After September 11, Shamsie assumed that, of course, Americans “would now see its stories bound up with the stories of other places.” But they didn’t. Why was it that the people of the most powerful country in the world—powerful because of its influence inside so many foreign nations—did not feel or care to explore what that influence meant for even their own American identities? Where was this shared sense of fate that we had unilaterally imposed on Pakistanis, Iraqis, Afghans? Shamsie had grown up in Pakistan in the 1980s, always knowing, as she puts it, that thinking about her country’s politics meant thinking about America’s history and politics. “So in an America where fiction writers are so caught up in the idea of America in a way that perhaps has no parallel with any other national fiction, where the term Great American Novel weighs heavily on writers,” she writes, “why is it that the fiction writers of my generation are so little concerned with the history of their own nation once that history exits the fifty states?” Her question echoed an experience I had in 2012 when I met an Iraqi man. Over the course of our conversation I asked him what Iraq was like in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was growing up. He smiled. “I am always amazed when Americans ask me this,” he said. “How is it that you know nothing about us when you had so much to do with what became of our lives?”
The historian Jackson Lears wrote that Americans of the early twentieth century displayed a “dependence on empire for their prosperity, for their racial, social, and even moral identity as a people, and for the power that undergirded their dreams of personal and national regeneration.” If the decline of the American empire may require, as Baldwin suggests, a radical revision of the individual identity, perhaps Americans have to more deeply understand what that imperial identity was in the first place. If America was an empire, was there even a difference between “home” and “abroad”? Was it not all the same kingdom? Were we not locked in the same intimate relationship? Was not their pain very much ours? Might this relationship even be one, as Baldwin said, of love?
This book is by no means a comprehensive exploration of this subject, nor of all the countries I write about. Many historians and scholars and novelists—many more of them non-American—have chronicled the story of the American empire in far more expansive books. What follows are merely my reflections on going abroad in the twenty-first century and my attempts to see foreign countries clearly—ultimately, to see my own. Even though I use mostly foreigners’ voices and writings in this book, I never asked them, essentially, “Why do you hate us?” They have been answering that question in complex and passionate ways for decades. The onus, I felt, was on me to catch up.
If I didn’t, I would never be able to make sense of letters like this one publicly posted on Facebook on the anniversary of the Iraq War in 2013, by the Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who, as of this writing, is still inside an Egyptian jail:
To My American Friends:
Ten years later and I still can’t find the words to explain my anger to you, we talk about it a lot in Arabic, it is forever part of our context, the horror, the madness, the futility of it all, in fact it has become such a part of who we are that we need an anniversary to realize how epic in proportion it was. Ten years on and it still seems possible for you to debate and talk about it in polite or boring language. I’ll never understand you and you’ll never understand me.
I know all of you (my friends) tried to stop it, I know millions more tried, I understand it wasn’t done in your interests, you are not the state, you are not the war, you are not the corporations. But still I’m angry at each and every one of you, maybe it’s irrational, maybe you as individuals hold no responsibility, maybe it’s a reaction to all the cheesy manufactured soul searching forced down our throats in which the horror of it all is stripped down to the suffering of American soldiers and American families, soldiers who died, soldiers who lost a limb, soldiers who were shocked at what they were capable of, soldiers who waited until they practiced the killing and torture themselves to realize that something was wrong. Murderers and pillagers who think the world owes them an apology, heroes even in the eyes of many of the millions who tried to stop the war. Maybe I include you, my friends, in my anger because you care, for what is the point of being angry at those who already made a commitment not to be human?
The scary part is I’m many steps removed from the war and its atrocities, I wonder at the anger felt by Iraqis who had to live every day of it? Until recently I wasn’t just steps removed, I was an accomplice just like you, the battleships moving through the Suez Canal were enough to push us to revolution in just ten years. Ask any activist who experienced the 2003 antiwar protests in Tahrir and they’ll tell you it started then, for you see we couldn’t live with the thought that Iraqis would look at us with anger in their hearts. Our incomplete and much-abused revolutions are our gift to you, join it and revolt now, for nothing short of revolution will ever redeem you.
“I’ll never understand you and you’ll never understand me.” Was that true? If we Americans admired the Egyptians for their revolutionary spirit from afar, if so many of us envied their passion and their commitment to a cause, then I wonder why we did not feel connected to Egyptians when clearly, in some way, they, like the rest of the world, felt inherently, inextricably, passionately connected to us.
That day I visited the Turkish coal miners, asking over and over those same American questions—“What happened here?” “How did this happen?” “What went wrong?” “How did your country fail to protect you?”—Ahmet, the survivor, interrupted me. A hush fell over the room, not because they thought him rude but because they all viewed me the same way: as a curiosity.
“But, ma’am, I have a question for you,” he said. “Why didn’t you come before the fire? Why didn’t you think of us before?”
1.
FIRST TIME EAST: TURKEY
Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself, that she might create her own tiny little happiness and live safely within it.
—KIRAN DESAI
OVER TIME I CAME TO REGARD the view of Istanbul from an airplane with a sense of claustrophobia. The red-roofed buildings sprawled across the entire visible landscape, as if created with digital magic for a sci-fi film. It was so incomprehensibly enormous, a planet city. I would search with rising panic for where this endless concrete would finally be broken by the natural earth: the Black Sea, the Marmara, the elegantly slithering Bosphorus, a patch of forest with its tree heads bowed against the siege. Istanbul was bigger than the country, as Turks liked to say; it ate everything in its path, and over time its appetite would grow monstrous. But that first day in 2007, I looked down at Istanbul with nothing but admiration, the gentle surprise of the Western tourist who hadn’t suspected the world had gone on without her. From my seat, the tankers waiting to enter the Bosphorus strait looked as if they were waiting to be admitted to the center of the world.