Goes the Neighborhood,” The National, 2008.
“When you see a beautiful woman in the street”: Quoted in Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City, 140.
“scowls”: Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 303.
“What I was really feeling, during these journeys”: Joseph O’Neill, Blood-Dark Track (London: Granta, 2001), 305.
“humiliation”: Orhan Pamuk, Other Colors (New York: Vintage, 2007), 328.
“Yes, despicable as it may sound”: Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2007), 72.
“its values and steadfast adherence”: David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 306.
“But I have always been struck”: James Ba
ldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial Press, 1972), 53.
“All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie”: Ibid., 85.
“White Americans are probably the sickest”: Ibid., 55.
“White children, in the main”: Ibid., 128.
“Unjust societies tend to cloud the minds of those who live within them”: Jonathan Lear, “Waiting with Coetzee,” The Raritan, Spring 2015, 1–26.
Around that time a bomb went off in the Istanbul neighborhood of Güngören: Suzy Hansen, “Istanbul Asks: Why Gungoren?” New York Observer, July 31, 2008.
“produced carnage”: Drew Faust, This Republic of Suffering (New York: Vintage, 2008), xii.
After fifteen months in Istanbul, I finally met Engin Cezzar: Suzy Hansen, “The Importance of Elsewhere,” The National, July 3, 2009.
“people who, whatever they are pretending”: Ibid.
“Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty”: James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963), 45.
“In order to deal with the untapped”: Ibid., 39.
“I feel free in Turkey”: Quoted in Magdalena J. Zaborowska, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 87.
“The American power follows one everywhere”: Ibid., 18.
“imperial presence”: Ibid., 17.
“power politics and foreign aid … in that sort of theatre”: Ibid., 99.
“When the ship anchored”: Quoted in Aylin Yalçın, “American Impact on Turkish Social Life (1945–1965),” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 15 (2002): 41–54.
“Turkish children to love the white Americans and hate the Indians”: Ibid.
3. A COLD WAR MIND: AMERICA AND THE WORLD
“American ignorance is a new phenomenon”: Quoted in Zaborowska, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade, 25.
“empire”: Tony Judt, “Dreams of Empire,” New York Review of Books, November 4, 2004.
“a rattling of chains, always was”: D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin Classics, 1990), 17.
“creating of more and higher wants”: Quoted in Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 32.
“sincere”: William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 2.
“rational man who stood at the center of an enlightened world”: Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 8.
“world power was thrust upon”: Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 20.
“like children, like schoolboys on holiday”: Curzio Malaparte, The Skin (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2013), 194.
“would blush crimson”: Ibid., 20.
“men can recover”: Ibid., 61.
“as though with enough time”: James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (New York: Vintage, 2013; orig. pub. 1956), 34.
“founded on the conviction”: Malaparte, The Skin, 63.
“they believe that a conquered nation”: Ibid., 15.
“The source of the plague”: Ibid., 34.
“carpet of human skin”: Ibid., 293.
“It is a shameful thing to win a war”: Ibid., 334.
“a hole in human history”: Quoted in Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 17.
“I don’t want to be told”: Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 452.
“The eyebrows of some were burned off”: John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Vintage, 1989), 29.
“even touch on the public debate”: Gore Vidal, “Tenacity,” The New Yorker, February 1, 1963.
“the moment when total war”: Garry Wills, “Carter and the End of Liberalism,” New York Review of Books, May 12, 1977.
“it was naïve to imagine that serious treatment”: John Dower, Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (New York: New Press, 2012), 176.
“was to advance the claim that it did not exist”: Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000), 1.
“a way station in humankind’s attempt”: Robert Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2.
“If we had to choose one word”: Quoted in Alan Brinkley, The Publisher (New York: Knopf, 2010), 312.
“‘toward the anti-Communist cause’”: Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, 211.
“fortified democratic values at home and abroad”: Eric Bennett, “How Iowa Flattened Literature,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 10, 2014.
“preoccupied by family and self”: Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), 38.
“Today’s creative-writing department”: Bennett, “How Iowa Flattened Literature.”
“The thing to lament”: Ibid.
“the fruits of the free world”: Quoted in Annabel Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 8.
“not only to produce a profit”: Ibid.
“my parents attended the opening of the hotel”: Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence (New York: Knopf, 2009), 101.
“The United States is no longer a spatially distant entity”: Claus Offe, Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States (Malden, MA: Polity, 2005), 98.
“an existential debt of gratitude”: Quoted in Offe, ibid., 70.
“a totalitarian structure of a medieval kind”: Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings (New York: Vintage, 2004), 49.
“country where everything is done to prove”: Albert Camus, American Journals (New York: Spear Marlowe, 1995), 43.
“self-assurance and confidence”: Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 21.
“It is impossible to hold back a giant”: Ibid., 219.
“I think the only purpose of military aid”: Saadat Manto, Letters to Uncle Sam, http://www.urduacademy2012.ghazali.net/Manto_Letters_to_Uncle_Sam1.pdf.
“We must embark on a bold new program”: Harry S. Truman, “Inaugural Address: 1949,” Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/50yr_archive/inaugural20jan1949.htm.
“diminish other people by exaggerating”: Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 176.
“irresistible and obviously superior path”: Hemant Shah, The Production of Modernization: Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and the Passing of Traditional Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 1.
“sincerely interested in improving the welfare”: Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 22.
“like the person who measures”: Quoted in Shah, The Production of Modernization, 6.
“The United States is presiding”: Quoted in Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (New York: Free Press, 1958), 43.
“after the fashion of Kemal Atatürk”: Quoted in Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side, 201.
“American advisors wanted to replace”: Nicholas Danforth, “Malleable Modernity: Rethinking the Role of Ideology in American Policy, Aid Programs, and Propaganda in Fifties Turkey,” Diplomatic History, April 2014.
“It was more than a decade”: Ibid.
“U.S. officials believed that wanting to be modern”: Ibid.
“state of noble innocence”: Anatol Lieven, “US/USSR,” London Review of Books, November 16, 2006.
4. BENEVOLENT INTERVENTIONS: GREECE AND TURKEY
“a condition of the soul”: Michael Wood, “Americans on the Prowl,” New York Times, October 10, 1982.
“Wasn’t there a sense”: Don DeLillo, The Names (New York: Vintage, 1989), 58.
; “I think it’s only in a crisis”: Ibid., 41.
“humor of personal humiliation”: Ibid., 7.
“‘All countries where the United States’”: Ibid., 58.
The streets of central Athens: Suzy Hansen, “A Finance Minister Fit for a Greek Tragedy?” New York Times Magazine, May 20, 2015.
For much of the last century, Greece had been run: Suzy Hansen, “Life Amid the Ruins,” Bloomberg Businessweek, November 2010.
“The flames may die down”: Quoted in Helena Smith, “In Athens, Middle Class Rioters Are Buying Rocks,” Guardian, December 12, 2008.
“‘young’ or ‘immature’ appears throughout”: Gilman, Mandarins of the Future, 170.
“national character”: Quoted in Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side, 106.
“disinclination to obey a leader”: Ibid., 106.
“savior of the country”: Ibid., 112.
“The very existence of the Greek state is today”: Quoted in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: 1947 (United States Government Printing Office, 1965), 56.
“We have to stand for decency and for freedom”: Quoted in Kati Marton, The Polk Conspiracy: Murder and Cover-Up in the Case of CBS News Correspondent George Polk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 81.
“American are now so numerous”: Quoted in ibid.