Notes on a Foreign Country Page 3

  The absence of genuine protest against the war in Iraq was explained away by the absence of a draft, as if our consciences would have been ignited if only someone else struck the match. What we didn’t know to ask was how we would be feeling or acting if we knew Iraqis. Not “knew” them as in calling an Iraqi on the phone, but knew them as in their history, their experience, their history and experience with the United States. I do not remember having a sense of the Iraqi people, of an Iraqi family, of an Iraqi man, a normal Iraqi man—a doctor or a postman or a teacher, like someone you grew up with. Even if I did, I am simply not sure my brain would have known to test itself with the potential horrors that might befall that man: if this person was ripped apart by a cluster bomb, tortured in a prison, shot at an intersection while driving, his brains blown apart, his leg torn from his side, his wife and daughter and son screaming and crying in pain, all because of your country’s military, your government, and because of you. Empathy was infrastructurally impossible. We couldn’t imagine a real war, a war that encompassed our lives, a war occupying our favorite Brooklyn street of restaurants, a war that slung up barricades and checkpoints and manned the corners with scary men in armored suits dripping with weapons and screaming in a language we didn’t understand. There simply was no way for the American mind, perhaps the white American mind, to imagine these things—not the horror, and not the responsibility—and so we did not.

  For journalists this failure of imagination had larger repercussions, of course, because we informed the public, and because as the so-called liberal journalists we were extremely arrogant. We revered our supposedly unique American standards of objectivity, but we couldn’t account for the fact—were not modest enough to know—that an objective American mind is first and foremost still an American mind. In being objective, we were actually leaving our judgment vulnerable to centuries of ingrained prejudices and black holes of knowledge. We failed to interrogate not only our sources but ourselves. I was surrounded by the most progressive-minded people in the country, and that wasn’t enough. The problem wasn’t politics.

  To me, New York’s beautiful diversity had been the best life America had to offer. But I knew there was something wrong with the way we were living. We walked around with this nagging sense that something had happened to us, but I didn’t know what and didn’t know why. That was one of the reasons I applied for the fellowship; I knew that my own confusion had to do with some central unawareness of the world, the kind that would only be reinforced, time and again, by the very thing I had once loved about New York, a sophistication built by an army of defense mechanisms. At the time, I never paid much attention to the history of Charles Crane, or why he had gone to Ottoman Turkey, or the significance of his King-Crane report, but I understood that I had been chosen for the fellowship for a reason somewhat in line with his philosophy—because the committee wanted to see what would happen if they dropped an ignorant person into a foreign place. I doubt that Charles Crane imagined that, in 2007, almost a hundred years after America’s first world war, an American would be as ignorant as me.

  I told everyone I chose Turkey because I wanted to learn about the Islamic world. The secret reason I wanted to go was that my favorite writer, James Baldwin, had lived in Istanbul in the 1960s on and off for ten years. I had seen a PBS documentary about Baldwin that said he felt more comfortable as a black, gay man in Istanbul than in Paris or New York. When I heard that, it made so little sense to me, sitting in my Brooklyn apartment, that a space opened in the universe. I couldn’t believe that New York would be more illiberal than a place like Turkey, because I couldn’t conceive of how prejudiced New York and Paris were in the 1950s, and because I thought that as you went east, life degraded into the past, the opposite of progress. The idea of Baldwin in Turkey somehow placed America’s race problem, and America itself, in a mysterious and tantalizing international context. I took a chance that Istanbul might be the place where the secret workings of history would be revealed.

  My interest in Baldwin had begun in part because he was the first person to explain who I was: a white American with a lot to learn. Americans have no sense of “tragedy,” as he wrote in Nobody Knows My Name, and he must have been right because I had no idea what he meant. Sense of tragedy—what was that? And what would it mean if we did have a sense of tragedy? How would we live our lives? I couldn’t change because I didn’t know what was wrong with me in the first place. Baldwin had counseled a surprisingly simple and bewildering antidote to America’s race problem, to white people’s absence of tragedy and fear of death and irredeemable “innocence”—his remedy was love. The solution struck me as a facile punt, an admission that he had no solution, something, strangely, I thought was his duty to provide. The world’s problems in 2001, when I first read Baldwin’s books, seemed far too complex to be solved by an emotion. Love seemed too obvious, too easy, a conclusion that in and of itself was proof that the love Baldwin was talking about didn’t come easily to me at all.

  Maybe Baldwin knew white people would never understand him. But as Americans act out their despair in increasingly dangerous ways in the twenty-first century, Baldwin’s observations from the twentieth began to sound more and more prophetic:

  “This is the way people react to the loss of empire,” he once wrote, “for the loss of an empire also implies a radical revision of the individual identity.”

  So, my question: Who do we become if we don’t become Americans?

