Ottoman History Podcast - America, Turkey, and the Middle East

Episode Date: October 15, 2018

Episode 386 with Suzy Hansen hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Turkey is a country that most Americans know little about, and yet the United States has played an extraordinary role in the making of modern Turkey. In this podcast, we explore this disparity of awareness and the role of the US in the history of the Middle East through the lens of an American journalist's slow realization of her own subjectivity and the myriad ways in which the US and Turkey have been intertwined. In this conversation with Suzy Hansen about her award-winning book "Notes on a Foreign Country," we critically examine the formation of journalistic and scholarly expertise, and we discuss reactions of readers and reviewers to Hansen's work. « Click for More »

I wrote the last pages of the book after the election and I was basically crying for two weeks. Something unusual happened last year. A popular book in the United States actually talked about Turkey. It's simply a country most people don't learn about at all. Its author, a journalist, got a fair amount of attention. Is it Pulitzer or Pulitzer? I think it can be both. I, a historian of the Ottoman Empire, didn't pay much attention at first.

But when I gave it a shot, I found something really refreshing. If you're going to write this book, it has to be really, really terribly honest and embarrassing, frankly, you know. Or don't do it. And a book that was about the history of Turkey and the Middle East and so much more. If I did not excavate all of these things, if I did not break down my own mind, I was still not seeing Turkey clearly and I was not going to be able to see Turkey clearly.

Join me in this interview with journalist Susie Hansen. We'll talk about the intimate relationship between Turkey and the United States. Most Turks' political views are to some degree shaped by the way that they view that American-Turkish relationship. Through the writings of James Baldwin, we'll interrogate the naivete of America in the world. There was a real parallel between this white-black relationship and the American-foreign relationship.

And we'll put the subjectivity of the self-assured American expert abroad in its rightful place. You are not the center of the universe. When you move to a foreign country, you live on their terms, to some degree at least. Welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. The title of today's conversation is Turkey, America, and the Middle East. It's definitely something we've talked about before on the program, but we've never approached it quite like this. We're going to be talking to a journalist who's recently published a very successful book on that very issue and has adopted a fairly novel perspective in doing so.

Our guest is Susie Hanson. Susie, thanks for being on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Susie Hanson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. You're just as likely to find her in Istanbul as in New York, and we're actually recording in her apartment in Istanbul right now, which is very quiet. There's only one major construction project going on here in Gihangir right now. So only if you hear any rumbling, just know we did our best really. Susie Hansen's new book actually came out last year, and it's just newly out in paperback, is entitled Notes on a Foreign Country, an American Abroad in a Post-American World.

is entitled Notes on a Foreign Country, An American Abroad in a Post-American World. That's published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. And this book was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, but we decided to invite Susie on anyway. Like, Kendrick never gets back to me about stuff, so this was as close as I could get to a Pulitzer Prize winner.

And it's also the winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award and was named a Best Book of the Year by New York Magazine and The Progressive. You'll find a lot written about this book online and everyone engages with it in a different way. How I would describe it as it kind of offers a history of the U.S.'s role in the making of the modern Middle East,

but it's narrated from the vantage point of an American who's slowly realizing just how much naivete and ignorance actually define a lot of American engagement with the Middle East. And we're not just talking about the masses, the public, but even people who might consider themselves expert, people who live for years in Turkey, as Susie, you have. I saw that you came to this vehicle for writing about the topic fairly late. You realized fairly late that you needed to invert the dynamic and make

it as much about America and Americans abroad as about Turkey and the Middle East. You know, I'll start by asking, what is the main thing that writing this book has taught you about the U.S. and its citizens abroad, people like us? Well, originally, I had thought that I was going to write the book as a sort of, how does the rest of the world see us? So I was, the book still has a lot of my readings in it, readings of foreign authors, even foreign novelists, foreign historians. And then also a lot of, I report on a lot of the things that people said to me as I was living abroad and as I was traveling through Turkey, through Greece,

