By HISHAM MATAR AUG. 28, 2017 New York Times; NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY
Image from article, with caption: A view from Istanbul's Eminonu Square, overlooking the Golden Horn waterway
An American Abroad in a Post-American World
By Suzy Hansen
276 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26
When I was 12 years old, living in Cairo, my parents enrolled me in the
American school. Most of the Americans there appeared oddly stifled, determined to
remain, if not physically then sentimentally, back in the United States. It seemed
particularly inconvenient that they had ended up in an Arab country. The school’s
architecture and grounds did all they could to remedy this. Even the urinals and
hand dryers had been shipped from America. It was as though they believed, as Suzy
Hansen observes in her remarkably revealing book, “Notes on a Foreign Country: An
American Abroad in a Post-American World,” that “as you went east, life degraded
into the past.”
This was in the early 1980s, before the two gulf wars and the “war on terror,”
and yet even back then I wondered whether to be an American in the world was to be
limited by a sort of imaginative obstacle. This is what concerns Hansen. According to
her, the situation has gotten worse. “We cannot,” she writes, “go abroad as
Americans in the 21st century and not realize that the main thing that has been
terrorizing us … 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.”
Born and raised in New Jersey, Hansen became a journalist (she is a
contributing writer for The Times Magazine), moved to New York and, after
September 11 — when Americans, as she puts it, “had all lost their marbles” — moved
to Istanbul. Her book is a deeply honest and brave portrait of an individual
sensibility reckoning with her country’s violent role in the world. In the period
between 9/11 and the election of President Trump, she lives in Turkey and travels to
Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran and the Mississippi Delta. She uses these places,
their complex histories and fraught present, as lenses through which to look at her
own nation.
Hansen is not only unnerved by but also genuinely interested in the ways her
country fails to “interrogate” itself. She asks why, given the extent to which America
has shaped the modern Middle East — the lives it ended, the countries it fractured,
the demons it created, its frantic and fanatical support of Israel — it “did not feel or
care to explore what that influence meant.” She is unsettled by how absent or illusive
or, worse, unnecessary this fact is to many Americans, including herself — for, before
anything else, “Notes on a Foreign Country” is a sincere and intelligent act of self-questioning.
It is a political and personal memoir that negotiates that vertiginous
distance that exists between what America is and what it thinks of itself. That
dramatic, dizzying and lonesome chasm is Hansen’s terrain. [JB emphasis]
One of the causes of this disparity, she proposes, is that “Americans are
surprised by the direct relationship between their country and foreign ones because
we don’t acknowledge that America is an empire.” She is curious about the nature of
the impediment, about how “ignorance is vulnerable to the atmosphere it is exposed
to.” Without realizing it, she too had absorbed a fear of Islam and the idea that
Muslims “were people that must be restrained.” She admits, “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.”
Hansen is doing something both rare and necessary; she is tracing the ways in
which we are all born into histories, into national myths and, if we are unfortunate
enough, into the fantasies of an empire. She traces the ways in which “Americans
were in active denial of their empire even as they laid its foundations.” She is
interested in and does well to expose the machinery — the propaganda, the economic
authoritarianism, the military might, the manipulative diplomacy, the myriad aid
agencies and NGOs — that made this possible. She also shows the ways in which
America, in its anti-Communist craze, has consistently supported the religious right
in the Middle East and aided the rise of Islamic extremism. Hansen wants to uncover
the lie, and this, of course, is both dangerous and hopeful, for as much as this book is
a lament — what its author calls “a study in American ignorance” — it is also a plea.
The tone is at once adamant and intimate. This is a book that is spoken softly
rather than screamed; and one senses that it took great personal discipline to be so.
In fact, what is admirable is the extent to which Hansen implicates herself. She does
this soberly and without self-pity. She is, to herself, independent but by no means
innocent. The “foreign country” of the title is to be interpreted in different ways: as
the writer’s adopted country, Turkey; as her homeland, America, made new and
unfamiliar by the journey she has taken; and, perhaps most poignantly, as the
existential place she finds herself in relation to the present and the history that has
led to it. She takes James Baldwin’s words (he is as close as she gets to having a
guide through this difficult landscape) and turns them on to herself, asking: “I ran
the plantations, and I owned the slaves, and I lashed the whip — for everything?”
Strangely though, and as “un-American” as this book might seem, “Notes on a
Foreign Country” is in fact a very American book. It is interested in personal
transformation; it is both a record of conversion — “Once you realize that the way
you have looked at the world has been muddled, you begin a process of shedding
layers of skin” — and an optimistic attempt to convert. Because, as she writes, no
one tells Americans that they will spend their first months abroad “feeling superior to
everyone around them and to the nation in which they now have the privilege to live.”
Hansen wants to be the one to tell them.
The problem, however — and it is a problem to do with conversion — is that it is
assumed that the question is one of persuasion. If only America were like Hansen:
disquieted, self-analytic and imaginative. Perhaps, in other words, Americans know
that they feel superior and are quite content with their superiority. Perhaps their
naïveté, if that is what it is, is not as deep as Hansen imagines; perhaps they are
aware of the myth of themselves and have simply decided it is too useful a myth to
give up. For as she herself notes, “The largest existential threat to Americans might
have been admitting the Afghans would be better off without them.”
This is why Hansen’s book is as much a gesture of despair as it is an expression
of confidence in her people, that once they see what she saw and learn what she
learned they would be persuaded. It is also an attempt at redemption — a word that
appears in the final sentence of the book — for just like the Americans she criticizes,
those who travel the world seeing nothing but themselves, Hansen too at times slips
into a consciousness that looks at other countries in order to diagnose America’s
perversions, as though part of her purpose is not only to show but also demonstrate
how, if you are fated to be American, everything, including your well-intentioned
desire to see the world clearly, will most likely lead you back home.
Hisham Matar’s most recent book is “The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in
Between,” winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
A version of this review appears in print on September 3, 2017, on Page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Empire in the Mirror.
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