Contemporary Authors

• Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2017

1. Notes on a foreign country : an American abroad in a post-American world LCCN 2016059415 Type of material Book Personal name Hansen, Suzy, 1977- author Main title Notes on a foreign country : an American abroad in a post-American world / Suzy Hansen. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9780374280048 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PN4874.H227 A3 2017 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Macmillan - https://us.macmillan.com/author/suzyhansen

  SUZY HANSEN
  Suzy Hansen
  Kathy Ryan
  Suzy Hansen is contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and has written for many other publications. In 2007, she was awarded a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs to do research in Turkey. She currently lives in Istanbul. Notes on a Foreign Country is her first book.

• Hurriyet Daily News - http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/interview-suzy-hansen-on-viewing-america-from-turkey-117436

  QUOTED: "It's very hard to write a book when it’s all going on around you, but at the same time this is a book about all the things I don't understand. So it sort of worked: I could chronicle my own attempts to understand what was happening in Turkey, my own confusion, and how much we still don't know about the whole situation. This included the Gezi protests, the Soma disaster, the uptick in violence and bombings, and the military coup attempt and everything that has happened in the aftermath."

  September 02 2017 00:01:00
  INTERVIEW: Suzy Hansen on viewing America from Turkey
  William Armstrong - william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr
  INTERVIEW: Suzy Hansen on viewing America from Turkey
  People travel on a ferry from the European side of Istanbul to the Asian side. AFP photo

  Over 10 years in Turkey, journalist Suzy Hansen has produced an impressive series of long, deeply reported explorations of various tough issues.

  In “Notes on a Foreign Country,” she turns her attention to her home country. The book (reviewed in HDN here) examines the dark side of U.S. engagement in the world, giving a searing critique of American amnesia and the belief in the “inherent goodness” of the U.S.

  Hansen spoke to the Hürriyet Daily News about her book and 10 years of reporting from Turkey.

  This is your first book and it has been getting quite a bit of attention. What has the whole process of writing and publishing the book been like?

  I'm very happy with the response. Most of the reviews have understood the intention of the book, which was mainly to explore what it means to be abroad as an American in the 20th century. What do you learn when you are living abroad? What does it tell you about your own country? What are the weaknesses and prejudices you discover when you're attempting to understand foreign countries? Americans have a unique problem in seeing the rest of the world clearly because we're invested in the idea of our own exceptionalism and the idea that the rest of the world wants to be like us. It’s a deeply unconscious assumption that even the most well-intentioned and self-critical thinker may have.

  A few people have been a little offended by the book, saying "America has done good things too, can't we acknowledge that?" But because this is such a time of confusion in the U.S., for the most part people are open to critique, self-critique and understanding American identity in different ways.

  The book opens in Soma, the small town in western Turkey and the site of the worst industrial accident in the country’s history at the coalmine in May 2014, which killed 301 people. Why open with such an episode?

  At the time I was writing it was the freshest episode to me. It was one of the most emotional experiences I've had as a reporter in Turkey and in general. I felt a different kind of brutality going on between the government and its citizens. It surprised me and reminded me of my own naiveté, my own failures, once again. When I first came to Turkey I was very distracted by the "secularism vs. Islam" narrative. I failed to look at Turkey through different lenses and I think I neglected to follow what was going on with Erdoğan's economic policies. I wasn't writing that much in the first five years, but just in terms of my own interest and study I don't think I was paying enough attention.

  There was something about this narrative of Erdoğan and the [ruling Justice and Development Party] AKP being pro-business that had seemed to be a good thing. I had basically thought, "OK he's pro-business, which means he's somewhat like us." I would describe myself as a leftist, but still there's this desire on the part of Westerners, Americans, or outsiders, when looking at people identified as Islamists, to try to see how we can feel better about them. And the fact that Erdoğan had been using this free market rhetoric that is so familiar to Americans was also comforting and familiar to me.

  In Soma, one of the miners told me: "Why didn't you come here earlier?" It was a very poignant comment. If I could have answered him honestly I would have said I was caught up in this idea of Turkey's economic boom, just like a lot of people. Also in Soma some of the miners were talking about this deep American history with Turkey in terms of labor unions and anti-Communism and everything else, and how that led to changes in Turkey's economic and labor policies. So it seemed like the obvious place to start.

  One of the writers you reference throughout the book is James Baldwin, who spent about 10 years in Istanbul in the 1960s. Why does Baldwin’s work and perspective resonate so much?

  He is my favorite writer. Actually one of the major reasons I moved to Istanbul was because I learned that he had lived there. He had said that he felt very comfortable there as a black and gay man. So part of why I wanted to go was kind of a romantic reason about my favorite writer.

  Baldwin actually never wrote about Turkey. But he gave some interviews to Turkish journalists while he was living in Turkey. Among the things he said was that he was recognizing this new empire that America was extending across the world. He was seeing that in Turkey because of course Turkey was one of the main recipients of American aid through the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. Baldwin was watching this with trepidation because the U.S. had not even solved its own problems yet, specifically about race. White Americans had not dealt with their own problems with power, and if they're extending their empire across the world then they're also extending their problems across the world. I saw how understanding how Baldwin saw the race problem back home could help me understand the relationship between Americans and foreigners abroad. I could use him as an intellectual and moral guide.

  At one point in the book you go back to the U.S. to report on problems in Mississippi and its failing and unfair healthcare system. It reminded me of George Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier,” in which Orwell documents the shocking working and housing conditions of miners in the industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in northern England. The book was published in 1937, when Britain was near the height of its imperial power but still had this poverty back home.

  In 2012 I spent a lot of time in Mississippi. This was after I had been living abroad for a few years. Mississippi is the poorest state in the U.S. and you could say it is kind of proof of the failure of the American Dream. In the 1960s people said Mississippi was how we could judge whether there is social justice in America, because if Mississippi doesn't improve then we can assume that there's no social justice. And indeed it hasn't really improved. In some ways it has declined. It was striking to have lived abroad, looking at proclamations of American exceptionalism and then going back to this place that exposes the lie at the heart of the myth.

  I had never been to a place quite like the Mississippi Delta, which of course was also the heart of American slavery. But it seemed necessary, especially after the financial crisis and the gross inequality in America had been exposed, to include a portrait of the U.S. at home and to describe what it was like to come home and see it differently for the first time.

  You came to Turkey in 2007. A lot has happened in the 10 years you've been here and you’ve reported on a lot of it. Just reflect a little on how things have changed.

  It was hard because when I first came to Turkey everything was changing so quickly. Up until recently, Turkey had not really been on the radar for editors. As a freelance writer it was very hard to get pieces published about it, which is why for many years I went to write about lots of different places.

  But as I was writing this book Turkey was becoming more and more appealing to readers and editors. In fact, as I was writing my editor actually wanted me to make the book more about Turkey. But I was just trying to get my head around everything that was happening. It's very hard to write a book when it’s all going on around you, but at the same time this is a book about all the things I don't understand. So it sort of worked: I could chronicle my own attempts to understand what was happening in Turkey, my own confusion, and how much we still don't know about the whole situation. This included the Gezi protests, the Soma disaster, the uptick in violence and bombings, and the military coup attempt and everything that has happened in the aftermath.

  Over those 10 years there has been a big shift in the atmosphere. Not so long ago Turkey was seen abroad as a democratic model for the Middle East, but now it’s seen as a kind of basket case. What do you make of this shift?

  A lot of us who were in Turkey at the time, especially Turks, were very skeptical of this idea of Turkey as a "model." It's very different from a lot of the countries that people were saying it could be a model for. It has such a specific, complicated history and trajectory so it didn't really make much sense.

  I do think there were a few years in there where a lot of people in the Middle East thought: "I might not be crazy about Erdoğan or the AKP but at least it’s working." But I don't think there was the kind of enthusiasm that Western writers were projecting. Again, this reminds us of this tendency for Westerners and Western writers - and I implicate myself in this at the beginning - to see the Islamic world as a problem that needs to be solved. It is a well-meaning liberal mistake but it's a very dangerous one. For Turkey and for Turks it also created this scenario where people were not seeing the dark things happening behind the scenes.

  But it's easy to forget what a different time it was in 2007, 2008 and 2009. The military was threatening to intervene and there was a lot of angry rhetoric about Islamists. And I think because the Islamists were cleverly manipulating this system, using rhetoric about democracy and human rights, it was easy to believe that everything was going to turn out well. A lot of this had to do with Turkey's history. I remember a lot of people at that time, especially minorities, wanted to do away with the old Kemalist system. And the AKP emerged as the one that seemed to be enthusiastic about doing that.

  One of your most recent articles was a long read giving a panoramic picture of Turkey in the aftermath of the July 2016 coup attempt amid the sweeping purge. How difficult is reporting in Turkey after the coup attempt?

  It's not necessarily difficult for me. It's more difficult for Turkish journalists, for whom it has been a nightmare. For me, I usually write one long article per year on Turkey and in that one I wanted to just crystallize what was happening and the feeling of terror in society. Personally I’ve been really heartbroken to see what's happening.

  The reporting is difficult because people don't want to talk and are afraid of talking. There’s no reason to risk anyone's personal situation so you have to be very careful and sensitive. Editors tend to have a lot of rules about wanting to use people's names or initials but you can't really do that in this situation. If you're going to do that you won’t be able to get close to the truth because people will be afraid to say what they believe. So it's a difficult and stressful situation. Foreign journalists have come under more pressure in recent years but I personally haven't experienced anything.

  You’re in the U.S. at the moment for the launch of the book but you’ll be coming back to Istanbul. Will you be staying in Turkey for the foreseeable future?

  I think I'll always live there one way or another. I have no plans to move as of now. There are certain familial reasons for wanting to come back to the States more often, but I love Turkey and living in Istanbul and I have a deep connection to it. So I hope to stay.

  * Follow the Turkey Book Talk podcast via iTunes here, Stitcher here, Podbean here, or Facebook here, or Twitter here.

• Publishers Weekly - https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/73947-the-view-from-abroad-pw-talks-with-suzy-hansen.html

  QUOTED: "I kept telling them about these realizations I was having about myself [and my worldview] as an American, but I didn’t realize what I was articulating at the time. They were noticing it. I wanted to write a book about Turkey, but they said, it seems like your book is about America."

  The View from Abroad: PW Talks with Suzy Hansen
  By Misty Urban | Jun 09, 2017
  Comments subscribe by the month

  Photo by Kathy Ryan
  Hansen, an American journalist living in Istanbul, grapples with a new understanding of her homeland and its place in the world in Notes on a Foreign Country (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug.).

  How did this book come about?

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  After I moved to Turkey, I had two friends, a writer and a book editor, and I kept telling them about these realizations I was having about myself [and my worldview] as an American, but I didn’t realize what I was articulating at the time. They were noticing it. I wanted to write a book about Turkey, but they said, it seems like your book is about America.

  How do you distinguish the two Americas that you describe in the book?