through Afghanistan. The book was originally going to be all of that. But as I was working on it, I was realizing that I had to really understand why it was that the American psychology had such a difficult time grappling with these things and why it was so difficult for Americans to see themselves as the rest of the world had. And that was when the book suddenly became much more of a memoir. And I was writing it from my point of view, and it became much more about me, even though I intended that narrator character to be a kind of universal American character. And in the end, I think that I found, because I return or I end up in Soma in Turkey

where there was a fire that killed 300 Turkish miners. And at that point, I'm in Turkey for seven years. And I had already started thinking about this book and writing this book. But when I was there, I found that I was still surprised by things I was learning. I was still surprised by the things I was learning about the American-Turkish relationship. And I was still suffering from a lot of the same reflexes, the reflexes of looking at a foreign country a certain way. And I think at that moment, I thought, okay, this might be an impossible problem to solve in a way, because these reflexes that we have as Americans are so deeply, deeply ingrained. They are actually who we are. And I became quite

depressed at that point. Right. Yeah, we'll talk more about that maybe later on in the interview. I'll let you know, like, when I first saw the book, I naturally recoiled. And I have to acknowledge very explicitly my colleague Nick Danforth for kind of keeping me honest about the fact that I was judging a book by its cover here. What I found in the book was something that for me was like, you know, it hit very close to home. Because you're excavating the process that people who are so-called experts about the Middle East all go through. And so one of the other points that you make throughout the book is that this ignorance, this naivete, it doesn't exactly cut both ways. There's not just like a gulf of understanding, just like mutual misunderstanding.

It's actually a disparity of awareness of the other. There's a disparity of understanding. Because the people you meet will always know more about you than you know about them. And they know more about what America has done in the Middle East than most Americans know, because they don't have the luxury of not knowing. It was very much a book that was criticizing journalism as a field as well. There was this kind of larger critique of journalism. And I think I was trying very much to undermine that tendency of the foreign journalists or the American journalists to sort of get up on TV and assume this role of the expert, because that is what we're supposed to do. But underlying all of that sort of veneer is, of course, all of this other stuff that's going on.

And that also has to do with the genesis of the book, because originally going way, way back, I did want to write a book about Turkey. But as I lived here longer, I was just realizing that I wasn't actually up to that. If I did not excavate all of these things, if I did not break down my own mind, I was still not seeing Turkey clearly, and I was not going to be able to see Turkey clearly. And then I also felt that in order, though, for this to not just be a book in which I am constantly talking about all of my feelings and my neurotic obsessions about this, that I had to include some real episodes of history. For example, I talk a little bit about the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran, a democratically elected leader. The US and the Brits, the intelligence agencies, came together to overthrow this democratic leader,

which completely changed the trajectory of the entire country. It's something that is never discussed when we are constantly talking about how awful the Islamic Republic of Iran is today. It feels like something that you see mentioned offhandedly in newspaper articles. So I feel like that is one thing that probably a lot more people know about, but nonetheless seems one of the most crucial things to talk about when you're talking about the Middle East.

I think the one that tends, from what I hear, tends to surprise everybody the most, not necessarily the Middle East, in my book, and that certainly surprised me, was America's relationship with Greece. Greece was the second country I went to to report on. Well, obviously, these are the two countries that were, two of the countries that were very, very important to the Americans right after World War II, Marshall Plan, Truman Dock. It was this obvious starting point. But I think because we have this very well-ingrained notion of our relationship with European countries

and with Greece as this peaceful, lovely place where we go to the beach on vacation, we really truly have no knowledge of that long history that we have with Greece and the fact that we practically occupied Athens in the late 40s and early 50s, that we were very much involved in wars against the leftists and communists. And suppose a communist, all we learn about is how we saved this place. And the same with Turkey. And I think Turkey presented itself as a really, another really interesting example, because it's simply a country most people don't learn about at all. I mean, even in recent histories of the CIA,

