The US empire in the mirror

Book review of 'Notes On A Foreign Country'

NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY

An American Abroad in a Post-American World

Suzy Hansen

Farrar, Straus & Giroux 

276 pages; $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 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 Ms Hansen. According to her, the situation has gotten worse. “We cannot,” she writes, “go abroad as Americans in the 21st century and not realise that the main thing that has been terrorising 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, Ms 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 Donald 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.

Ms 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 Ms Hansen’s terrain.

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 realising 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.”

Ms Hansen 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. 

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 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”. 

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 Ms 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 Ms 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.”
 

Copyright: New York TImes News Service, 2017.