  I borrowed this from other writers—Mohsin Hamid and Kamila Shamsie. We’re very aware of the America at home and this special history we have as a democracy and the rights that we have as individuals; we have this sense of ourselves as a special nation. Hamid says that there are certain things about America that make it very special, and that is why over the years a lot of people have wanted to go there—but that’s the America at home. The America abroad is just an entirely different idea. It is a different kind of imperialism, and often quite brutal, and quite violent, and selfish. More than anything else, we’re just not aware of the very people who we have this power over. The rest of the world knows us so well. It’s as if they know us better than we know ourselves, in a way, because we’re not aware of this second America as much as they are. But it’s part of us.

  How did you decide the balance between the history you include in the book and your personal narrative?

  I was reluctant to write a book this personal, but I felt that I’d be wagging my finger if I didn’t bring the reader along with me and let them know that I was realizing this ignorance, this unawareness I had about the world, this lack of consciousness or this lack of responsibility. With the history, I wanted to give the reader something beyond just my experiences. I thought it was important to say, okay, look, this is what happened in Greece in the 20th century, this is what happened in the Arab world—things that I thought were important to our sense of ourselves as Americans and our national identity.

  What is your advice to Americans who want to live abroad?

  Living abroad is a wonderful experience. You grow in a different way, you have this freedom to think differently, to be a different person, because you’re outside your normal parameters. Some people find this completely disorienting—I did at first—but I think it’s an unbelievable privilege to live in the rest of the world and learn about different cultures. I highly recommend it.

• Guernica - https://www.guernicamag.com/suzy-hansen-the-rest-of-the-world-knows/

  QUOTED: "In conceiving my own 'character' in the book, what I really wanted to do was examine my ignorance. What does it mean to be ignorant? These questions have become more relevant since the election, and I always bristle when I hear people talk about 'non-college educated' voters or whatever. What does college have to do with it? What does it mean to be educated? What does it mean to be sophisticated about the rest of the world? To care? What are the things that we as Americans should know about foreign countries?"
  "When I was writing, I saw myself as an average, somewhat educated American ... and I wanted to bring the reader along with me in this examination of all the things I didn’t know when I moved abroad. What I could offer readers was this incredible experience and the process of trying to fill in the holes of my ignorance with the reader who may not have had the chance to think about it in the same way I did."

  Suzy Hansen: The Rest of the World Knows
  The writer on living abroad in Istanbul and the fraught concepts of American innocence and empire.
  By Nicholas Bredie
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  Cover image: Macmillan.
  I met Suzy Hansen when we both lived in Istanbul and attended a fundraising dinner for refugees. It was fall of 2012, and the refugees in question were a handful of West Africans trying the then unusual tactic of crossing into Europe through Turkey. One topic of conversation was the Turkish government’s increasing authoritarianism, but the latest outrage was barring Istanbul’s drinking establishments from setting up tables in the back alleys. The resistance responded by gathering to drink beer in the shadow of the twelfth-century Galata Tower. In other words, there were authoritarian clouds on the horizon, but no one knew about the dark turns ahead.

  Suzy moved to Istanbul in 2007 on an ICWA fellowship and has been based there as a foreign correspondent since. Fleeing the recession, I moved there in 2010 to work a university teaching job. In the past year, we both have published books rooted in our early years in Istanbul—hers is a memoir called Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in the Post-American World, and mine a novel called Not Constantinople. Last month, over Skype and email, we had a chance to discuss writing as expats, James Baldwin, our love of Istanbul, and our current transnational political moment.

  —Nicholas Bredie for Guernica

  Guernica: Why don’t we start with the figure of the American abroad, what it’s like to represent that experience? For me, when it comes to writing the American abroad, it’s like two sides of the same coin: there’s the American innocent who appears in Henry James’s The Ambassadors and then the flipside of that, The Ugly American. I think in some ways they’re the same character from different perspectives. So when you were writing about yourself in your early years in Istanbul and other parts of Turkey, Greece, and Afghanistan, did you ever think of yourself in those terms?

  Suzy Hansen: James Baldwin talked about this kind of innocence in The Fire Next Time: “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” I read Baldwin when I was twenty-two or twenty-three and I didn’t really understand what he meant at the time. One thing I was aiming for in the arc of Notes on a Foreign Country was to show the ways I had lived up to his terrible conception of the American innocent as someone who lived with little to no sense of responsibility for American history.

  But in conceiving my own “character” in the book, what I really wanted to do was examine my ignorance. What does it mean to be ignorant? These questions have become more relevant since the election, and I always bristle when I hear people talk about “non-college educated” voters or whatever. What does college have to do with it? What does it mean to be educated? What does it mean to be sophisticated about the rest of the world? To care? What are the things that we as Americans should know about foreign countries? When I was writing, I saw myself as an average, somewhat educated American—I grew up in a fairly provincial, inward-looking place but went to a good college and spent my twenties in New York—and I wanted to bring the reader along with me in this examination of all the things I didn’t know when I moved abroad. What I could offer readers was this incredible experience and the process of trying to fill in the holes of my ignorance with the reader who may not have had the chance to think about it in the same way I did.

  Guernica: I wanted to know what you think about it this passage from a great interview in the Henry James Review between Baldwin and his biographer David Leeming. Does any of that resonate with your writing about American innocence?

  DL: […] if you had to pick two words that are basic to whatever we mean or Christopher Newman [a character in Henry James’ The American] would mean when we speak of the “American Dream,” wouldn’t they be freedom and, perhaps, innocence?

  JB: Yes, but freedom and innocence are antithetical. You can’t have both.

  DL: […] So, when you speak now of freedom…

  JB: I mean the end of innocence. The end of innocence means you’ve finally entered the picture. And it means that you’ll accept the consequences too.

  DL: By innocence, then, you mean the false objectivity that gives you the illusion that you can stand outside of something and describe it accurately without touching it, without paying your dues.

  JB: Yes. And I also associate innocence with the role of the victim.

  Suzy Hansen: What do you think he means by “I associate innocence with the role of the victim?”

  Guernica: It reminds me of the way that white Americans are able to judo their guilt into a kind of victimization. Take Trump, for example: the deck is always stacked against him, even though he was given all of his money. It’s like the character David in Giovanni’s Room where instead of owning up to his relationship with Giovanni, he lets Giovanni go to the guillotine, and he portrays their relationship as an aberration. That book is about his inability to own his actions.

  Suzy Hansen: In the case of Trump’s voters, I think it’s that they’re able to act as if they are themselves the victims of something without recognizing the things that they’re themselves responsible for. And the fact that they are using race, obviously, as a means of gaining power. But what Leeming says about “standing outside of something” and thinking you can describe it resonates with me. What I was trying to do with all of the chapters in the second half of the book was to take some of my journalistic assignments that I did over the years in Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Afghanistan, and then America and reconsider them through the lens of American involvement and responsibility. When I was conscious of the history the US shared with these places, I could better understand my own reflexes and attitudes toward that place. I thought I was being objective, but I was never being objective, because in some way I was, my country was, involved in those places.

  Guernica: Reading how you portrayed that experience, what struck me was that what is made manifest when you’re abroad is your “Americaness.” It’s suddenly tangible. If you are just an American in America, you don’t even think about what that is constituted from. So were there certain things, certain experiences, where you’re suddenly like, “Oh my god, I just did an incredibly American thing?”

  Suzy Hansen: I wasn’t the Ugly American in the most obvious way. I was very quiet and keeping to myself and sort of saying “thank you” all the time to the Turks for letting me be here. But when my best friend told me about how a Turkish person had reacted to September 11 [by saying], “Oh now it’s happened to you too,” or when I read that passage in the Reluctant Fundamentalist where the character smiles when he sees the Twin Towers fall. It’s amazing to me now that these things surprised me, but I didn’t understand what that anger was rooted in. I think by then I knew that that was not just about these vague hatreds. What I was suddenly becoming more conscious of was that there was this history—in Turkey and Greece, and in places like Pakistan and Egypt—that was less well known. I don’t think a lot of Americans know our history with Greece, or that we had one.

  Guernica: My vision of Greece is always white columns and Club Med, that kind of thing. I have a Greek friend so I’m being a little bit flippant. I knew about the history of American-backed right-wing governments, though you don’t think about Greece like you think about Chile or something.

  Suzy Hansen: You don’t think of Turkey like you think of Chile either. And they’re not necessarily the same experiences. Well, Greece might be. It was a very layered experience because on the one hand I was sitting there doing these interviews in Athens and realizing, “Okay, this magazine has sent you to do the story to write about these people.” I was reading books about Greece, and I was trying to educate myself, but the Greeks I was interviewing kept making these references to historical moments they assumed I knew about. To them this is just second nature, part of who they are. And they are essentially talking to the American like we know each other, but I knew nothing about our shared history whatsoever. I was missing out on a connection that I should have been having with this person, and I realized how tragic that is. Meanwhile, back in New York everyone is portraying the Greeks like a bunch of irresponsible children, as if Americans never had anything to do with Greece’s historical trajectory.

  Guernica: Moochers.

  Suzy Hansen: They are still portrayed that way, and there are ways in which the Greeks are responsible for that crisis, of course, but the contempt that Americans express for various foreign countries is just embarrassing.

  Guernica: In Don DeLillo’s The Names, the protagonist, who’s based in Greece, couldn’t give a shit about what America has done in Greece or Turkey. The only important question that comes up in that book, and several characters ask it, is “are they killing Americans?” It’s the only question that these characters who are part of these multinational shady organizations are concerned with. That and comparing Hiltons in various locations. That book was really haunting.

  Suzy Hansen: That book was so way ahead of its time. Abroad, you do become conscious what it means to be American. If nothing you’ve really been told about yourself is true, or you haven’t been told a lot about it, you start questioning everything. That’s why I have a Cold War chapter in Notes on a Foreign Country. It felt like the root of all this, at least for someone of my generation.

  Guernica: American Empire, just like American innocence, is a kind of fraught concept, right? Supposedly during the Cold War, and after, we’re not just not an empire; we’re also anti-Empire. We’re not the bad Europeans who had been now ruining the world for 150 years. But then the question is, what are we?

  Suzy Hansen: This is exactly the problem, because this Empire, our Empire, hasn’t really been defined. We don’t really understand what we are, don’t know how we compare to the old ones. We don’t have a new word for it. But then that makes it hard for us to understand our role in it. Obviously British imperialists had a clearer sense of themselves. We have this kind of fuzzy sense of having power but not really having direct power over the rest of the world. That does allow us to remain innocent. Don’t you even feel a little bit strange when you say the word empire?

  Guernica: Absolutely, it’s such a slippery concept. We don’t set out to control areas of other countries, but of course we do, not only ones purely administered by our government, but also one’s administered by our corporate infrastructure. ExxonMobil is the empire within the empire.

  Suzy Hansen: Judging by your music list for Largehearted Boy, it seems like you have some Turkish lefty friends, right? I was going to say that I think this is complicated not just for us, but for the rest of the world as well. On the one hand, there are a lot of Turks who would be happy to hear an American take some responsibility for Turkish history, or just say it’s about time. There are also others who would say, “Look we have so many people who constantly blame America for everything, this is such a waste of time, we have to actually take responsibility for ourselves, or the government does, and all of that America stuff is a conspiracy theory.” A lot of this confusion comes from the sort of sneakiness of American empire, the fact that it was constantly denying its own existence and its own crimes as it was wielding more and more power.