you don't hear that much about the U.S. There is never a chapter about Turkey and the U.S., you know? There's Central America, and maybe there's Iran, and maybe there's Vietnam and Laos and all of these places, but there's very, very rarely a focus on Turkey. It's just not a country that we tend to learn that much about at all. Well, Turkey complicates a lot of narratives about both Europe and the Middle East in the US. Well, I think that this brings up another interesting question that was difficult to deal with in the book and also has been criticized, which is just about this good

versus bad intervention or involvement. You know what I mean? Like, for example, there's this bookstore in North Carolina that is owned by this really fabulous guy who's a Vietnam vet. And he said when he read the book for the first time, he threw it across the room. And he said that a lot of people he knew, because the bookstore is near Fort Bragg, so there's a lot of military people and State Department ex-CIA people living around there in North Carolina. They were coming in and saying, well, why doesn't she write about any of the good things that the U.S. did? That was a decision that I made. I can't actually figure what is good, what is bad. This is not my job. But also because I felt that the good things were all things that we know very,

very well. And that in order to provoke a kind of emotional reaction in the reader, I would have to really talk about the things that surprised me that were so, so palpably bad. But even beyond that, I think there's just this question of like if there is any intervention at all of a third party what does that do to the trajectory of the country especially such a powerful third party right this is something that americans have to grapple with to go back to maybe another case that uh listeners can read about uh in your book since we'll talk a lot more about turkey after this i at least want to mention it. Maybe one good thing that happened, the US helped save Afghanistan from communism, right? You do talk about that. Like, that's a nice story, right? Like, what

happened there? It's turned out wonderful. I mean, I feel like that, again, is another story that has become more well known, right? In recent years. In recent years. And you see it mentioned more often. But what's interesting in terms of the relationship between what was happening in the late 1970s and in the 80s, when the US was suddenly really, really terrified of what was happening, Iran had just turned over to the Ayatollahs, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, and then also there was all this chaos in Turkey. And a lot of the reason why people believe that the US endorsed the coup in Turkey in 1980 was because of this fear in general of what was happening. However, what was the US's policy at that time? They were so afraid of communism, so afraid of the Soviets

that they thought that actually in Afghanistan and Turkey at least that a little bit more religion Islam was a way of kind of quelling the radicalism in those in those countries. And the Afghanistan case is also interesting just because of how critical Saudi Arabia was to that too. How the mujahideen were like dangerous element in Saudi Arabia that could be redirected Mujahideen were like dangerous element in Saudi Arabia that could be redirected away from the monarchy towards another place. And, you know, the U.S. has made a lot of strange bedfellows out of such logic. You know, I thought it was very unusual for a book about the Middle East that is going to be sold to a wide American audience as it has to focus so heavily on Turkey.

American audience as it has to focus so heavily on Turkey. Usually Turkey is not at the center of that. Sometimes Turkey isn't even considered part of the Middle East conversation to begin with. Why was Turkey so central for you beyond the fact that that's where you were? It was in part, I have to be honest, my editor truly wanted the book to return to the same, he wanted there to be a center of the book, right? And he wanted it to return back to Turkey. I think that one interesting thing about that, and I'm not sure exactly if this is why my editor said this, but one thing I did notice at that time is that the US, people in the US and in the publishing industry and in the media became much more interested in Turkey at the time that I was writing this book. And that was because of

Erdogan. Yeah. So that changed. I mean, maybe seven years ago, I think it would have been very, very hard to sell a book about Turkey at all. What is the time period exactly that you're writing here? Did you write everything after 2013 Gezi moment? Yes. Basically, I was writing the book then. Yeah.

I think I, yes, I got the book deal in 2013, right after Gezi. Yeah, but I had been working on the proposal for a long time. And the proposal was not really, you know, necessarily Turkey-centric. But it was really the editor who pushed it. I think he recognized that people were becoming more and more interested in Turkey. But I think also, again, I think the very fact, what ended up working out and what I tried to expand on was that the fact that this was a country that was not seen as one that had been affected by American intervention that

that most Americans did not know had had they had had this very intense relationship with the the Turkish people most Turks political views are to some degree shaped by the way that they view that American Turkish relationship whether they are leftists or whether there're Islamists, it doesn't matter. It is such a central thing. And then also the knowledge, the amount of knowledge that they have about American culture, about American politics, it's extremely deep. And so that felt, this was one of the many, what I would characterize as heartbreaking moments in the book, where you sort of recognize that you're in this relationship with these people. You've been in it for a very long time.

