My own love for Turkey, for Istanbul, had been in some ways shallow. I was infatuated with the way the architecture and smoking salons resisted modernity, the persistence of horse-drawn carts and traveling knife sharpeners and boza sellers calling out their wares. What I loved were the ways in which Turkey was different from America. But the similarities between Turkey and America were ones I never expected. The United States had been a tabula rasa, and so had the modern Turkish Republic. Denial and forgetting were crucial 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.
One of those many pieces of my own history I had forgotten, or had not known, was that the United States had had a relationship with Turkey, a kind of long-distance imperial relationship. Was I not of the place that had exerted power over them? Would not that assertion of power necessarily come with prejudice? For a year and a half, I realized, I had not been seeing Turkey plain. In 2006, before I left America, I had written about the Turks and the Armenian genocide: How does a people go about forgetting the past? Now I asked myself, How did I, and worse: What else did I not know?
Before I left Engin Cezzar’s home for the last time, I asked: “When you went to the United States, where did they think you were from?”
“Turkey. But no one knew about the place.”
3.
A COLD WAR MIND: AMERICA AND THE WORLD
MAFIA BOSS: You’re the guys that scare me. You’re the people that make big wars. Let me ask you something. We Italians, we got our families and we got the church. The Irish, they have the homeland. The Jews, their traditions. Even the n____, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Carlson, what do you have?
CIA OFFICER: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.
—THE GOOD SHEPHERD (FILM)
WITHOUT BALDWIN I MAY NEVER have begun to see America in Istanbul, or Turkey itself. What Baldwin’s books illuminated and then stripped of its white readers was an unconscious certitude in their own cognitive abilities, even or especially among the well educated. He made me doubt my assumptions. Rana and I often discussed the meaning of ignorance. Whenever I learned something new in Turkey—no doubt wildly annoying to Rana—I would say, “See, no American knows that.” “No American knows we have our nuclear weapons in Turkey.” “No American knows James Baldwin lived in Turkey.” “No American knows Turkish kids once chose between American and Russian cartoons.” To me, Americans knowing every shard of historical detail might have meant a humbler American monolith and a less violent world. Rana would reply that Turks were ignorant, too; they didn’t know about the countries around them, about twentieth-century history, about their own Eastern Kurdish cities. Why did I think Americans should be different?
In the 1960s, Baldwin had a similar conversation with a Turkish filmmaker. “American ignorance is a new phenomenon,” he said.
It’s not the ignorance of your peasant in Anatolia, or any peasant anywhere … If you are dealing with people who do not know how to read and know they don’t know how to read, it is at least conceivable that you can teach them how to read. If an African peasant doesn’t know how to drive a tractor, or how to irrigate a barren field, he can be taught those things. But I don’t know what you do with the people who are ignorant in the way Americans are ignorant. Who believe they can read, and who read their Reader’s Digest, Time magazine, the Daily News, who think that’s reading, who think they know something about the world because they are told that they do.
Baldwin was making the distinction between a lack of education and the ignorance of the complacently powerful, those who had faith that their esteemed institutions would teach them what they needed to know about the world. “You can’t expect people to know about countries they have never been to,” Rana said. But what if their own country had, in a way, been to that foreign country? If America had extended itself over the world, had even in spirit occupied many foreign countries, had not Americans in some way been there themselves? Had not a connection been made?
The more I realized how little I knew about Turkey, the more it seemed that the American claim to exceptionalism necessarily obscured something about America itself. 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. This could only mean that in order to see a foreign country clearly, I would first have to excavate my mind. I would have to take apart the myths about America—as I had with Turkey—one by one. The American empire, for American citizens, was difficult to locate, I would discover, because it had long ago developed ways of preventing its own citizens from knowing the contours of its existence.
*
THE BRITISH HISTORIAN Tony Judt once observed that Americans have a strange allergy to the word “empire.” Thomas Jefferson referred to the U.S. as an “empire for liberty,” the state of New York is called the “Empire State,” but still the word sounds reactionary to Americans, like a leftist harangue, perhaps even just too old-fashioned and out-of-date for a modern superpower. Non-Americans, like Judt, use the words “empire” and “imperial” casually. In Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a Chilean man accuses Changez, who is Pakistani and works on Wall Street, of working for an “adopted empire” as a “modern day janissary.” I once saw an Egyptian man post on Facebook, “I am going to the Empire today,” in regard to an upcoming trip to New York City.
But Americans, I noticed, only began using the word with relative comfort after the financial crisis, when the “empire,” whatever it meant, appeared to be on the verge of precipitous decline. Only then, with the balm of self-pity and perhaps their own American brand of hüzün, did it become easier to accept that they, the onetime anti-imperial revolutionaries, the world’s foremost lovers of freedom and independence, might be little different from the British suppressing an Indian revolt, or the French colonizing Algeria, or the Belgians divesting Congo of its resources. 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.