  * * *

  THIS IS A BOOK about an American living abroad in the era of American decline. When Baldwin, or Ernest Hemingway, or Henry James wrote from abroad, America had not yet achieved its full imperial status. The 1960s ushered in a golden era of global intellectual engagement—Robert Stone, Gore Vidal, Paul Theroux, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, among others—but even that would paradoxically fade in the age of globalization. As America, growing more powerful abroad, turned more inward-looking at home, so, too, did the going-abroad books, so many of them celebrating the transformation of one’s self, and extolling a conception of the world as a meditation and wellness center for the spiritually challenged.

  An American going abroad during the era of American decline encounters an entirely different set of circumstances. In these years after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the many more wars that followed, it has become more difficult to gallivant across the world, absorbing its wisdom and resources for one’s own personal use. As an American abroad now, you do not have the same crazy, smiling confidence. You do not want to speak so loud. You feel always the vague risk of breaking something. In Turkey and elsewhere, in fact, I felt an almost physical sensation of intellectual and emotional discomfort, trying to grasp a reality for which I had no historical or cultural understanding. I would go, as a journalist, to write a story about Turkey or Greece or Egypt or Afghanistan, and inevitably someone would tell me some part of our shared history—theirs with America—of which I knew nothing. I would feel as though I could not write that story, just as I could not write the story of the coal miners, because when I asked “What happened?” I was more often than not met with a response that spanned sixty years. And if I didn’t know this history, then what kind of story did I plan to tell?

  In so many countries, I could not shake my own reflexive assumptions. No matter how well I knew the predatory aspects of capitalism, I still perceived Turkey’s and Greece’s economic advances as progress, a kind of maturation. No matter how deeply I understood America’s manipulation of Egypt for its own foreign policy aims, I had never considered—could not grasp—how these policies may have affected individual lives beyond resentment and anti-Americanism. No matter how much I believed that no American was fit for nation-building, I saw Americans’ good intentions in Afghanistan, even as a more cynical reality stared me in the face. Even when I disagreed with America’s policies, I always believed in our inherent goodness, in my own. I would never have admitted it, or thought to say it, but looking back, I know that deep in my cons
ciousness I thought that America was at the end of some evolutionary spectrum of civilization, and everyone else was trying to catch up.

  In a sense my learning process abroad was threefold: I was learning about foreign countries; I was learning about America’s role in the world; I was also slowly understanding my own psychology and temperament and prejudices—the very things that had made it so impossible to acquire worldly knowledge in the first place. American exceptionalism did not only define the United States as a special nation among lesser nations, it demanded that all Americans believe they, too, were born superior to others, a concept of goodness that requires the existence of evil for its own sustenance. How could I, as an American, understand a foreign people, when unconsciously I did not extend the most basic faith to other people that I extended to myself? This was a limitation that was beyond racism, beyond prejudice, and beyond ignorance. This was a kind of nationalism so insidious that I had not known to call it nationalism; this was a self-delusion so complete that I could not see where it began and ended, could not root it out, could not destroy it.

  Yet we are living at a time when people are questioning—trying to question—their national identities in new ways. After the death of Margaret Thatcher, the actor Russell Brand (during his more serious years) published an essay about once catching a glimpse of the elderly Thatcher in some gardens along London’s Strand. For Brand, as a young boy, Thatcher was the “headmistress of our country,” the woman who taught her children that “there is no such thing as society” and that they should “ignore the suffering of others.” Brand then did what in retrospect was the logical next step for a child of Thatcher: he considered her effect on his own mind. “What is more troubling,” he writes, “is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins.” Part of the reason Brand felt compelled to question the Thatcher way of life was that so much of her economic philosophy had been recently upended by the financial crisis. But the remarkable thing was that the effect of the crisis on Brand’s country had actually compelled him to question himself. He was not immune; he was not innocent, either.

  Americans have in recent years been stumbling through the twilight of the American century, but largely without Brand’s self-knowledge. Historians and pundits struggle to explain disturbing phenomena: Donald Trump, a flailing foreign policy, the rise of inequality, daily shootings, the tragic plea “Black lives matter.” Incipient decline might account for the collective anxiety gripping the country, the fears and rages, what is, in the end, a desperate confusion. For the first time since World War II, the lives of American citizens, who have long been self-sufficient and individualistic—the masters of their own fates—have become entwined with the fate of their nation in a palpable way. It is also perhaps the first time Americans are confronting a powerlessness that the rest of the world has always felt, not only within their own borders but as pawns in a larger international game. Globalization, it turns out, has not meant the Americanization of the world; it has made Americans, in some ways, more like everyone else.

  In academia, there has been a call to internationalize history or, in the words of the historian Erez Manela, “to examine how the United States has been reflected in the world, in the histories of other societies,” which suggests that entire nations—billions of lives—cannot be studied without considering the intervening history of the United States. A profound moral event has taken place, something bigger than what is cheerily reduced to McDonald’s signs in Shanghai, or disparaged as mere anti-Americanism. Anti-Americanism is not some bitter mental disorder inflamed by conspiracy theories and misplaced furies and envy. It is a broken heart, a defensive crouch, a hundred-year-old relationship, bewilderment that an enormous force controls your life but does not know or love you.