And you cannot really genuinely have a genuine kind of affection for people you do not know. But they can actually, even if they supposedly hate America, or they're angry at America, or they're anti-American, and all of these silly phrases, they know you. They can actually think of you and of your people as sort of human beings as well-rounded individuals with with faults and and with also some positive attributes yeah that depth of knowledge of the American audience might not know that Turkey uh is often referred to here as little America and then ofük Amerika. And then, of course, after Trump got elected, a lot of my friends started making the joke,

America became Küçük Turkey. Yours did that too. Yeah, I just heard that. Independently, people were making that joke because there's parallels anyway. That's not what this podcast is about. No, but again, I mean, I point out in the book, a Turkish friend of mine,

sympathetic Turkish friend who lives there, you know, she would say when I was complaining about how Americans don't know anything about any of these foreign countries, she'd say't necessarily know that much about Iraq, although I would say that they do compared to probably us. But the point is that Turkey, before recently, was not invading Iraq all the time, or it wasn't getting involved in its affairs. Americans do have a different responsibility, or should have. And the question of why they didn't feel they had that responsibility was one thing I was also trying to figure out in the book. Well, like we said, listeners who aren't familiar with that context will be well served to read the book. What we're going to do in this conversation as we continue is go deeper into sort of this issue of subjectivity, because I think this book has something to offer not just to a general reader

who wants to learn more, but actually to experts and people who consider themselves knowledgeable about Turkey. It's a very refreshing reminder of a lot of things that need to be kept in mind, as I said at the beginning of the podcast. So we're going to give you a quick music break, and then we're going to be back with Susie Hanson talking about her book, Notes on a Foreign Country. Welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. Here with Susie Hanson talking about her book, Notes on a Foreign Country. So in reading some of the reviews of the book, a great word came up. The word brave. What a great word came up. The word brave.

What a great word. Yeah, terrible word. Yeah, I normally don't like to see it. But, you know, one of the good blurbs from the New York Times book review by Hisham Mattar, a deeply honest and brave portrait of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country's violent role in the world. The bravery we're talking about is not about the Western adventure setting out into the wilds of the Orient. That's something that's thoroughly deconstructed in the book and criticized.

It's just not a brave thing to live in Turkey, because lots of people live in Turkey. It's a great place to live. Let's talk about that later. 80 million people do. Yeah, exactly. And it's not brave to write a really good book no that's what you aspire to do right right that's your job but there are things that are

aptly described as brave in terms of what you're doing as an author and what you're doing in terms of opening yourself up to the audience your own subjectivity let's say uh and i want to talk about an example that uh stuck out to many of my students when I taught this book in a class at University of Virginia so you described this episode where you're pretty new to Turkey still you're just getting your footing you know we won't explain the whole episode but there's a delivery boy who ends up coming back to your house and makes an unwanted sexual advance on you in your own apartment and like this is an american export in itself the fantasy of a delivery boy showing up this is like american

porn 101 right but so you're shocked you you you get it together you get them out of your apartment then you like have to deal with this bewildering thing that you weren't expecting it's it's very common experience for women throughout the world. You know better than I. Yes, I said that in the, well, not specifically with Delivery Boys, but I said that obviously about the various cities I have lived in in my life. Of course, this happens to women all the time. Yeah. In the Middle East, like for various reasons, we won't deconstruct. It happens to, and you know, Western women often feel under that sort of gaze. But there's something in that passage that I think a lot of readers would have just tightened

