A few weeks after I left, a truck full of American contractors killed four Afghan civilians on the road, and Afghans torched the cars and screamed “Death to America!” So often walking through Kabul, I wished I’d never come to Afghanistan. It was my mere existence, I felt, that did damage enough. I wanted nothing else but to withdraw myself.
In “Shooting an Elephant,” George Orwell writes: “All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.” Such were the ugly confessions of the Englishman sent to work for the empire abroad; I suppose there are American soldiers, spies, diplomats, even embassy chefs who might sometimes share the same crisis of conscience and thrill of anger, even if we don’t hear about it much. Mostly, though, we don’t think of ourselves like the British at all. That month, as an American journalist in Kabul, attending embassy parties, and living in homes behind blast walls, and enjoying the privileges of being a white person in Asia, I had a feeling similar to Orwell’s, except for a few key aspects. The dominant reflex was not hatred—the desire to “drive the bayonet,” as Orwell had written—but indifference. In Greece and Turkey, in the 1940s and 1950s, Americans had descended on Athens and Istanbul for their specific nation-building tasks, while their CIA and military counterparts deployed direct imperial muscle, as they would throughout the world and up until this day. But by the 1990s and 2000s, even State Department officials in Afghanistan, or USAID representatives in Egypt, hardly did the dirty, physical work of empire anymore. The long arm of American power allowed for most Americans to remain completely isolated from the foreigners they were in denial of ruling; there would never be any guts to splay with a bayonet. For many of us, there may not even be a bayonet. We would not know them, and therefore, as Baldwin said, could not love them, could not care so much for their deaths. Distance, distance, distance was the American way, a frigid, loveless distance, a kind of power and violence that destroyed intimacy in all its other manifestations, that destroyed empathy in all of its imperial citizens, in us, in me.
But it was darker than this, wasn’t it? We all wanted to hold on to this imperial dream, because the loss of the empire meant we might someday be the ones who were ruled. It meant we would not be the strongest, it meant we would not chart our own course, it meant all the freedoms we believed ourselves divinely ordained for, all the power to “be whatever you want to be”—everything that made up the meaning of our American lives—would be gone. We couldn’t stand it. We couldn’t stand a world in which we might one day be the Afghans. We could not imagine it and so, from Kabul, we never left.
7.
AMERICAN DREAMS: AMERICA, IRAN, AND TURKEY
It was hardly understood that the real fear of Iranians at the time was that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, would simply not allow a political system to develop that didn’t mirror its own.
—HOOMAN MAJD
ONCE, WHILE I WAS VISITING New York, I got pneumonia. Afterward, countless American friends remarked with concern, “Well, thank God you happened to be in America!”—because they had never been to Turkey, or because they knew nothing about the majority of hospitals in the United States of America.
That week, I had been staying at an apartment in Brooklyn, thinking I had the flu. When I felt dizzy one morning, I called a friend to take me to the hospital. We went to the closest one, a charity hospital set amid the projects and directly across the street from a row of magnificent brownstones, most of them some three million dollars each. I almost passed out at the registration desk, but once I got to the emergency room, things really went downhill. A nurse yelled at me for dropping my purse next to my bed “because someone might steal it”; there was no food on offer; at night, adorable but hapless residents stood before a group of students, saying, “Now. This patient’s name is Su-zy Han-sen, but she’s from Turkey. Wow.” Over the first twenty-four hours, a series of doctors on shifts vacillated in their diagnosis of me; first lung cancer, and then “possibly” HIV, and then tuberculosis, at which point I was actually quarantined for forty-eight hours, no last phone calls, no Internet. My glasses got mysteriously thrown out; families of flies lived in the public hallway showers; at night a mentally ill man stood in the middle of the hallway and screamed over and over, “Get. The fuck. Out the way.” The patient next to me cried silently the whole time.
Thank God I happened to be in America.
If I had been in Turkey, I would have gone to a hospital as beautiful and immense as a luxury shopping mall, it would likely have cost far less money than the Brooklyn charity hospital, and my friends’ mothers would have brought me homemade food and pestered the doctors for me every day. That fancy Turkish hospital was available to me, of course, only because of the power of the American dollar in Turkey. But at the height of the health care crisis, most Americans still did not know just how terrifying our hospitals were, and in a way I did thank God I had been in America when I got pneumonia, because that night in the hospital was one of the two times I viscerally understood how degraded America had become for many of its people. The other time was when I came home from Istanbul to spend several months in Mississippi.