  Guernica: The most troubling or unsettling thing about where America is in the world is that this identity forged in denial could be sustained in that the height of American prosperity. The ethos of “don’t look back,” “live for tomorrow,” “tomorrow is going to be better.” “Don’t mind the mangled bodies and wrecks that got you here. They are in the past, and you know as Americans the future is what’s most important.” What happens when the wheels start coming off of that formulation?

  Suzy Hansen: I always saw September 11 and the financial crisis as a real crisis of white men from an older generation, baby boomers, because I think that this sense of America as the most powerful, and the best is very important to their conception of themselves as powerful. Those two events represented a loss of power because “how in God’s name could these guys have done this to us?” It was just so psychically damaging. Then the financial crisis revealed our system is bullshit as well, so what meaning do we actually have here? And then for conservative white men, the mere existence of Obama drove them insane. All of these things made these people feel very vulnerable, and very much like the meaning of their lives was lost, and so they had to regain it in some way and how do they regain that? That specter of decline has had a tremendous effect on white people in the US, made worse of course by a real decline in wages and opportunities.

  Guernica: It feels like the lid is off that now. I think there is a lot to grieve about the whole Trump thing, but the one good thing is that all the insanity is forced into the open and maybe that’s where things can start to come around—when you are an American abroad your Americaness is suddenly manifest. You can’t just blend in and do American things. Suddenly American things become foreign things, and you have own them.

  Suzy Hansen: It’s also making foreigners much more direct in speaking about America. I just traveled with my mother in Italy, and I hadn’t seen so many foreigners very directly saying “what in God’s name have you people done? This man is a disaster.” You have the Italian taxi driver telling you your president is a disgusting human being, and I think this is something really new for a lot of Americans who haven’t really thought about how the election of this man affects everybody else in the rest of the world. I’m sure in the past people hated Nixon—they hated Bush—but for the most part, people hold back or they say, “Well we know your government is the problem, but we love Americans.” Now it’s like “What have you done?” Interestingly, I don’t think we’re having that conversation yet—what this has all meant for America in the world. It’s all still very domestic.

  Guernica: Your book’s subtitle is An American abroad in a Post-American World. Did you feel a particular urgency writing the book for now? Was there something in your reporting that made you say, “Ah, something has shifted?”

  Suzy Hansen: I think it was personal. The financial crisis had an enormous impact on me as well—I was abroad then, and I just remember realizing that the endless promise on which America depends had ended, and also that my own life was no longer as predictable as I’d thought. At the same time, I was seeing how the ridiculous financial games played by bunch of men in New York—men who knew nothing of how their actions would impact others—was affecting people thousands of miles away. This was also a time of drones in Pakistan and the futility of the war on terror—my 2010 trip to Kabul was heartbreaking–and, again, this insane hatred of Obama, and, yes, it all started to seem like a time when the idea of America was fully unraveling. The truly end-times feeling that came with ISIS and then Trump started after I had already started writing.

  Guernica: I wanted to ask, as someone who loves Istanbul but broke up with it a few years ago, if there was a moment where you felt the magnetic pull of the place? I mean aside from the dome and minaret skyline, the history, etc. I will never forget the feeling of waking up on a Sunday morning to hear an accordionist slowly making his way down my crooked street and that certain slant of hazy light that assured me I couldn’t be anywhere but Istanbul.

  Suzy Hansen: That’s a hard one because I loved everything about Istanbul, even the ugly parts seemed beautiful to me. I realized you can have an aesthetic connection with some places that is inexplicable. But I would say it was something I describe in the book, happening upon this kind of decrepit parking lot with a bunch of street dogs sitting in the dirt and some guys sitting and drinking tea on plastic chairs watching the sunset against that famous skyline. It was such a prime piece of real estate—the view was worth a million bucks—but nothing had been built on it. Anyone could go and sit there, and for some reason this struck me as more human, more democratic, and I loved that the tea guys were so proud of their city. Those were the last years before the money really started pouring in, and of course, that place is gone now.

  Guernica: I’ve been reflecting a lot on that Istanbul, the one before the money, before the terrorism, the coup attempt, and the crackdown. It’s the setting of my novel. It’s an odd feeling because when I wrote the book, and even while I revised it, I sincerely believed that Istanbul would continue to exist in some form. But everything I read or hear from friends leads me to believe that, famous skyline notwithstanding, the city is unrecognizable compared with its 2010 self. Is that how you feel, and thinking back to your early years in the city, could you have guessed what would befall the place?

  Suzy Hansen: I think in fact even the skyline is not the same. Things have changed on several levels. You have the unbelievable overdevelopment and, some would say, destruction of Istanbul itself. Everyone is constantly complaining about the amount of construction, the loss of trees, the transformation of the shoreline, the devastation to the environment. You lived near Taksim Square, as I do now, where the Gezi Park protests happened, where all the nightlife and art spaces once were, and that you truly would not recognize. So on a physical, visible level, daily life has been much transformed.

  And then of course there is the political aspect, and that not only manifests in the form of journalists and academics and politicians arrested, in stolen referendums and ever-expanding autocracy; it manifests in a kind of constant psychic stress. Many Turks have been even physically sick over what has happened in the last few years. So many of them just want to leave, and are leaving, but the vast majority in the opposition cannot. They get on with their lives but it is not easy.

  No, I can’t say I would have ever imagined it going this way. But looking back, those early AKP years of 2007–2008, also seem like a mirage. I saw Istanbul and Turkey in a dreamy, naïve way; what I thought then is not necessarily to be trusted.

• Vogue - https://www.vogue.com/article/istanbul-turkey-before-terrorist-attacks-isis

  An American Expatriate on Why She’s Not Leaving Istanbul
  JANUARY 4, 2017 6:02 AM
  by SUZY HANSEN
  istanbul
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  Photo: Pankaj Mishra / Courtesy of Suzy Hansen
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  For nearly a decade, Istanbul had been a magical place for journalist Suzy Hansen—a cosmopolitan refuge and a welcoming home. Then the violence began.

  On the day last March when a man blew himself up in the middle of Istanbul, I was at home. I heard the blast as I sat at my desk; it was nearby on Istiklal Avenue, where I walk every day. On the night in June when ISIS attacked the Istanbul airport, I was having dinner at the new Soho House, in a nineteenth-century Italianate mansion that was once the American consulate. My first thought was that it would make for a brilliant second target, and I quickly scanned the perimeter of the terrace for an escape. In the early hours of the military coup in July, I joined a line of Turks snaking out of my local deli and stuffed water bottles and beer cans in my pockets, preparing for the long night ahead. (“Are you sure you don’t need three packs of cigarettes?” the deli worker asked a customer as I left.) I watched live footage at home of the army firing on Turkish civilians—and when fighter jets flew low over the city, I took cover in my bathroom.
  I am not a war correspondent. I never dreamed of watching history unfold on the front lines, or bearing witness to atrocity, or learning the difference between the sounds of a mortar and a car bomb. I chose to live in Istanbul because when I arrived the city felt like a refuge and then, very quickly, like home. Over the last decade I have become so attached that I am still momentarily confused when people ask me if I plan to leave. Istanbul has been the place I have felt safest in my life.
  In 2007, when I was 29, I won a fellowship that sent journalists to the country of their choice for two years. I had grown up in a proudly provincial Jersey Shore town, believing that New York was the most daring place I could escape to. But some time after I arrived the mood of the city began to bother me. New Yorkers’ curiosity and compassion in the wake of September 11 had dissolved into a frenzy of decadence. The spiking stock market, the luxury towers crowding the skyline, the $50 grass-fed steaks on every menu—in retrospect, my decision to move to Turkey was as much about getting away from New York. I suspected there were many things that I did not understand about the rest of the world.
  I arrived just as Istanbul was entering its own Gilded Age. There was a palpable feeling during this magical period that the East was leaving the West behind. The Constantinople-era buildings of Beyog˘lu, the central neighborhood where I found an apartment, were still dusty and dilapidated, with cats peeking out through broken windows, padlocks rusting on doorknobs, eerie men smoking in unlit foyers and scaring me to death. But people from all over the world were moving in, transforming what had become a kind of haunted city into a place of thriving boutiques, restaurants, hotels, and art spaces. Even the Nobel Prize–winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who had long meditated on the country’s state of melancholy, expressed optimism about the future. European and American tourists invaded; Istanbul topped all the travel lists. An Islamic conservative prime minister and president were running the country after decades of state-enforced secularism, yet the city felt liberated—even raucous—and there was a gleeful defiance in the air. Istanbul was a rejoinder to the West for doubting the Muslim world’s many possibilities.
  I loved Istanbul instantly, from the moment my first airport taxi merged onto the coastal road and passed the oil tankers cruising through the Sea of Marmara, a view so beautiful I couldn’t believe they had put a highway next to it instead of waterfront condos. I loved the romance of the Bosporus and the rose-gold glow of its sunsets. I was charmed by the old-fashioned ferries that shuttled back and forth between Asia and Europe, the horse-drawn carts piled high with carrots and onions, the dinners of vegetables soaked in olive oil, even the smell of burning coal in the winter. But after a year I knew it was an expat’s mistake to love a country only for its beauty or its food or its exchange rate. If I was to make Istanbul my home, I would have to define my affection beyond such superficialities. Did I love the country’s nationalism, its obsession with honor, its xenophobic soccer chants? Not really. In the beginning, it was the sense of engagement I missed in New York, of being in the middle of the world. Young people here seemed more concerned about politics, about the painful history of the region, even seemed to have a greater belief in democracy and human rights, mostly because they still had to fight for those things. By the end of two years, I had road-tripped through the dark-green mountains of Turkey’s east and taken vacations by myself on the Mediterranean; I’d rooted for Turkey’s soccer team during the Euro Cup and shouted along at countless political protests. Dating wasn’t easy—even Westernized Turkish families remained fairly traditional, and many men my age had married; upper-class Turkish women warned darkly that I would have a hard time finding someone egalitarian enough for me, and I was not brave enough to go on dates barely speaking the language. But I had a group of friends, a daily walk, a view of the famous Old City from my bedroom window. I decided to stay.
  Even the first stirrings of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, the subsequent crackdown in Egypt, and the war in Libya seemed only to boost Turkey’s image. Here was that rare Muslim democratic success story—the one hopeful city in a deteriorating region. Exiles and refugees arrived, adding to Istanbul’s regenerative cosmopolitanism; suddenly I heard Arabic everywhere on the streets, met a young Tunisian fashion designer in my local deli. I never worried that the violence they’d left behind would come here. For most of its modern history, Turkey had stayed out of foreign wars, and I was confident that that would continue. In 2013, at a wedding in New York, I laughed dismissively when a friend asked me if Turkey would get mixed up in Syria. A war correspondent who had actually been in Syria and seen the way the new violence dissolved borders looked at me in disbelief and walked away. I still had a lot to learn about the world.
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  Photo: Getty Images
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  Slowly the geopolitical landscape took a darker turn. By 2013, it had become clear that Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an, had been providing safe haven to Syrian militant groups that opposed Bashar al-Assad. Jihadis were flying into Istanbul and transferring to domestic flights to cities on the border with Syria. Journalists I knew met Syrian warlords for interviews in trendy cafés; Arab fighters did their shopping on the same gentrifying street where my friends and I bought our printer cartridges and ate gelato. Refugees arrived in numbers too enormous to control or assist, and took up residence on street corners, displacing entire neighborhoods. The chaos of the region caused Erdog˘an to fear a rebellion within his own borders, and so he started a war with Turkey’s Kurdish militants. In 2015, the first bombs went off: at a leftist gathering in the south, a rally in the east, and a peace march in the capital city of Ankara. No one agreed on who was responsible—was it ISIS, Kurdish opposition groups, the government? The uncertainty made the terror worse. And it came gradually closer: explosions in metro stations in distant Istanbul neighborhoods, then in the Old City, then on Istiklal Avenue. The reaction was a mix of fear, heartache, and detachment. Everyone in the city moved on so quickly after bombings that you yourself barely noticed how many had gone off. What I did notice was the increasing frequency of emails from friends at home: When are you getting out of there? Isn’t it time to leave? This is insane.