up when they read you say it. It's the part where you ask yourself what did I do? Did I misunderstand something in Turkish? Did I not get a social cue? Did I bring this on myself? Now in America we say no woman should ever have to ask that. No one shouldn't ask that. that's the wrong way to think about sexual assault but i think it points to like a larger project that you've got going on in this book interrogating the self um because the book doesn't have a lot of drama hyperbole it's it's fairly even toned right um because my life is boring but yes well your life isn't boring your life has been full of a lot of adventure and it must have been like passages like that it must have been

emotionally fraught there must have been a lot of psychological wrangling you did with this text and I just want to hear you more reflect more on the growing pains and how you decided to write the book the way you did well first of all yes with that scene um i think god there's a lot to say about it you know i most of my friends who read it i remember them saying that they read it with one eye closed because it was just so kind of awful to to not because because of of putting a scene like that in a book about a middle eastern country you know it's just it's just raising so many different things at once um but i. But there were a couple of reasons why I did it. It's in a series of scenes where what I'm,

early on in the book, where what I'm trying to show, after my initial enthusiasm about living in Turkey and learning about the history, where I'm trying to show my mind starting to change. So that scene is supposed to represent a moment where I started questioning myself about other things, politics and everything else. But this was a very, very personal experience that made me do that. And I do think it was very important in that regard. Maybe not particularly on this topic. I still

believe that women do not do, generally do not do, they're not responsible for what happens to them in terms of sexual assault, of course. However, I think that in this case what was interesting to me was that a number of my Turkish friends said things to me like well you know I don't normally open the door all the way when the delivery boy comes or I don't spend time talking to him or I don't smile widely or leave the door open when I turn around to go and get money in my apartment, that there are certain, you might have sent certain cues that you're not aware of because you're not paying attention. And I think that that made me recognize that there are cultural norms, there are social norms in various places that are outside of the way that, of course,

I as an American or a westerner thinks about them and that it's it's something that i'm going to have to be more mindful of in all areas that this is not just about this is not about gender relations necessarily well right there's there's cultural norms and also like people just know what they need to protect themselves from and what they don't like and it's different everywhere it's different everywhere it's just different everywhere it's one of these scenes it's a scene where and and i've had many similar instances like not necessarily like that but other other instances where you're you know in a country like turkey uh and all of a sudden you become very conscious of the power relations that you take for granted at all times right and you realize as a as an american you're walking around feeling invincible because you actually are afforded some power as being from another country

that has such just power in the world uh and then to have those moments where everything's inverted and upended yeah i think that also what is important about that story is what happened next and i was you know i was fine after after this event happened, but I called my Turkish friend to ask what we should do because obviously if the boy did this to me, he might be doing it to someone else. And I thought we were going to go to the police because that's what I thought you did

because that's what I guess we would have done in New York. I guess that's what we would have done in New York. And she said, no, what we're going to do is tell the other shop owners in the neighborhood and they will take care of it. And my reaction was to be horrified. What do you mean they're going to take care of it?

And even one of my friends back in New York, you know, who's kind of New York, typical New York liberal was sort of like, you're just going to let these guys beat this guy up. You know, all of these things just show how, we don't even have to analyze what's right and what's wrong here. It simply shows how different things are, in one place versus another. These are the norms in this place.

These are the norms in another place. And it's not really your job as the foreigner in a foreign country to be the one making those decisions. It's theirs. And I think this is just having respect. That's a realization. This is all a better way of explaining this. That's a realization of knowing when you are supposed to have respect for the place. You are not the center of the universe.

