Suzy Hansen: Exploring world chaos and American ignorance
View(s):Suzy Hansen grew up in a “rather insular, conservative” town in New Jersey. From that vantage point, there would have been little reason to question ‘the glory of America’– or at least its role internationally.
However, as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper post 9/11, she found a disturbing disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home. She then decided to move to Istanbul to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines at home.
What followed is told in Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-America World, a book that was a Finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in General Non-fiction and the winner of the Overseas Press Club’s Cornelius Ryan Award for Best Non-fiction Book on International Affairs.
What concerns Hansen is the ignorance of Americans living abroad. “We cannot,” she writes, “go abroad as Americans in the 21st century and not realize that the main thing that has been terrorizing us….….is our own ignorance — our blindness and subsequent discovery of all the people on whom the empire-that-was-not-an-empire had been constructed without our attention or concern.”
The New York Times heralded the book as “a deeply honest and brave portrait of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country’s violent role in the world”. In the period between 9/11 and the election of President Donald Trump, Hansen lives in Turkey and travels to Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran and the Mississippi Delta. She uses these places, their complex histories and fraught present, as lenses through which to look at her own nation.
She asks why, given the extent to which America has shaped the modern Middle East — the lives it ended, the countries it fractured, the demons it created, its frantic and fanatical support of Israel — it “did not feel or care to explore what that influence meant”. The book is a political and personal memoir that negotiates the vertiginous distance that exists between what America is and what it thinks of itself.
Hisham Matar of The New York Times points out that Hansen is doing something both rare and necessary; she is tracing the ways in which we are all born into histories, into national myths and, if we are unfortunate enough, into the fantasies of an empire. She traces the ways in which “Americans were in active denial of their empire even as they laid its foundations”.
She is interested in and does well to expose the machinery — the propaganda, the economic authoritarianism, the military might, the manipulative diplomacy, the myriad aid agencies and NGOs — that made this possible. She also shows the ways in which America, in its anti-Communist craze, has consistently supported the religious right in the Middle East, and aided the rise of Islamic extremism. Hansen wants to uncover the lie.
But the book is not merely a gesture of despair. It is also an expression of confidence in her people. For as much as it is a lament — “a study in American ignorance”, it also brims with the hope that once they see what she saw and learn what she learned, her fellow Americans will also be party to the same epiphany she experienced.