To me, New York’s beautiful diversity had been the best life America had to offer. But I knew there was something wrong with the way we were living. We walked around with this nagging sense that something had happened to us, but I didn’t know what and didn’t know why. That was one of the reasons I applied for the fellowship; I knew that my own confusion had to do with some central unawareness of the world, the kind that would only be reinforced, time and again, by the very thing I had once loved about New York, a sophistication built by an army of defense mechanisms. At the time, I never paid much attention to the history of Charles Crane, or why he had gone to Ottoman Turkey, or the significance of his King-Crane report, but I understood that I had been chosen for the fellowship for a reason somewhat in line with his philosophy—because the committee wanted to see what would happen if they dropped an ignorant person into a foreign place. I doubt that Charles Crane imagined that, in 2007, almost a hundred years after America’s first world war, an American would be as ignorant as me.
I told everyone I chose Turkey because I wanted to learn about the Islamic world. The secret reason I wanted to go was that my favorite writer, James Baldwin, had lived in Istanbul in the 1960s on and off for ten years. I had seen a PBS documentary about Baldwin that said he felt more comfortable as a black, gay man in Istanbul than in Paris or New York. When I heard that, it made so little sense to me, sitting in my Brooklyn apartment, that a space opened in the universe. I couldn’t believe that New York would be more illiberal than a place like Turkey, because I couldn’t conceive of how prejudiced New York and Paris were in the 1950s, and because I thought that as you went east, life degraded into the past, the opposite of progress. The idea of Baldwin in Turkey somehow placed America’s race problem, and America itself, in a mysterious and tantalizing international context. I took a chance that Istanbul might be the place where the secret workings of history would be revealed.
My interest in Baldwin had begun in part because he was the first person to explain who I was: a white American with a lot to learn. Americans have no sense of “tragedy,” as he wrote in Nobody Knows My Name, and he must have been right because I had no idea what he meant. Sense of tragedy—what was that? And what would it mean if we did have a sense of tragedy? How would we live our lives? I couldn’t change because I didn’t know what was wrong with me in the first place. Baldwin had counseled a surprisingly simple and bewildering antidote to America’s race problem, to white people’s absence of tragedy and fear of death and irredeemable “innocence”—his remedy was love. The solution struck me as a facile punt, an admission that he had no solution, something, strangely, I thought was his duty to provide. The world’s problems in 2001, when I first read Baldwin’s books, seemed far too complex to be solved by an emotion. Love seemed too obvious, too easy, a conclusion that in and of itself was proof that the love Baldwin was talking about didn’t come easily to me at all.
Maybe Baldwin knew white people would never understand him. But as Americans act out their despair in increasingly dangerous ways in the twenty-first century, Baldwin’s observations from the twentieth began to sound more and more prophetic:
“This is the way people react to the loss of empire,” he once wrote, “for the loss of an empire also implies a radical revision of the individual identity.”
So, my question: Who do we become if we don’t become Americans?
*
THIS IS A BOOK about an American living abroad in the era of American decline. When Baldwin, or Ernest Hemingway, or Henry James wrote from abroad, America had not yet achieved its full imperial status. The 1960s ushered in a golden era of global intellectual engagement—Robert Stone, Gore Vidal, Paul Theroux, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, among others—but even that would paradoxically fade in the age of globalization. As America, growing more powerful abroad, turned more inward-looking at home, so, too, did the going-abroad books, so many of them celebrating the transformation of one’s self, and extolling a conception of the world as a meditation and wellness center for the spiritually challenged.
An American going abroad during the era of American decline encounters an entirely different set of circumstances. In these years after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the many more wars that followed, it has become more difficult to gallivant across the world, absorbing its wisdom and resources for one’s own personal use. As an American abroad now, you do not have the same crazy, smiling confidence. You do not want to speak so loud. You feel always the vague risk of breaking something. In Turkey and elsewhere, in fact, I felt an almost physical sensation of intellectual and emotional discomfort, trying to grasp a reality for which I had no historical or cultural understanding. I would go, as a journalist, to write a story about Turkey or Greece or Egypt or Afghanistan, and inevitably someone would tell me some part of our shared history—theirs with America—of which I knew nothing. I would feel as though I could not write that story, just as I could not write the story of the coal miners, because when I asked “What happened?” I was more often than not met with a response that spanned sixty years. And if I didn’t know this history, then what kind of story did I plan to tell?
In so many countries, I could not shake my own reflexive assumptions. No matter how well I knew the predatory aspects of capitalism, I still perceived Turkey’s and Greece’s economic advances as progress, a kind of maturation. No matter how deeply I understood America’s manipulation of Egypt for its own foreign policy aims, I had never considered—could not grasp—how these policies may have affected individual lives beyond resentment and anti-Americanism. No matter how much I believed that no American was fit for nation-building, I saw Americans’ good intentions in Afghanistan, even as a more cynical reality stared me in the face. Even when I disagreed with America’s policies, I always believed in our inherent goodness, in my own. I would never have admitted it, or thought to say it, but looking back, I know that deep in my consciousness I thought that America was at the end of some evolutionary spectrum of civilization, and everyone else was trying to catch up.