  What do we mean when we talk about safety? A year ago, I began reporting a story in an unfamiliar neighborhood on conservative Muslims and the influx of Syrian refugees. My American acquaintances, even the tolerant ones, thought such a place might be forbidding because of its strict Islamic traditions: Many women were covered, some in black chador; some men dressed like imams. The area also was famous for drugs, mafia, guns, and thieves.
  Yet it had not occurred to me to worry. In these old Ottoman neighborhoods, people rush by on narrow streets, engage in daily exchanges—of commerce, of greetings, of complaints. If you come up short a few lira at the deli, the shop owner insists you take your goods anyway, not because he is generous but because he knows that you have to come back. Everyone is up on everyone’s business, everyone is watching, and, of course, they were watching me, too. Little can happen to you when the neighborhood is an organism in and of itself, something that must be loved, fed, and protected.
  That’s the feeling of security I’ve carried with me in Istanbul. For years I’ve left my purse, phone, or laptop at tables in restaurants when I go to the bathroom, and I’ve always walked home by myself late at night. I am comforted by the most ordinary community rituals: the groups of men lumbering up the hills after Friday prayer; the boys bringing tea on trays from a café to a deli employee; cats stretched across a coffee-shop counter; hipsters too respectful of Istanbul cat culture to disturb them. Once my 65-year-old mother came to visit and, while walking on the dark back streets of Beyog˘lu, tripped on the cobblestones and fell. The area had been empty; it was late at night. Before I could bend down to help her, seemingly ten men were at our side, as if they had been watching from the windows or sensed her pain through the walls. “Oh!” she exclaimed, more stunned by the reception than the fall. “Oh, my goodness! How nice. So sorry to bother you!”—a deeply American reaction to standard Turkish operating procedure of social obligation and reciprocity.
  This is what the recent political unrest threatens to unravel—and my friends and I have begun wringing our hands. One thinks of moving back to Athens; a Turk married to an American I know is considering the United States. Another Turkish friend has become so distraught over her country’s politics—the persecution of dissidents, the war against the Kurds, the arrests of democratically elected politicians—that she has developed a mysterious illness and rarely wants to venture out of the house. Turks who do not support the government live ever more circumscribed lives. Many have fled the country, and many more are in jail. The only people moving to Istanbul these days are journalists, who can’t help expressing an unseemly excitement about all the new and grim prospects for work. Throughout my neighborhood, for rent signs hang in the windows. After the airport attack, the tourists stopped arriving completely, and rich Turks in their SUVs no longer “come downtown” either. Even a Starbucks has closed its doors.
  The day before July’s military coup, I said goodbye to two American friends who had decided to move to Lisbon after fifteen years here. For them, the city had changed in ways they could no longer accept. They told me that the French consulate had issued a terror warning for Istanbul, and reflexively I wondered why we were sitting outside. Later that night, I saw on the news that a truck had rammed into a crowd in Nice. Twenty-four hours later, the military coup began. It seemed that enormous, horrific events were happening everywhere, and whether to leave Istanbul was beside the point—nowhere was particularly safe. A few months ago, just before seven in the morning, an apartment across from mine had a gas explosion, the force of which was so strong that shattered bits of glass blew clear across the roof of a mosque and into my own fifth-story windows. I was jolted straight out of bed and onto the floor. It sounded like a bomb. It didn’t really matter, to my rattled psyche, that it wasn’t.
  I have begun to believe that a price one pays for living in an unstable place is a failure of imagination. I have had a couple of serious relationships over my decade here, but I am unmarried and have often thought about whether I want a child. My answer used to have to do with things like how much money I make, how much I like babies. Now I look out the window and am confronted with the world out there, the world I would be bringing a child into, one that often feels chaotic and bleak.
  But all such calculations are speculative and to some degree irrational. They are about wondering if someplace would be better, some time, some future, will be safe. Many of us from the U.S. grew up believing security was our birthright. When that is threatened, our impulse is to withdraw or lash out. In Turkey I learned that the future will never be predictable and that mutual dependence in daily life is the truest form of safety. When I am confused about whether to leave Istanbul, I think about those tight-knit Ottoman neighborhoods and take my cue from the Turks, many of whom would never abandon the communities they have created, and who, like most of the world, don’t even have the extraordinary privilege of leaving.
  A Turkish artist who recently returned from living in New York for ten years told me that it had been a difficult place for him. “The city is a grid, designed to get you from place to place quickly,” he said. “It’s a strange concept of time for me. I missed Istanbul, where I can look at something 600 years old and know it will always be there. There is something reassuring about that.” Being surrounded by history—what I craved when I moved abroad—does offer its comforts. When I wake up in the middle of the night and look out my living-room windows to a wide view of the city, I see the fourteenth-century Galata Tower brilliantly lit, a huge stone column that has survived all manner of war and atrocity. The tower is strong, permanent, and proud. And it is a reminder that far more important than plotting an escape is learning how to preserve and honor the life that we love—and to stay.
  Author’s note: Since this essay appeared in the pages of Vogue_, there has been more violence in Turkey, including the New Year’s attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul, which killed 39. These events have been upsetting, but my plans to remain—for now—haven’t changed._

QUOTED: "Painfully honest, this book can be a difficult read, but Hansen leaves us room to hope."

Notes on a Foreign Country
Deborah Mason
BookPage.
(Aug. 2017): p25+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
New York Times Magazine correspondent Suzy Hansen begins her book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An
American Abroad in a Post-American World, with her investigation into a lethal coal-mine fire in Soma,
Turkey. She is shocked to learn of America's role in the creation of an ineffectual union that failed to protect
its members. Hansen had always assumed that American policies were essentially benign; we seek to
"modernize" less developed countries and to democratize them--certainly not to cause harm.
Hansen argues that Americans are dangerously innocent about American interventions in other countries.
When confronted with intractable hostilities abroad, we don't realize these hostilities are frequently the
result of U.S. policies that have caused great harm--a history that is rarely taught in American schools.
Raised in a conservative New Jersey town, Hansen, too, was "an innocent abroad" when she arrived in
Turkey in 2007 on a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs. Despite a Harvard education,
Hansen had no understanding of how America's fear of communism led it to support strongman
dictatorships, destroy local economies and even encourage and support fundamentalist Islamist militants.
Paradoxically, the foreign country she ends up taking notes on is her own.
Painfully honest, this book can be a difficult read, but Hansen leaves us room to hope that, while our
innocence has harmed the world, self-knowledge and empathy can help heal it.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
FSG
$26, 288 pages
ISBN 9780374280048
1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Audio, eBook available
CURRENT EVENTS
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mason, Deborah. "Notes on a Foreign Country." BookPage, Aug. 2017, p. 25+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499345397/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=16e8cffa.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499345397

QUOTED: "She is a fearless patriot, and this is a book for the brave."

1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Notes on a Foreign Country: An American
Abroad in a Post-American World
Emily Dziuban
Booklist.
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p12.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World.
By Suzy Hansen.
Aug. 2017.288p. Farrar, $26 (9780374280048). 914.961.
Americans are taught that they are exceptional, brave, and fearless. Hansen's must-read book makes the
argument that Americans, specifically white Americans, are decades overdue in examining and accepting
their country's imperial identity. In 2007, journalist Hansen won a fellowship to live abroad and chose
Turkey because American author James Baldwin wrote he felt more like himself, a gay, black man living in
the 1960s, in Istanbul than New York. How could that be? Hansen's argument goes beyond the factual
assertion that Americans are ignorant of the country's long, complicated, invasive histories with many other
countries around the world. She makes the paradigm-breaking claim that what Americans are taught about
their national and personal identities disallows the very acquisition of this knowledge. When a mine
collapses in the Turkish city Soma and she asks for the cause, she's stunned that people want to talk about
American foreign policy from the 1950s. Only after years of living in Turkey can Hansen frame interview
questions with an awareness of her American biases. Hansen builds her winning argument by combining
personal examination and observation with geopolitical history lessons. She is a fearless patriot, and this is
a book for the brave.--Emily Dziuban
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Dziuban, Emily. "Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World." Booklist,
1 July 2017, p. 12. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862658/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4f1c01f1. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862658

QUOTED: "a mostly illuminating literary debut that shows how Americans' ignorance about the world has made turmoil and terrorism possible."

1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Hansen, Suzy: NOTES ON A FOREIGN
COUNTRY
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hansen, Suzy NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00
8, 15 ISBN: 978-0-374-28004-8
A journalist questions the notion of American exceptionalism.When New York Times Magazine
contributing writer Hansen arrived in Turkey in 2007 on a research fellowship, she harbored a deep faith in
America's "inherent goodness, as well as in my country's Western way of living, and perhaps in my own
inherent, God-given, Christian-American goodness as well." She assumed that any nation's move toward
modernity "in the American sense" meant progress. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, where
international geography had been cut from the school curriculum, she knew little about the world; even as
an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, she hardly noticed international events. Living in a
"zone of miraculous neutrality" about her country's role in foreign affairs, she naively and complacently
believed America to have "uniquely benevolent intentions toward the peoples of the world." That view
changed dramatically as she traveled through the Middle East, reading history and political analysis and
conducting many interviews in Turkey, Afghanistan, Greece, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. She discovered that fear
of "communism, Islamism, or any other enemyism of the United States" led America to foster military
dictatorships rather than risk the outcomes of democratic elections. Talking with Egyptian dissidents and
Muslim Brothers, for example, Hansen learned of the corruption, torture, and repression resulting from
American efforts to undermine Egypt with the aim of gaining power in the Arab world. She concludes that
keeping Americans unaware about global issues has served such efforts, unleashed hatred abroad, and
contributed to the rise of Donald Trump. Examining her own identity as an observer and writer forms a
recurring theme: was she endorsing America's penchant for denial if she wrote about a foreign country
without fully understanding its history, including America's role? Hansen offers a heartfelt plea for empathy
and a recognition of "the realities of millions of people," but honing a sophisticated global perspective
seems far more complicated than she acknowledges here. A mostly illuminating literary debut that shows
how Americans' ignorance about the world has made turmoil and terrorism possible.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Hansen, Suzy: NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427518/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a2457ece.
Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427518

QUOTED: "Hansen's confident—if overreaching—distillation of complicated historical processes and her detailed, evocative descriptions of places, people, and experiences."