  Yet just as black American writers once desperately urged their white friends to come to terms with their violent but intimate relationship, foreigners have been constantly asking Americans to listen to them. The Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid and the American author Jay McInerney gave a talk in New York in 2012. During the question-and-answer period, an audience member joked that the best solution to the anti-American protests in Pakistan would be to give them all green cards to the United States. The audience member was very proud of this punch line. Of course, most Americans believe that everyone in the world wants to live in the United States. These were the sorts of things that seemed like obvious, factual truths to Americans. But then Hamid pointed out something that would be an obvious, factual truth to a Pakistani. He said: “There’s an America that exists inside the borders of the United States, which is a very different entity from the America that projects its force outside the United States … There are kind of two Americas.”

  I kept encountering this idea of the two Americas. The Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie once wrote that the case of John Hersey’s Hiroshima epitomized this divided existence. For Shamsie, there was one America, “which decides what price some other country’s civilian population must pay for its victory,” as well as another America, the one of John Hersey, “the America of looking at the destruction your nation has inflicted and telling it like it is.” Shamsie wanted to know, however, where were all the John Herseys of today, the American writers or novelists making sense out of, say, the war on terror, the dirty wars in Latin America, or the oil-and-weapons obligations of the Middle East? She couldn’t find many young novelists who even acknowledged American power in the world. Shamsie recounted an experience that I have heard time and time again from foreign friends: “I was startled to discover that when I said I was from Pakistan I was met with blankness—as if, in 1991, no one knew that through the 1980s Pakistan had been America’s closest ally in its proxy war against the Soviets.”

  After September 11, Shamsie assumed that, of course, Americans “would now see its stories bound up with the stories of other places.” But they didn’t. Why was it that the people of the most powerful country in the world—powerful because of its influence inside so many foreign nations—did not feel or care to explore what that influence meant for even their own American identities? Where was this shared sense of fate that we had unilaterally imposed on Pakistanis, Iraqis, Afghans? Shamsie had grown up in Pakistan in the 1980s, always knowing, as she puts it, that thinking about her country’s politics meant thinking about America’s history and politics. “So in an America where fiction writers are so caught up in the idea of America in a way that perhaps has no parallel with any other national fiction, where the term Great American Novel weighs heavily on writers,” she writes, “why is it that the fiction writers of my generation are so little concerned with the history of their own nation once that history exits the fifty states?” Her question echoed an experience I had in 2012 when I met an Iraqi man. Over the course of our conversation I asked him what Iraq was like in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was growing up. He smiled. “I am always amazed when Americans ask me this,” he said. “How is it that you know nothing about us when you had so much to do with what became of our lives?”

  The historian Jackson Lears wrote that Americans of the early twentieth century displayed a “dependence on empire for their prosperity, for their racial, social, and even moral identity as a people, and for the power that undergirded their dreams of personal and national regeneration.” If the decline of the American empire may require, as Baldwin suggests, a radical revision of the individual identity, perhaps Americans have to more deeply understand what that imperial identity was in the first place. If America was an empire, was there even a difference between “home” and “abroad”? Was it not all the same kingdom? Were we not locked in the same intimate relationship? Was not their pain very much ours? Might this relationship even be one, as Baldwin said, of love?

  This book is by no means a comprehensive exploration of this subject, nor of all the countries I write about. Many historians and scholars and novelists—many more of them non-American—have chronicled the story of the American empire
in far more expansive books. What follows are merely my reflections on going abroad in the twenty-first century and my attempts to see foreign countries clearly—ultimately, to see my own. Even though I use mostly foreigners’ voices and writings in this book, I never asked them, essentially, “Why do you hate us?” They have been answering that question in complex and passionate ways for decades. The onus, I felt, was on me to catch up.

  If I didn’t, I would never be able to make sense of letters like this one publicly posted on Facebook on the anniversary of the Iraq War in 2013, by the Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who, as of this writing, is still inside an Egyptian jail:

  To My American Friends:

  Ten years later and I still can’t find the words to explain my anger to you, we talk about it a lot in Arabic, it is forever part of our context, the horror, the madness, the futility of it all, in fact it has become such a part of who we are that we need an anniversary to realize how epic in proportion it was. Ten years on and it still seems possible for you to debate and talk about it in polite or boring language. I’ll never understand you and you’ll never understand me.

  I know all of you (my friends) tried to stop it, I know millions more tried, I understand it wasn’t done in your interests, you are not the state, you are not the war, you are not the corporations. But still I’m angry at each and every one of you, maybe it’s irrational, maybe you as individuals hold no responsibility, maybe it’s a reaction to all the cheesy manufactured soul searching forced down our throats in which the horror of it all is stripped down to the suffering of American soldiers and American families, soldiers who died, soldiers who lost a limb, soldiers who were shocked at what they were capable of, soldiers who waited until they practiced the killing and torture themselves to realize that something was wrong. Murderers and pillagers who think the world owes them an apology, heroes even in the eyes of many of the millions who tried to stop the war. Maybe I include you, my friends, in my anger because you care, for what is the point of being angry at those who already made a commitment not to be human?