For a while, anti-Americanism in Turkey spiked, largely because Erdo?an’s newspapers wanted to whip up that old reliable nationalism to distract from the government’s own mistakes. They claimed the Americans were behind the coup. My corner bakkal guys, ?rfan and Bilal, whom I had known for seven years, even got angry at me for complaining when Erdo?an persecuted so many people. “This was a coup, Suzy!” they said. “Do you know what that means?” I didn’t think the Americans had anything to do with the 2016 coup, but there was another reason that the Turks’ suspicions weren’t strange: because in the 1980s and 1990s, it was entirely plausible that the CIA had supported the Gülen movement as part of its Islamic green belt against communism. We would never know.
My bakkal guys and I made up quickly, though, because most Turks, like most of the rest of the world, had long grown accustomed to distinguishing between the American government and American citizens, and also because my daily apple juice, as ?rfan noted sincerely, had nothing to do with politics. What was more disturbing to me, actually, was to watch America dismiss its alleged role in the military coup, as merely crazy conspiracy theories. Once again, the Americans were ignoring their own long, tangled history with a foreign country. The United States influenced Turkey for seventy years. It reorganized its military, put soldiers on its soil, and meddled in its domestic and foreign affairs. When I moved here in 2007, many Turks told me that if America would invade Iraq in the careless, groundless manner it did in 2003, then there was no reason to think Turkey wouldn’t be next. This was the reality people lived in. The time had long passed when Americans should have learned to be more sensitive to the traumatized people of their former satellite countries. Sovereignty is a privilege that Americans take for granted. Much of the rest of the world still feels they must guard it with their lives.
After the coup, I even felt an unexpected sympathy for the Turkish people’s nationalism. I could see how this nationalism—especially at a time when nations from West to East seemed to be crumbling apart—was the force that for some repaired the wounds of a coup in remarkable ways. Even people who hated Erdo?an despised the idea of a coup more. That November, when the sirens went off signaling the anniversary of Atatürk’s death, I watched from my window. A man had stopped in the middle of the street. A woman paused on the curb. Someone got out of his car. Maybe these were people who didn’t subscribe to Erdo?an’s version of nationalism, but no matter; at that stage in world disorder, it was reassuring to see a moment of any nation’s harmony. Even if, toward the end of the siren, a lone, young girl in full black head scarf and dress strode in between the frozen people, walking briskly as if there had been no siren at all.
*
MONTHS LATER, DONALD TRUMP became the president-elect of the United States, and my country, too, seemed to collapse, if only psychologically, into angry factions. (The day after the election, my Turkish Pilates teacher said, “Now you are Kü?ük Türkiye,” or “Little Turkey.”) In retrospect, the schism was a long time coming for all of us. The twentysomething life crisis that had propelled me out of New York and into Istanbul might have been much deeper than any crisis of gender, class, or profession. My crisis, like many other Americans’, was about my American identity. Confusion over the meaning of one’s country, and over that country’s place in the world, for anyone, but especially for Americans, might be the most foundational identity crisis of all.
I knew Trump supporters, had grown up with them, had them in my family, and so I wasn’t as surprised as some when he won. Afterward, my sense was that the phenomenon was more incoherent, fuzzy, irrational than any of the articles about coal country; Flint, Michigan; or the white working class ever showed. But I did believe that in at least one way Trump voters were little different from anyone else in the country. They, like all Americans, had been told a lie: that they were the best, that America was the best, that their very birthright was progress and prosperity and the envy and admiration of the world. I did not blame those voters for Trump’s election, and I didn’t even blame them, in all cases, for their racism. I blamed the country for Trump’s election because it was a country built on the rhetoric and actions of white supremacy, by which I mean it was a country built on the rhetoric and actions of American supremacy. American supremacy, or “greatness,” or “exceptionalism,” had not, contrary to what many said painfully after the election, been a by-product of America’s melting pot, or of America’s celebration of diversity, or of its values of freedom, human rights, and democracy; it had been built on the presupposition that America was, and should be, the most powerful country on the planet. When both the most vulnerable and the most nationalistic sensed the slow draining of that power from their own hands, America began to break.
Trump also had been right about one thing: immigrants did get a free ride. They had been let into the country too easily. Immigrants did need stricter qualifications for citizenship. There was no doubt that the white European immigrants who one hundred years ago knocked on the doors of Ellis Island should have faced a higher bar for entry. They should have gotten a months-long education on the Americans’ destruction of its indigenous populations, on its history of slavery, on its persecution of darker-skinned immigrants, on its invasion and occupation of Cuba and the Philippines—and later, on its vast and endless empire—and they should have been made to swear that they accepted this ugly American history as their own, that they vowed to take responsibility for it and its repercussions, and that they promised to protect nonwhite peoples as much as they protected their white selves—forever. This vow should have been the price of American citizenship. Because clearly something did go wrong in America. Americans had been bound to myth, not history. They got a free ride. We got a free ride. I got a free ride.