1/28/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Notes on a Foreign Country: An American
Abroad in a Post-American World
Publishers Weekly.
264.19 (May 8, 2017): p50.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World
Suzy Hansen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (288p) ISBN 978-0-374-28004-8
After moving to Turkey in 2007, American journalist Hansen, who writes for the New York Times
Magazine, came to the startling realization that America seen from abroad is a wholly different entity from
the America she knew. Hansen explores her own loss of innocence, as her belief in American grandiosity,
exceptionalism, and humanitarianism is deeply shaken by the destruction wrought by the U.S. in the Middle
East. The first chapters describe Hansen's encounters with Turkish nationalism and her painful acquaintance
with a new view of her country's history. Subsequent chapters explore the ways American interventions
have spread wars, propped up dictators, destroyed landscapes in the name of modernization, and spurred the
rise of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Middle and Near East. Lucid, reflective, probing, and poetic,
Hansen's book is also a searing critique of the ugly depths of American ignorance, made more dangerous
because the declining U.S. imperial system coincides with decay at home. The book is a revelatory
indictment of American policy both domestic and foreign, made gripping by Hansen's confident--if
overreaching--distillation of complicated historical processes and her detailed, evocative descriptions of
places, people, and experiences most American audiences can't imagine. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World." Publishers Weekly, 8 May
2017, p. 50. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491949116/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=21577c2e. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491949116
Briefly Noted
Macy Halford
The New Yorker. 93.29 (Sept. 25, 2017): p97.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Briefly Noted

Notes on a Foreign Country, by Suzy Hansen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Hansen, a reporter, moved to Turkey in 2007 and found that, as she probed her subjects' anxieties and blind spots, she was compelled to question everything she presumed to know about being American. Anchored in the work of James Baldwin, who spent several emancipatory years in Istanbul, her memoir is a piercingly honest critique of the unexamined white American life. Hansen finds a willful innocence in American assumptions, an obliviousness to history and to the burdens of imperial power. She comes to see the anti-Americanism she encounters as "a defensive crouch," rooted in "bewilderment that an enormous force controls your life but does not know or love you."

Mason, Deborah. "Notes on a Foreign Country." BookPage, Aug. 2017, p. 25+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499345397/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. Dziuban, Emily. "Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 12. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862658/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "Hansen, Suzy: NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427518/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. "Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World." Publishers Weekly, 8 May 2017, p. 50. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491949116/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018. Halford, Macy. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 25 Sept. 2017, p. 97. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A508006300/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dda59bac. Accessed 28 Jan. 2018.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-shattering-and-a-shame-on-suzy-hansens-notes-on-a-foreign-country/#!
  Word count: 1492

  QUOTED: "This combination of historical and political analysis combined with Hansen’s musings about her own identity create a narrative that defies categorization. While it bears traces of memoir and of travel writing, her methodology also taps into ethnography and political theory. Moreover, Hansen pulls from a diverse and colorful range of literary sources that span various time periods, geographic locations, genres, and perspectives."
  "This book is certainly an insightful read for any American who is, has been, or will be living abroad."

  A Shattering and a Shame: On Suzy Hansen’s “Notes on a Foreign Country”
  By Rebecca Barr

  39 0 1

  SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

  I FIRST PICKED UP Suzy Hansen’s book with slight trepidation; the title, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, emitted a whiff of the exoticization that so often accompanies the “other” when Americans write about their experiences in another country. The genre of female-centric inspirational travel memoirs, with Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love as perhaps the most famous example, has become (in)famous for its focus less on understanding the complexities of the world and more on how the rest of the world can act as a catalyst for the protagonist — generally a white, young-ish, Western woman — as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and finds joy, fulfillment, and love in the process.

  On the surface, Hansen’s book appears to have a similar premise. A young, white, American woman decides to leave New York to take a writing fellowship in Turkey, and through this experience, she has a series of small realizations that culminate in an epiphany about her identity. The introduction of Notes on a Foreign Country, however, vehemently refutes the Gilbertian narrative, opting instead to characterize her years as an American abroad not as “a joyous romp of self-discovery and romance” but as “more of a shattering and a shame.”

  The rest of the book evolves out of the fragments of this shattering. While she does reject the romantic idea of living in a foreign land, Hansen still indicates to the reader from the beginning that, yes, this book does focus on her — her identity as a white American woman, her gradual realization of the privilege of ignorance, and her complex relationship with the world around her. All of these pieces of her as an individual and as part of the collective white Americanness that she attempts to identify and define throughout the book snake through the historical and political narrative that she weaves.

  Hansen’s anecdotes in the first chapter, which many Americans who have lived abroad will recognize, place Hansen face-to-face with people and situations that challenge her preconceptions of Turkish culture, of Islam, and of what it means to be a liberal American. She discusses her experiences hanging around with a group of wealthy, liberal, secular Turks, and finds perplexing their contempt for their own country and prejudice against women who wear the headscarf. She goes to conferences with Western journalists and finds their treatment of Turkey shallow and reductive. She spends months hunting down a famous theater actor who was friends with James Baldwin, but comes away from the long-awaited meeting feeling under-informed and ignorant because the meeting played out in a way very different from her expectations.

  She also finds friends who help her see and process the paradoxes. Rana, a “cool and independent-minded and loving” woman, is a constant companion who takes her around different parts of Istanbul and challenges her preconceived notions about Turkish society. The lessons Rana imparts upon her do not always, or even frequently, come in the form of a beautifully cheerful revelation about the joys of Turkish culture. Instead, they come through moments of profound discomfort, such as when Hansen is harassed by a delivery boy, and Rana takes her around the neighborhood to tell everyone about the delivery boy’s transgression and to solicit vows of retaliation from all the neighborhood men. This idea of neighborhood justice unnerves Hansen, undermining her liberal convictions and setting the tone for the shattering of her American innocence: “If I was going to live in Turkey, I had to learn to think like a Turk. These were not my rules to break.”

  Far from being limited to Istanbul, Hansen’s account stretches from the mansions of the Bosphorus to the coal mining town of Soma. She talks with shopkeepers, journalists, academics, activists, taxi drivers, actors, politicians, and miners, and each conversation, whether one of conflict or camaraderie, illuminates an aspect of the larger relationship between the United States and Turkey. Through these interactions and thorough research, she provides a political and historical analysis of the “kind of long-distance imperial relationship” between the United States and Turkey and the unraveling of her own unwitting complicity in the relationship.

  After examining Turkey, Hansen turns her attention to Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran — all countries within Turkey’s larger neighborhood and all with complex historical relationships with the United States. While Hansen certainly makes insightful observations and comments on the relationship between the United States and these countries, these chapters lack the historical depth and deep empathy Hansen shows in her chapters on Turkey. This is an understandable flaw; Hansen lived for several years in Turkey, while she only spent a few weeks or months in any of the other countries. While these chapters add important context to the US-Turkey relationship, which exists within a larger web of American interference around the world, they lack the familiarity, the unmistakable sense of being there, that can only come from deep immersion in a particular location.

  This combination of historical and political analysis combined with Hansen’s musings about her own identity create a narrative that defies categorization. While it bears traces of memoir and of travel writing, her methodology also taps into ethnography and political theory. Moreover, Hansen pulls from a diverse and colorful range of literary sources that span various time periods, geographic locations, genres, and perspectives, from Orhan Pamuk to Don DeLillo, and from Abdelrahman Munif to Eric Bennett.

  Perhaps unexpectedly to many Americans, of all the authors that Hansen references, the one who most influenced her is James Baldwin, who lived in Turkey on and off throughout the 1960s during a time of newly unleashed liberal, leftist, and artistic movements in Turkey. Hansen identifies Baldwin’s time in Turkey as the “secret reason” for her own initial interest in Turkey. His presence hovers over the book, as Hansen returns time and time again to Baldwin’s idea of “innocence,” and the loss thereof. Hansen latches onto Baldwin’s establishment of innocence as a defining characteristic of white Americans, along with their inability to understand tragedy. By pulling from Baldwin so heavily, and by returning near the end of the book to a story about a black doctor from Mississippi who attempted to implement a medical system based on an Iranian model in rural Mississippi, Hansen returns to the idea of what it means to be a white American both in the context of being abroad and within the domestic American sphere.

  As someone who has lived in Turkey, I found that Hansen’s experience resembles my own. Like Hansen, I tried to understand what my white American identity meant in the world, just as I tried to grasp the political, social, and economic complexities which, with some surprise, I suddenly confronted. Hansen’s articulation of this struggle gave me quite a few moments while reading when I found myself loudly exclaiming, “Yes!” as she encounters and processes experiences very similar to ones I have encountered. She asks probing and difficult questions that left me ruminating about their significance in our current political climate.

  This book is certainly an insightful read for any American who is, has been, or will be living abroad, but, as I am certain Hansen would agree, the book should not be read in a vacuum; white Americans need to listen to the words of people from other places, races, and backgrounds. We should not view self-discovery as a personal process; we must put in the time and effort to overcome the danger of the privilege of innocence and lack of consciousness about the world around us, which serves to “[exonerate us] of responsibility, of history, of a role.” Without an understanding of United States’s outsized, insidious, and violent influences around the world, white Americans can feel neutral in their very existence, and thus perpetuate the power imbalances that exist at home and abroad. Hansen’s book serves as a call to serious reflection and action for white Americans, even, and perhaps especially, the liberal, well traveled, and well intentioned.

  ¤

  Rebecca Barr is an educator and writer currently based in Portland, Maine.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/28/books/review/notes-on-a-foreign-country-suzy-hansen.html?mcubz=1
  Word count: 1549

  QUOTED: "Before anything else, Notes on a Foreign Country is a sincere and intelligent act of selfquestioning. 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."

  A Journalist Abroad
  Grapples With American
  Power
  By HISHAM MATAR AUG. 28, 2017
  NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY
  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
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  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 selfquestioning.
  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.
  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
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  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
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  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.

• Commonweal
  https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/revelations-here-abroad
  Word count: 1292

  QUOTED: "Hansen writes well, especially about architecture and cityscapes."

  Revelations Here & Abroad
  By Paul Baumann
  November 20, 2017
  Books Music
  This story is included in these collections
  Christmas Critics

  Portrait of Frank Sinatra at Liederkranz Hall in New York by William P. Gottlieb, circa 1947
  Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, 276 pp.) has gotten a good deal of attention, and deservedly so. Hansen, an American expat who moved to Turkey in 2007, grew up in New Jersey, and made her way into New York journalism after the University of Pennsylvania. She is disarmingly candid about the many things she didn’t know about the military interventions and economic machinations of the United States abroad over the past seventy years. She discovers, for example, that the United States first used napalm in Greece during the civil war that broke out immediately after WWII, and that U.S. support for coups in Turkey, Iran, and other places is remembered bitterly in those countries even if these incidents are forgotten or were never known by most Americans. Hansen writes well, especially about architecture and cityscapes. On assignment in Kabul, she observes that “the Afghan elite lived in enormous ‘poppy palaces,’ the Central Asian disco version of a McMansion, homes so unbearably ugly and ostentatious, they seemed to be engaged in satire.”