When you move to a foreign country, you live on their terms, to some degree at least. And I think that that, who am I to say how this neighborhood wants to take care of itself? And also, of course, the history of the police in Turkey is a whole other part of this story. If people had not come to trust their policemen, then, of course, they're going to come up with different ways of policing their society. Yeah. But, of course, writing about it in this way in the book you know you get back to the book a little bit through this conversation you can see why that's such a difficult thing to do as someone

who's supposed to be writing as a you know an explanatory work about another country an expository work you know i one thing i will just say about this concept of bravery and in writing the book and opening myself up is that i think that I've read a lot of first person works. I thought that there was simply no point in writing this book unless I was going to go all the way. So that for me did not mean writing about my personal life. This is one of the very, very few personal in terms of, you know. You must have had so much stuff go down in all those years in your personal life it isn't in the book yeah it's not a lot of juicy gossip no and there's no romantic life and i didn't

want any of that in there because i did not want the book to be so much about suzy hansen the book was supposed to be about this american and you were supposed to be able to identify with her but at the same time i just felt that if i any anytime that I was lying about my own ignorance, my own naivete, or my own prejudices, I was essentially, you know, missing an opportunity to reveal something about Americans in general that really needed to be discussed. So it was sort of like a decision. If you're going to write this book book it has to be really really terribly honest and embarrassing frankly you know or don't do it yeah yeah it's it's we we have narratives of like the personal adventurer their personal tragedies abroad their romantic adventures like that exists already in the genre of american travel writing. What's actually missing is this very serious intellectual and psychoanalytical approach to oneself as an author. It's pretty

unusual in this genre. And since we're on this topic, and since we just talked about like, this question, do we call the police? And this isn't a question you just have to ask in Turkey. This is a question that we're asking right now in the United States, because there's so many instances in the news of white people calling the police on black people over really stupid stuff and with devastating consequences for the person in question. Like I like in the book that it's also about interrogating whiteness, like Americanness as whiteness abroad. And your main interlocutor in this process is James Baldwin. Our listeners know James Baldwin, the African-American writer. They might not know that he spent a decade in Turkey.

And we've got a book on the website in the bibliography called James Baldwin's Turkish Decade by Magdalena Zaborowska that will tell you more about that. So I want to hear you talk more about why James Baldwin is so important in this book. What's the role he plays? Yeah, and just continuing on what you were saying about police and institutions and things, I think that I also realized because people here in Turkey are so skeptical of their institutions. And, you know, I have that one scene where at some point I'm talking about like, well, you know, someone was saying to me that the Americans did 9-11 to themselves and I said oh no

you know our press would have figured that out if that was the case in this kind of like confident way or our judicial system all of these things and of course you know the Turkish person I was talking to was just sort of laughing at me and I realize again this is a moment where of course as a white American I believe in my institutions in the US and all. I think that Americans believe in their institutions. And for the first time, I thought it's not just about the fact that I'm white that I believe that, but also why do we believe in our institutions so much? You know, how much of that is actually grounded in reality? Although, as they're under assault right now,

I should probably talk about that, right? Like, why are we defending the FBI right now? I feel very weird. It's also weird. It's also weird also weird i mean this is obviously we're living in an upside down world um but as for james baldwin i again this is just honestly what what happened which is that i decided to move to turkey because he was my favorite writer i read him for the first time when i was 23 he told me what it meant to be a white person. I saw a documentary about him in which he said that he had lived in Turkey. There was all this amazing footage. You can still see this footage of him walking through Turkey and Istanbul. And he says that he felt so comfortable there and even more so than in France and New York in the 40s and 50s. And this was just something I did not understand when I was 25 years old. Why would that be? What was this place?

I had never been to Turkey. I had never been very far east at all. So that was to a large degree why I chose Turkey when I applied for this fellowship. It wasn't because of some deep love of Turkish culture or Turkish history or any knowledge of it whatsoever. Frankly, to some degree, it was because my favorite writer had lived in Istanbul.

