Yet wasn’t this what these nascent modernizing democracies were supposed to do? Westerners, comforted that the Muslims liked money just as much as they did, saw Turkey as a reassuring success story, a country experiencing growing pains endemic to progress. I, too, had been distracted by this illusion of progress. I was enraged about Wall Street greed and income inequality, even the ravaging effects of capitalism itself, and yet still I had thought, somewhere deep down, that Turkey under Erdo?an was getting better because it was imitating the West. Even when I saw the evidence of the system’s ravages in America, I still saw countries like Turkey as “behind” us in some way, as if the course of maturity and democracy was to go through the same painful process we had. These ideas about my country and the world, no matter how often I challenged them, were foundational. Like many expatriates, I often reminded myself that I couldn’t understand everything about Turkey because I wasn’t Turkish. But the problem in seeing this foreign country clearly was not that I wasn’t Turkish; it was that I was American.
The other person processing the world like me, in fact, was Erdo?an. In one way, he exploited cultural nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire as a retreat from the depredations of Kemalist modernity, but in other ways, Erdo?an was destructive capitalist progress in human form. After the mining disaster in Soma—which will be forever linked to Gezi in my mind—Erdo?an suggested that he was not responsible for the Soma tragedy, because Turkey, just like England in the nineteenth century, was industrializing, and would suffer some of the same consequences every developing nation has experienced. Erdo?an even called the Soma massacre the men’s “fate,” as if it were what God had wanted. Erdo?an was revealing something else: his fervent belief in the divine power of the capitalistic system he learned from the West and used for his own ends. By 2014, Erdo?an’s lust for expansion would cause him to go to war, in Syria, and later in the eastern Kurdish lands of his own country. I had once unconsciously seen in Erdo?an’s up-by-the-bootstraps background my own mythical American story; I had not known then what inevitably comes with that narrative: the longing and imperative for imperial power.
In 2014, I had gone to Soma in May, a time when the farm hills glow golden and the sun begins to burn white, and met a sensitive, angry young man named R?za, at a teahouse near the black-windowed union to which he belonged. R?za was very smart, and he had heavy-hooded brows, under which his eyes seemed to fire bullets. He had been a rescue worker the day of the mine fire, but what really enraged him were the systemic problems that afflicted workers, all of which he could outline with sophisticated scientific precision. He was even angry enough to tell an American journalist something I had never heard any Turkish man—or any man period—admit before.
“My wife stays home all day because she can’t go visit friends because she has to calculate how much that will cost her,” he said. “I can’t even promise her a present. I don’t have time to spend with my kids. And because of this, and how much the men work, domestic violence is rising, as are divorces. We’re going crazy. They say Turkey is growing, but we are constantly shrinking.”
He seemed to be admitting to me that the stress of his life had been causing him to hit his wife. A liberal Turkish feminist and sociologist had once told me, at a time when a spike in domestic violence had caused many to cast blame on the AK Party’s Islamic conservatism, that domestic violence was often a response to other forms of violence in the country and even in the world: wars, militarization, poverty. R?za wanted me to understand that the labor conditions of Turkey were not just making work dangerous; they were shattering the larger society and reshaping the Turkish soul. R?za, who had never graduated high school, had just articulated in a sentence what a thousand textbooks could not: that when an economic system humiliated its workers, when the system was, essentially, violent, it meant the humiliation and abuse of women, children, an entire society. Atatürk’s new Turk had been remade into this traumatized man, forced to endure the habits of this new Turkey, Erdo?an’s Turkey, which sounded a lot like what I had seen at home, in Mississippi, in America.
I had been startled at first when the miners used the word “octopus” to describe how power was enforced in Soma. At the turn of the previous century, the Big Four railroad monopoly in America, owned by the dominant oligarchs of the time, had also been called the octopus, its tentacles reaching into every aspect of American life, controlling government policy and political parties and citizens. But even American industrialists of those earlier eras eventually had been forced to cooperate with leftist movements and unions to improve working conditions for their employees, not because they were decent but because they were pragmatic. The industrial magnates had something to fear: socialism, communism, an alternative system, anything for which capitalism could be rejected. Over time, the possibility of any alternative faded, and one hundred years later, Turkish coal miners were thrust into a world subsumed by globalization. They had no protection. Neither, it would turn out, did the American workers who angrily cheered on the presidential candidate Donald Trump. Turkey and the United States, as I had discovered, often shared the same fate. That week in Soma, in 2014, I read in a book called Turkish-U.S. Relations that since the 1940s, as part of the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, “America tried to shape and orient the Turkish labor movement in ways that would not conflict with its own benefits,” and so the two longest periods of American imperial history—the Cold War and the age of neoliberalism—finally came together for me, in a coal mine, in Turkey.
*
A FEW OF the Iranian academics working on the health houses project came with their wives to Mississippi from Iran in 2010. They were shocked by what they saw: “This is America?” they said.
I felt the same way when I went to the Delta with Dr. Shirley and Dr. Shahbazi and another doctor named Eva Henderson-Camara. The first thing you notice about the Delta, especially when you’ve gone looking for images of poverty, is that you don’t see any people. So much of it is bucolic and sun-dappled that at first it doesn’t seem poor. When I made this observation, Claudia Cox had replied sternly, “That’s because poverty in America doesn’t look like what y’all think. It used to be bare feet, now it’s Nikes. If I miss two months of work because I get sick, well, guess what? I’m in poverty. This is the new poverty. You don’t know.” The Delta was all segregated schools and unemployed men, drugs and poverty and sickness. There was no social life except for church and the juke joint. The porches of small houses sagged with the weight of old washing machines, televisions, and trash bags, as if a barricade against the world. The only place to shop for food was Walmart, Dollar General, or the Piggly Wiggly, and for some, these stores were fifty miles away. In what is one of the country’s most fertile regions, many people of the Delta shopped for their groceries at the closest gas station market.
“Imagine waking up every morning and this is all you see,” said Dr. Henderson-Camara, looking out the window. “And you think: Should I shoot myself now or later?”
Dr. Henderson-Camara, now in her sixties, grew up on a Delta plantation, a system that in Mississippi existed well into the 1970s. This plantation was her grandfather’s, and he “treated us just like any plantation owner would.” Kids worked much of the typical school year. Dr. Henderson-Camara escaped by winning a scholarship to Yale for a special program for disadvantaged students. She studied anthropology before she went to medical school and could quietly analyze the most basic of human interactions and spin them into an artful anthropological story.