  Notes on a Foreign Country is a coming-of-age tale. The foreign country of the title is not Turkey but America, and Hansen’s ambition is to show how the United States is perceived by those who have had to grapple with U.S. preeminence, especially those in the Middle East. It is also an examination of how her own very American preoccupations and prejudices prevented her from understanding the “foreigners” she was often writing about. Perhaps most of all, it is a love letter to Istanbul, the ancient city where Hansen has found a society and a culture that compelled her to shift her perspective in a way that enabled her to see herself and America more clearly. She explains how she came to appreciate what Islam means to many Turks and others around the world, and why it is a mistake to see a strong religious identity as a threat. She does not make a case for the superiority of Turkey, and she doesn’t hesitate to criticize bad actors, regardless of where they were born. But she insists that looking at the United States from a distance puts American pretentions to exceptionalism in context. “America First” has long been our calling card. Or as she writes, “Denial and forgetting were critical to the patriotism that held the idea of the Turkish nation together, and to its nationalism. They had been crucial to America’s nationalism, too.”

  Two other Americans who found living abroad deepened their sense of human possibility were the literary couple Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller. Hazzard, originally from Australia, was a brilliant novelist (The Transit of Venus, The Great Fire), and Steegmuller a distinguished translator and biographer, best known for his translations of Flaubert. They made their home in New York City, but every year would spend a month or more in Naples, a city of monuments and churches, a place relished for its palpable sense of a still-present past, as well as for its “squalid” vitality. The essays in Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (University of Chicago Press, $18, 112 pp.), were written over many years. Italy is a place, Hazzard writes of her first visits, where “the cult of leisure flourishes still and where variety and pleasure can fill up many, though not all, days.” In the aftermath of WWII, it offered an “admixture of immediacy and continuity, of the long perspective and the intensely personal.” Hazzard further discovered that “the ability to rise to the moment, to the human occasion, is linked to a sense of mortality intrinsic, in Italy, to all that pleases us.”

  If, for whatever reason, you don’t cotton to Sinatra, Hamill just might convert you.
  In Ancient Shore, these two immensely learned people move appreciatively among the remnants of Naples’s Greek, Roman, Renaissance, and Bourbon past while navigating a city of motorbikes speeding by on narrow streets. Steegmuller’s frightening encounter with one of Naples’s uglier but all-too-common incidents anchors the book. While he and Hazzard are walking together, his bag is ripped from his hands and he is knocked to the ground and dragged by two thieves on a motorbike. His shoulder and nose are broken, as well as a tooth. Steegmuller’s meticulously observed recreation of the incident and the excellent medical attention he received in rundown and poorly equipped Italian hospitals is a tribute to how important the human presence and touch is to the sick or injured.

  Returning to New York, to its magnificent hospitals, brilliant doctors, and “interminable waiting,” Steegmuller laments “a sense of removal from the normal reciprocity of existence,” something abundantly present in shabby Naples. Suffering a relapse, he remains in a New York hospital for a week. There “even the kindest of my new hospital attendants—and many were very kind indeed—spoke to me across an artificial barrier of polysyllabic indirection, where my ‘stressful situation’ was being ‘checked out,’ and where I could never simply be told but must everlastingly be ‘notified’ of my ‘ongoing status.’ All my Neapolitan rescuers had used direct, expressive words, words still vigorously derived from human experience; none had...been persuaded to embrace pretension in the name of professionalism.”

  Speaking of the Italian genius for speaking to and from the heart, even if somewhat cynically, Pete Hamill’s Why Sinatra Matters (Little Brown, $26, 187 pp.) is required reading for any true believer. In my early twenties, smitten as I was with The Band, James Taylor, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, I came upon an album of Sinatra singing Cole Porter songs. Nelson Riddle was the arranger. It was a revelation. Hamill, a novelist as well as a great journalist, knew Sinatra, at least socially. One of his claims is that Sinatra “perfected the role of Tender Tough Guy…creat[ing] a new model for American masculinity.” True, I suppose, although that seems to have gone the way of EPA regulations. What remains is Sinatra’s extraordinary voice and his impeccable phrasing and musicianship. Hamill quotes Miles Davis’s assessment of the Sinatra-Riddle collaboration. “A lot of musicians and writers don’t get the full value out of a tune,” Davis said. “[Art] Tatum does and Frank Sinatra always does. Listen to the way Nelson Riddle writes for Sinatra, the way he gives him enough room and doesn’t clutter it up.”

  If, for whatever reason, you don’t cotton to Sinatra, Hamill just might convert you.

  I’ll end with two books that explore a different revelation. Generous in tone and respectful of objections raised by skeptics, the British philosopher John Cottingham is the best sort of Catholic apologist. In Why Believe? (Bloomsbury, $18.95, 208 pp.), he argues that a belief in God is a rational response if you reject moral relativism and concede the objective nature of goodness and virtue. In How to Believe (Bloomsbury, $30, 176 pp.), he reminds us that you cannot think your way into belief; you must live your way into a new way of thinking. If you do that, aspects of reality once hidden will become evident. A sports analogy might help. Until you get good at playing a sport, you really can’t enjoy it. Nor, at another level, can you know the beauty or the truth of it.

• Progressive
  http://progressive.org/magazine/our-favorite-books-of-2017-171205/
  Word count: 669

  QUOTED: "This is a beautiful, angry, sad piece of writing that every American should read as we try to live in a world that has long known things about us that we are only now coming to understand."

  Our Favorite Books of 2017
  by The Progressive Magazine

  December 5, 2017
  350

  Print
  Expand
  Screen Shot 2017-11-27 at 1.jpg
  From Kate Clinton
  The past eleven months have been an attempted white-out of the policies and programs of our first black President. There’s freshly mined coal in the nation’s stocking. No peace on earth. Forget donning the gay apparel. The endless Muzak track at the D.C. mall is Ta-rump pum pum Trump. It’s a White Supremacist Christmas.

  [...]

  From Ruth Conniff
  “I went abroad for the same reason everyone else does: to learn how to live,” Suzy Hansen writes at the end of her extraordinary book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

  Hansen, who describes herself as an ambitious, provincial young writer who went to New York City to make it big, moved to Istanbul shortly after September 11, 2001, in the grip of a personal crisis.

  “My crisis, like many other Americans’, was about my American identity,” she writes.

  In Istanbul, where she still lives, Hansen learned Turkish, reported on the Middle East for The New York Times Magazine, and embarked on a years-long exploration of what it means to be an American.

  The guiding spirit on Hansen’s journey is James Baldwin, whom she first encountered as an undergraduate, in the library stacks at the University of Pennsylvania. Baldwin left her gobsmacked with his description of the “terrible innocence” of white people in the United States.

  Later, Baldwin’s assertion that he felt more free as a gay, black man in 1960s Istanbul than he could ever feel in New York challenged and worried Hansen, propelling her on her path to Turkey, and ultimately launching this deeply thoughtful book.

  Hansen tries to understand why America is a country where, as Albert Camus observed, “everything is done to prove that life isn’t tragic.”

  “Because the Americans had never looked their tragic history in the face, they could delude themselves into believing that their own comparable superiority might create a better world,” she writes.

  Reading this book in Mexico, I understood why Hansen takes so personally the sunny ignorance with which Americans view the rest of the world. She captures the shock of realizing that you are one of the world’s rich kids, and that your feelings of boundless possibility, happiness, and freedom exist because your country has aggressively and systematically crushed the possibilities, happiness, and freedom of others.

  Much of the dark history of American foreign policy that Hansen uncovers—the propping up of dictators, betrayals of pro-democracy movements that looked to the United States for support, the training of foreign armies and secret police in torture techniques—will not come as a surprise to longtime readers of The Progressive. But Hansen goes deeper, provocatively connecting geopolitics to a culture that shapes us and blinds us.

  Donald Trump, the prototypical Ugly American, has made Hansen’s book particularly timely this year. But, she writes, “From abroad, when I used to hear President Obama say that America is the greatest country on earth . . . I felt like I did as a child, not wanting to admit to my parents I knew there was no Santa Claus.”

  This is a beautiful, angry, sad piece of writing that every American should read as we try to live in a world that has long known things about us that we are only now coming to understand.

  Ruth Conniff is living and working in Oaxaca, Mexico, this year as The Progressive’s editor-at-large.

• New York Review
  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/09/suzy-hansen-very-american-endeavor/
  Word count: 527

  A Very American Endeavor Kaya Genç NOVEMBER 9, 2017 ISSUE
  Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World
  by Suzy Hansen
  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 276 pp., $26.00

  Burak Kara/Getty Images
  Suzy Hansen in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul, August 2017
  Suzy Hansen was twenty-nine when, in 2007, she was awarded a fellowship to study in Turkey. Before leaving New York City for Istanbul, she had led a rather comfortable life as a reporter for The New York Observer, interviewing Woody Allen, covering the Republican Convention, and poking fun at conservative grandees. But Hansen was restless in New York. Though she spent most of her time in their circles, she was disenchanted by what she saw as the narcissism of the city’s young intelligentsia. She found, to her surprise, that September 11 had made people around her—novelists, writers, and intellectuals of a liberal and progressive bent—in most cases indifferent to the effects of America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. There was at first no genuine protest against the war, and no concerted effort to imagine or empathize with the experiences of Afghan and Iraqi citizens. In Hansen’s view, progressive American intellectuals failed to ask themselves the question that had puzzled her in the six years following September 11: Why do they hate us?

  It is this question that Hansen pursues in her passionately argued, if somewhat frustrating, first book, Notes on a Foreign Country. In Istanbul, Hansen lived, by and large, in Beyoğlu, the district of artists, hipsters, and dissidents. From the first moment, she adored Istanbul. The colorful old houses, many built by Armenians and Greeks, were cheap to rent; a deserted hill in her neighborhood offered views of the Bosphorus, and she would go there at night to look upon the misty Asian continent beyond the sea. Her first apartment had no heat, and the century-old building featured broken windows and a dilapidated entrance, but Hansen’s enthusiasm did not diminish. Like so many expats before her, including her favorite author, James Baldwin, who had traveled to Istanbul in the 1960s in search of a more liberal atmosphere (Turkey had never criminalized homosexuality), she found refuge from what she considered the oppressive American realities of the time.

  Hansen instantly fell in love with Turkey, its people, and its customs. Turkish women in veils did not irritate her; she was more annoyed by her own previous ignorance of their religious values. She watched Turkish Muslims savoring the religious freedoms they had gained under the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which came to power in 2002, only a year after it was founded: she was “consumed” by the country’s “cultural revolution,” which allowed conservative women to wear headscarves in public. She also observed how many pious Turks felt “spiritually redeemed and politically enfranchised” by the rise of Islamist politics. Moreover, she enjoyed seeing money pour into Turkey in an atmosphere of economic liberalization.

