In order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.
Muslim Istanbul became Baldwin’s refuge. At the time, the Ottoman Empire’s exhausted former capital was a no-man’s-land among Europe and the Soviet Union and the Arab Middle East. This lack of definition heightened the city’s appeal. “I feel free in Turkey,” Baldwin told Ya?ar Kemal, who replied: “Jimmy, that’s because you’re an American.” He spent his years in Istanbul combing through the sahaflar, or secondhand book stalls near the Grand Bazaar, having tea in Sultanahmet, socializing heartily with Turks and foreigners alike—Marlon Brando paid a visit—and finishing his novel Another Country. He also put on plays with Cezzar, including John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, which is about gay men in a correctional facility. To Baldwin, the Turkish theater scene of the 1960s was more radical than America’s.
Baldwin lived for a time in a grand old house on the Bosphorus called the Pa?a’s Library, named for the nineteenth-century intellectual Ahmet Vefik Pa?a. It hung from a cliff over Rumeli Hisar?, from where Mehmet the Conqueror launched his attack on Byzantium, and near Robert College, which had been established by American missionaries a hundred years before. In a black-and-white film made by the Turkish director Sedat Pakay, Baldwin sits at his desk in front of the window with the view of the Bosphorus, a glass of whiskey by the typewriter and a cigarette in hand, watching the U.S. Navy ships skulk through the water. “The American power follows one everywhere,” he said. America “has dragged itself, and may well have dragged the world, onto the very edge of a kind of unimaginable conflict, which could be the end of all of us, and has done it out of a really weird determination to protect something called the American way of life, which used to be called manifest destiny.” While Istanbul was an escape from the horrors of the sixties at home, according to Zaborowska, Turkey sharpened Baldwin’s sense of America’s “imperial presence” abroad. For him, it was “a revelation” to see the functioning of “power politics and foreign aid … in that sort of theatre.” Those were the early days of the Turks’ waning love affair with America. They still saw America as a benevolent safe port, a delusion Baldwin sought to cure.
What was the nature of this “imperial presence” that he was noticing in Turkey in the 1960s, a country that had seemed to me in the scope of America’s history abroad so much less important than Vietnam or Central America? He described the country as a “satellite on the Russian border” where one learned about “brutality and the power of the Western world” by “living with people whom nobody cares about, who are bounced like a tennis ball between the great powers,” very much reminding me of what Rana had said about the cartoons. Baldwin’s observations from long ago felt like time capsules. Turkey had mostly avoided any direct military confrontations with America, and so, in the era of Iraq and Afghanistan, I had not been much interested in their relationship. But if Baldwin recognized it, something must have been happening there, a different kind of influence.
It began, Cezzar would tell me, in 1946, when the USS Missouri sailed up the Bosphorus and docked in front of Dolmabah?e Palace, ostensibly to deliver the remains of the Turkish ambassador to the United States, Münir Ertegün (father of Atlantic Records cofounder Ahmet). The visit was widely received as a declaration of American support for Turkey against the Soviets. In preparation for the event Turks washed their cars, repainted their shops, and inspected their brothels. The word WELCOME was strung between the minarets of mosques. “When the ship anchored,” writes the academic Aylin Yal??n, “applause, shouts and songs of the crowd revealed their enthusiasm and joy.” That week, President Harry Truman’s special envoy met with then president ?smet ?n?nü, to establish their commitment “to democratize Turkey.”
Cezzar remembered that day the sailors came ashore, too.
“In the forties, the Americans made a big gesture. The Turkish ambassador to Washington died, and they put his body on the biggest, most powerful war machine of the time, the Missouri. Huge, beautiful, right there, we used to go to school down there—in Karak?y.” He was pointing out the window, down below to the shores of the Golden Horn. “And they took us on board—everyone could go. The American sailors who we’d only seen on film—in their beautiful white uniforms—gave us chocolates and sweets. It was the beginning of some sort of treaty—when they started giving money to Turkey. The soldiers gave the children chewing gum.
“And then the next day the whole class was sick. We all had diarrhea. The teacher had to send us all home. Nobody knew what had happened to us. We had not seen chewing gum before. We thought it was chocolate. They gave us so much. We all swallowed the chewing gum.
“And that was the beginning of the American influence in Turkey!”
*
THE MISSOURI LEFT BEHIND a people infatuated with America. In those first years, the Turks drank Coke and 7Up, ate American foods, played with American toys, and listened to American music. Turkish kids read Little Women and Pollyanna, and comic books about American frontier history that, according to Yal??n, taught “Turkish children to love the white Americans and hate the Indians,” a love affair that would not last long. They would soon have the experience Baldwin had as a child, of watching American Westerns and realizing he was not John Wayne or Gary Cooper, but that the Indians were him. Some twenty years earlier, Baldwin had warned that if America was not “able, and quickly, to face and begin to eliminate the sources of this discontent in our own country, we will never be able to do it on the great stage of the world.” By the time he had gotten to Istanbul, the Americans had already laid claim to Turkey. I was slowly discerning through Baldwin and Cezzar a connection between the way Americans had defined their identity as white people against the identity of black people, and the country’s relationship with the rest of the world.