  Indeed, the country’s economy was booming under AKP rule, and Hansen greatly admired the party’s charismatic leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was…

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-power-to-trace-power-on-suzy-hansens-notes-on-a-foreign-country/
  Word count: 2276

  QUOTED: "It would be difficult for an American reader not feel changed by this book. By framing the history of American imperialism within her own journey from innocence to knowledge, Hansen serves as a guide to whom we all can easily relate. The assumption, though, is that we can follow her path from the comfort of our own homes."
  "This is both the blessing and the curse of the book. It will open the eyes of readers who lack the means, opportunity, or desire to spend a decade abroad researching and living global politics. But it also presupposes the privilege of those readers."

  The Power to Trace Power: On Suzy Hansen’s “Notes on a Foreign Country”
  By Andrew Wessels

  41 0 1

  SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

  ON AUGUST 8, 2017, in an open meeting with the press at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, President Donald J. Trump made an off-the-cuff announcement that initiated a new policy regarding the United States’s approach to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK): “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

  For many, this bellicose language was hardly a surprise. The president has a penchant for picking fights. The focus in the news was on the comment’s immediate impact: would it lead to nuclear war? Deeper journalistic dives into the burgeoning crisis have stepped back to give a broader picture of the historical relations with the DPRK. Many commentators pointed out that the DPRK has long bragged of its nuclear capabilities. Some stories have included a discussion of the Sony Pictures hack in response to the release of the movie The Interview (2014). Any broader historical context has typically been contained to a short overview of the DPRK’s history since the Korean War.

  But why does this situation exist in the first place? The origins predate Kim Il-sung’s final consolidation of power in the 1956 August Faction Incident. One must go back to the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945, which the Korean people responded to with a nationalistic guerrilla movement led in part by Kim Il-sung. That period of colonization was followed immediately by the colonizing efforts (deemed “occupations”) begun at the end of World War II by China and the Soviet Union in the north and the United States in the south, which initiated the division of Korea into two separate zones or states. At that point, Kim Il-sung rose to power in the north and initiated a dynasty, as well as a foreign policy that continues to affect our world.

  This current political crisis has its roots in decisions made before any of the current players in the crisis were born. But does teasing out the dense, complicated history of colonization in the Korean peninsula change the present? Can knowledge of the history provide a way out of the current crisis?

  In Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, Suzy Hansen posits that the answer to these questions is, at least potentially, yes. Hansen, who has lived in Istanbul, Turkey, for a decade while working as a foreign correspondent, unravels the history of American imperialism in Turkey and on her assignments in Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. Turkey and Istanbul, as Hansen discusses, have been touted as potential “solutions” to the “problem” of Islam, a “proof” that a secular democratic governmental structure and a predominantly Islamic electorate can coexist. This view, Hansen finds, is reductive and problematic, generated by and supporting Western and American imperialist power structures.

  Hansen first moved to Istanbul in 2007 on a journalistic writing fellowship and has lived there ever since, reporting on the Greek financial crisis, the Americans’ vain attempts to nation-build in Afghanistan, the Arab Spring in Egypt, and, more recently, the attempted coup in Turkey. Prior to this, though, Hansen had little experience of the world beyond the United States’s boundaries. Born and raised in a small city in New Jersey, she found herself ill-equipped (despite an Ivy League education) to understand the global events that had been pushed to the fore of American consciousness in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

  Her mission as a journalist in Istanbul, as she saw it, was to help herself and her fellow Americans better understand the realities of the Muslim world, and perhaps to solve the Muslim problem:

  For the last eighty years […] the Turks had been wrestling with this secularizing experiment perhaps with lessons for all of us. Wasn’t Turkey the one Muslim country that, in those days, gave hope? Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” seemed more intellectual than martial in Turkey, and I saw the country like some idea lab dreamed up for my benefit.

  The language Hansen uses in these passages detailing her early perspective are important: Turkey is an experimental lab that will provide lessons for “my” — read: Americans’ — benefit. As the book progresses, her perspective expands; Hansen highlights how even these “positive” ways of viewing Turkey are themselves steeped in imperialism. The focus is solely on benefitting one group:

  Many of us unconsciously settled for these softer versions of oppression, the kinds that fit easily into the American vision of its place in the world: as guardian and enforcer. I had believed […] that “Islam” was a thing that I, an American abroad, should be thinking about solutions to, because that’s what Americans always do.

  Hansen begins to discover that neither Turkey nor Islam are monolithic. Each has its own groups and power structures, which, in turn, can be subdivided into further groups, which can be further subdivided until one arrives at a collection of individuals, each with their own desires, perspectives, and goals. She begins, to put it bluntly, to see the people who live in Turkey as humans, not as objects in an American power play.

  As she began to settle in, Hansen noticed that many Turks didn’t fully trust her, some going so far as to call her an American spy. Her friend suggests “that maybe [Hansen] was a postmodern spy — a spy who didn’t know she was a spy.” “Like all foreign correspondents,” he tells her, “you’re sending back information that, no matter how you intended it, will no doubt be used in the worst way imaginable.” This suggestion triggers an epiphany that hangs over the entire book: Americans may be imperialists and not even known it, including the American going to Turkey with the goal of critiquing that imperialism.

  Hansen uses a litany of horrifying historical examples of American imperialism to combat what she sees as the standard American practice of pretending that it isn’t a colonial force: “Rejecting the word ‘empire’ had long been a way for Americans to avoid taking responsibility for acting like one, which was a habit embedded into the American character from the moment of its birth.” Hansen details the United States’s role sponsoring or, at the very least, strongly encouraging coups in Turkey and Greece; propping up a repressive, anti-democratic regime in Egypt; and the various ways that the United States’s so-called nation-building devolved into colonialism.

  The ongoing American mess in Afghanistan, as seen through Hansen’s eyes, reveals the pernicious uncertainty of American imperialism. This evolved form of colonialism is decentralized, diffused into countless competing interests, but all emanating from a single homeland. Various wings of the military, the State Department, NGOs, and private corporations all work together and against each other, competing for space within the “reconstruction effort.” While the vague goal of reconstruction is shared across these different groups, the paths toward that goal diverge. The group or coalition that can best manipulate power will emerge victorious. Meanwhile, the people of Afghanistan — like those of other countries touched by American imperialism — are disenfranchised.

  The current situation within the United States isn’t directly addressed, but one can’t help but draw connections. Hansen herself relates the slow decline of American power abroad with the rise of nationalism at home, which conditioned the election of Donald Trump. She doesn’t delve deeply into foreign policy differences between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Her aim is broader; she suggests that the United States has one basic foreign policy: the extension of American influence, often leading to violations of sovereignty and human rights. The forces that perpetuate these violations are not connected to a specific political party. They emanate from a multifaceted power system, which draws its immense strength in part from its decentralization.

  It would be difficult for an American reader not feel changed by this book. By framing the history of American imperialism within her own journey from innocence to knowledge, Hansen serves as a guide to whom we all can easily relate. The assumption, though, is that we can follow her path from the comfort of our own homes. This is both the blessing and the curse of the book. It will open the eyes of readers who lack the means, opportunity, or desire to spend a decade abroad researching and living global politics. But it also presupposes the privilege of those readers, their distance from the destructive outcomes of American foreign policy. It challenges readers to reflect on their isolationist privilege, but, in so doing, comforts them.

  The trouble, as Hansen’s friend understood, is that the production of knowledge does not necessarily lead to positive outcomes. The dominant power structure can use new knowledge to continue its consolidation of power and exploitation of the powerless. Hansen never really addresses her friend’s critique. Indeed, the book’s very existence implies that, however much she questions the supposed objectivity of the Western press, she still believes in journalism’s ability to reveal the truth and, in revealing it, to right wrongs, serve the cause of justice, improve the world. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. But, as usual, matters are much more complex.

  Notes on a Foreign Country can be read as an institutional critique of the American power structure. The idea is that, by exposing that structure to the sunlight of journalism, Hansen can highlight its flaws and encourage resistance. However, this act of institutional critique can also aid the power structure — it can help the institution it critiques better understand how to avoid future critiques, how to gird and perpetuate itself. Hansen offers no clear directive for resistance, and her reporting may, at least potentially, enable elements of the clever exploitative system she criticizes learn how to cover its tracks all the more thoroughly.

  Another question arises: what isn’t tainted at its root? One is reminded of the narrator’s conversation with Cornelis de Jong in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995), about the ongoing impact of the capital amassed through the sugar trade’s exploitation of slave labor. This immense surplus capital, according to de Jong, ended up funding museums like the Mauritshuis in The Hague, Netherlands, and the Tate Gallery, London. Sebald’s narrator recalls:

  At times it seems to me, said de Jong, as if all works of art were coated with a sugar glaze or indeed made completely of sugar, like the model of the battle of Esztergom created by a confectioner to the Viennese court, which Empress Maria Theresia, so it is said, devoured in one of her recurrent bouts of melancholy.

  Hansen’s book is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), which was run independently for decades, until a majority stake in the company was sold to the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group in 1993. This is one of the many transactions in the ongoing consolidation of the mass publishing industry over the last few decades. Holtzbrinck Publishing Group was officially founded in 1948, in the aftermath of World War II. Over a decade ago, it was revealed that the founder, Georg von Holtzbrinck, was a member of the Nazi Party whose initial forays into publishing relied at least in part on his willingness to distribute Nazi-sponsored magazines and books. The profits and infrastructure created through this enterprise became, after the war, Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which decades later went on to become one of the largest publishing conglomerates in the world, gobbling up publishers across Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including FSG.

  Does this invalidate FSG’s offerings? Not at all. Should we be aware of the legacies of violence and exploitation? Absolutely. These are among the complex and painful lessons of Hansen’s book. If we follow the clues of history, we are unlikely to find pristine origins. The evils of this world are deeply rooted, and all we can do is expose them. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that this exposure will result in greater justice. Attempts to dismantle American imperialism from within the power structure may only lead to the structure’s transformation. Will its new form be less harmful? We can hope, and, with that hope, take action. There is no other option.

  ¤

  Andrew Wessels is a poet and translator who currently lives in Los Angeles. He has lived in Istanbul, Turkey, where he taught writing at Koç University. His first book of poems, A Turkish Dictionary, was published by 1913 Press in 2017, and Semi Circle, a chapbook of translations of Nurduran Duman’s poems, is available from Goodmorning Menagerie.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/an-eye-opening-exploration-of-how-other-countries-perceive-america/2017/08/18/fa72780a-7232-11e7-8839-ec48ec4cae25_story.html?utm_term=.17cef338e31f
  Word count: 1196

  An eye-opening exploration of how other countries perceive America

  A ferry sails in the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul. Turkey was one of the countries Suzy Hansen studied to gain a sense of her American perspective of the world. (MURAD SEZER/REUTERS)

  By Ali Wyne August 18, 2017
  Ali Wyne is a contributing analyst at Wikistrat and a coauthor of Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (2013).
  Ali Wyne is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, a security fellow with the Truman National Security Project, and a new leader with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

  With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States no longer confronted a major competitor on the international stage, and the values it promoted seemed irreversibly ascendant. Given the ensuing triumphalism that prevailed among many U.S. commentators — premature in retrospect, but understandable at the time — Americans who came of age during the 1990s might be forgiven for lacking interest in events beyond their borders. Nothing much mattered anymore, it seemed, except what was going on in the United States.

  [Trump’s radical depature from postwar foreign policy]

  Growing up in a small New Jersey town, Suzy Hansen remembers that her “entire experience was domestic, interior, American,” lacking any “sense of America being [just] one country on a planet of many countries.” In 2007, she received a writing fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs to visit Turkey and conduct research on political trends in the Islamic world. Her award had been endowed in the 1920s by Charles Crane, the adventurous heir to a Chicago plumbing company fortune who lamented that “Americans and especially American policymakers were not well enough informed about the rest of the world.” Early on in “Notes on a Foreign Country,” Hansen relates a conversation she had with an Iraqi man in 2012. When she “asked him what Iraq was like in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was growing up,” he replied: “‘I am always amazed when Americans ask me this. How is it that you know nothing about us when you had so much to do with what became of our lives?’”

  Abounding with such anecdotes, “Notes on a Foreign Country” is a compelling exhortation to introspection: Hansen, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, urges Americans to recognize the perspectives that shape — and sometimes distort — how they understand their country’s role in the world. In the concluding stanza of his 1786 poem “To a Louse,” the Scottish bard Robert Burns enjoined individuals to inhabit the minds of their peers: “Oh, would some Power give us the gift / To see ourselves as others see us!” This undertaking is particularly challenging for citizens of the world’s superpower, who tend to presume that its values are universal and the world order it promulgates is sacrosanct.

  “Notes on a Foreign Country,” by Suzy Hansen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
  Hansen spends much of her book identifying and critiquing her own preconceptions. She notes, for example, that she initially approached Turkey “like some specimen I could place under a microscope,” appraising its development according to Western notions of modernization. Indeed, the further her narrative progresses — winding through Istanbul (where she now resides), Athens, Cairo and Tehran — the more one senses that her reflections are as much an exercise in discovering her biases as they are in enlightening her American readers. She concedes that she “had been invested in an idea of the East’s inferiority without even knowing it” and cites an “unassailable, perhaps unconscious faith” in America’s “Western way of living” that accompanied her during her travels. No matter how dispassionately Americans may believe they can — or do — assess their country’s actions, Hansen observes that “an objective American mind is first and foremost still an American mind.”

  She vividly captures the disorientation we experience when our preconceived notions collide with uncomfortable discoveries, likening that moment to “a cavity filling: something drilled out, something shoved in, and afterward, a persistent, dull ache and a tooth that would never be the same.” We do not easily relinquish our assumptions. Indeed, the more we believe a proposition is self-evident, the more resistant we are when it is challenged: Overcoming that inertia, Hansen writes, is akin to “shedding layers of skin. It’s a slow process, you break down, you open up, but you also resist, much like how the body can begin to heal, only to fall back into its sicker state.”

  It is rare and refreshing for an observer to exhibit this level of candor about her internal tensions. But occasionally Hansen’s perceptions create tensions of their own. While she premises her book on the judgment that America is in decline, she also characterizes it as an empire. Indeed, she sometimes seems to portray a country bordering on the omnipotent, wielding its wide influence in ways both evident and clandestine. It is hard to reconcile that depiction with the litany of strategic setbacks that the United States has experienced in the postwar era or with the accelerating growth of disorder in world affairs. An exaggerated appraisal of U.S. influence has proved doubly harmful: Beyond tempting the United States to embark on and persist with misguided interventions, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has led outsiders to implicate the United States in unfortunate outcomes for which it had little, if any, responsibility.

  [How Trump is changing America’s foreign policy]

  And while Hansen rightly cautions against blind acceptance of America’s foreign policy, which has often departed from its self-professed values, blanket suspicion is not warranted, either. Her narrative would be more balanced if she acknowledged some of the contributions of U.S. power. Programs such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the President’s Malaria Initiative, for example, have saved millions of lives. And the resurgence of the Asia-Pacific — of which China’s post-1978 growth is the most remarkable example — has been enabled, in no small part, by the order that the United States has sustained in that region.

  Still, with the U.S.-led postwar order under growing duress, and with long-standing U.S. allies increasingly questioning America’s reputation as the exemplar of openness and pluralism, Hansen’s principal injunction to Americans to understand how others view them and their country’s policies is timely and urgent. While “Notes on a Foreign Country” makes for sobering reading at times, there may be a silver lining in Hansen’s chronicle of widespread disillusionment with the United States: It reflects a residual hope in the power of the American example. Americans, policymakers and citizens alike, should work to sustain their country not just as a military power and an economic engine, but also as an aspirational idea.

  NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY
  An American Abroad in a Post-American World
  By Suzy Hansen

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 276 pp. $26

• Time
  http://time.com/4904292/notes-on-a-foreign-country-suzy-hansen/
  Word count: 213

  An American’s Tale of Policy and Progress

  By KARL VICK August 17, 2017
  IDEAS
  Vick is a TIME correspondent based in New York
  In 2007, at the age of 29, Suzy Hansen moved from New York City to Istanbul. The same city had provided refuge to James Baldwin, whose writing opened Hansen’s eyes to an essential truth to which she had been blissfully ignorant: that she was not just an American but a white American, a position so privileged, it afforded the luxury of blissful ignorance.

  Notes on a Foreign Country is Hansen’s ardent, often lovely attempt to take self-awareness overseas. It doesn’t come along peacefully. But then Baldwin wrote of people in intimate proximity, while Hansen tackles the sins of U.S. foreign policy. Her humans are separated by thousand of miles and opposing governments — Washington, and the ones it manipulates. The one easy thing here is Hansen’s company. In Dubai, “sky and the water melt into an aluminum-hued oblivion.” A Hilton “had the benevolent totalitarian aesthetic of the United Nations.” A nurse speaks “in a tone that makes you want to put your head on her shoulder.” If Noam Chomsky could write like this, Hansen’s work would already be done.

• Atlantic
  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/cover-to-cover/534225/
  Word count: 340

  QUOTED: "Her long stay in Istanbul (she’s still there) gives her an outsider’s vantage on myopic American arrogance that is bracing."

  The Identity Crisis of an American Abroad
  Making sense of one’s home country from afar

  ANN HULBERT SEPTEMBER 2017 ISSUE CULTURE
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  REVIEWS
  Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World
  By Suzy Hansen
  FSG
  A“twenty-something life crisis,” and a writing fellowship, sent the journalist Suzy Hansen from New York to Istanbul in 2007. There she got swept up in a bigger crisis, one likely to sound familiar these days. It “was about my American identity,” she writes. “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.”

  FSG
  Hansen turns a coming-of-age travelogue into a geopolitical memoir of sorts, without sacrificing personal urgency in the process. She frankly confronts her ignorance about Turkey, long the West’s go-to model for modernizing the Middle East. And she wrestles with her assumptions about American beneficence abroad. As she travels and reads—learning about U.S. meddling not just in Turkey but in Greece, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, the Arab world—her confidence is shaken.

  Hansen’s disillusionment with the U.S. is so deep that it can sometimes feel doctrinaire. Yet her long stay in Istanbul (she’s still there) gives her an outsider’s vantage on myopic American arrogance that is bracing. And her fascinating insider’s view of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s rise upends Western simplicities. “I had the space to look at everything so differently that I actually felt as if my brain were breathing,” she writes. The experience is contagious.

• Christian Science Monitor
  https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2017/0807/Notes-on-a-Foreign-Country-is-an-American-s-struggle-to-understand-her-country-s-relation-to-the-world
  Word count: 860

  QUOTED: "Hansen writes with both authority and humility and, occasionally, with sharp beauty."

  'Notes on a Foreign Country' is an American's struggle to understand her country's relation to the world
  Journalist Suzy Hansen wonders how she, an Ivy League-educated journalist, could have been so ignorant of the extent of the US's role in remaking the post-World War II world.

  Caption
  What Are You Reading?
  Tell us about the book that's currently on your bedside table.

  Barbara Spindel
  AUGUST 7, 2017 —Several years ago, journalist Suzy Hansen met an Iraqi man and asked him what Iraq was like when he was growing up there in the 1980s and 1990s. “I am always amazed when Americans ask me this,” he replied, not unkindly. “How is it that you know nothing about us when you had so much to do with what became of our lives?”

  Hansen faced a version of that question more than once after moving to Istanbul in 2007 and traveling widely throughout the Middle East. Her answer comes in the form of a searching and searing new book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World. In it, she combines a brisk history of America’s anguished intervention in the region; artful reporting on how citizens in Turkey and its neighbors view the United States today; and unsparing self-reflection to explain how she, an Ivy League-educated journalist, could be so ignorant of the extent of her country’s role in remaking the post-World War II world.

  Hansen had no particular connection to Turkey when she moved there after receiving a writing fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs. She chose Istanbul because she was interested in learning about Islam in the wake of the 9/11 attacks; the secular republic of Turkey, founded in 1923, had long been heralded by the West as a model for the Muslim world. The fact that her favorite writer, James Baldwin, had lived in Istanbul off and on in the 1960s, claiming to feel more comfortable there than in New York or Paris, also captured her imagination.

  Istanbul immediately defied her expectations – she was shocked by how much nicer its airport was than the run-down one she had departed from in New York. “I had been invested in an idea of the East’s inferiority without even knowing it,” she confesses, “and its comparative extraordinariness shook my own self-belief.” Hansen was further jolted when everyday Turks spoke matter-of-factly to her about how Cold War-era American foreign policy, specifically military and economic aid provided as part of the Truman Doctrine to contain Soviet expansion, had helped shape current political conditions in the country. “Americans are surprised by the direct relationship between their country and foreign ones because we don’t acknowledge that America is an empire,” she writes. “It is impossible to understand a relationship if you are not aware you are in one.”

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  Hansen writes with both authority and humility and, occasionally, with sharp beauty. The anti-Americanism she encountered during her travels, she writes, 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.” Some of the book’s strongest passages involve her rigorous interrogation of the notion of American exceptionalism, of America as the pinnacle of a historical narrative of progress, which she realizes she has internalized. “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,” she observes. “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.”

  Also fascinating is the author’s evolving understanding that despite her faith in her journalistic objectivity, the myths she has absorbed affect the way she tells stories from around the globe. Hansen continues to live in Istanbul, reporting on Turkey for The New York Times Magazine. There is, of course, much to write about: In the wake of last summer’s failed coup, the conservative Muslim president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has instituted a brutal crackdown on his political opponents, highlighting the country’s many contradictions, between secularism and Islamism, democracy and authoritarianism. In our post-fact era, journalists are denounced for spreading “fake news” (and it probably goes without saying that those who subscribe to that belief will find little to admire in a book by a reporter that presupposes that America has entered the period of its decline). "Notes on a Foreign Country" is a testament to one journalist’s courage in digging deep within herself to understand the real story and to make sure she gets it right.

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