And then I started reading about Turkey a lot more. And of course, it was because my favorite writer had lived in Istanbul. And then I started reading about Turkey a lot more. And of course, it was fascinating. But Baldwin, what he sort of opened up for me was I found it. Well, actually, Magdalena's book came out when I had moved to Turkey. So that book is phenomenal. And there's a tremendous amount of research in it. And she found that Baldwin had done these interviews with turkish journalists in which he had talked about seeing for the first time the way that u.s the u.s was becoming this ping-pong

ball between the soviets and the u.s between the soviets and the turkey was becoming the ping-pong ball between the soviets and the americans and so this was the early 60s so he was seeing just this the beginnings of the american empire essentially and how we were extending our influence and trying to show our American values to the rest of the world and extend them. And he was absolutely terrified because he just said, well, what are these values? We're in the midst of this terribly violent era in the US

where we have not in any way come close to solving what is our terrible race problem and what are these values that these white men are going to be extending around the rest of the world. What we are going to be exporting is a kind of violence. And he was really, really, really shaken by this. And I think that this whole story and that plus all of his other writings about whiteness and what it means to be a white person, I realized could also be put side by side or extended to the kind of what the American abroad and the Americans' relationship with the rest of the world,

that there was a real parallel between this white-black relationship and the American foreign relationship, and that there was a connection between America's domestic history, of course, because that in and of itself was an empire, and the rest of the empire that was being created in the 20th century. So I just felt like Baldwin, who of course is, you know, a genius and my hero, could explain all of these things a lot better than I could. And he had, he'd already done it, essentially. And everything he writes feels very prescient today. I think it's a good plug for James Baldwin. And I think what James Baldwin loved about Turkey

is similar to what maybe you love about Turkey. And I do want to talk about that later in our conversation. But first, we're going to take another music break. And we're going to come back and ask Susie a little bit about reception of the book. Because it's rare we have a guest on the podcast who actually gets so much public feedback about their book believe me my book will not be profiled in the new york times i assure you

and if it is it will be for all the wrong reasons i'm sure anyway quick music break and we'll be back with suzy hansen stay tuned Are you a teacher who uses our podcast in the classroom? If you are, consider becoming a faculty patron of our project through a donation to our Patreon account. You'll find a link at the top of ottomanhistorypodcast.com. In this episode, I'd like to send a bit of gratitude out to Professor Hagnar Wattenpah of the Art History Program out at UC Davis, as well as Dr. Melis Hafez, Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University. Thank you. Remember, Ottoman History Podcast is entirely non-commercial. It's a genuine labor of love, and nobody makes a profit off these handcrafted, long-form interviews. Except Patreon, of course. They take a 5% cut. Oh, and the financial institutions that process the transactions.

And then there's our hosting service, SoundCloud and Facebook. But anyway, now back to our interview with Suzy Hansen about her new book, Notes on a Foreign Country. Welcome back to Ottoman History Podcast. Chris Grayton here with Susie Hansen talking about her new book, Notes on a Foreign Country. It's a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Is it Pulitzer or Pulitzer? I think it can be both. It's a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a great read.

Check out our website, OttomanHistoryPodcast.com, to find a link to that book, as well as a lot of other great episodes. So, we're here recording, as we said, in Turkey, in Cihangir. There's some machines outside that absolutely won't quit, and I want to spend the rest of our interview talking more about, you know, Turkey and what it means to you. But before we do that, I do want to ask you about reception of the book. You've got a lot of feedback, most of it unsolicited. I know you've given a lot of talks. People probably ask you all sorts of questions at those talks. You must be

bombarded with feedback, basically. And I want to ask you to respond to that, to reply to what you've heard, to reply to the criticisms you've got, which ones helped, which ones maybe you think missed the point. Well, first, I should say that, you know, people are really quite kind, like you don't get letters that tell you how awful your book is. And you don't hear about that on Facebook. You're always just, you're hearing these nice things. So I don't know, you know, probably the worst criticisms. I had my own going into it that I thought that people were going to say or talk about,

but, and sometimes they didn't, sometimes they didn't. But so I'm sure I haven't heard the worst things. I think that there's a fundamental issue with the book that some people have um talked about which is the fact that it is about myself yeah um and that I and I we knew this going into it that I was I risked being criticized for making it all about me kind of thing yeah um even though the idea whether it succeeded or failed was obviously it was the idea was the relationship between the individual and empire.

You know, how does it shape you? How does it shape your psychology? I did, as I have said, intended as a general American figure, and you're supposed to sort of see yourself in that character to some degree. That is why my personal life is not in there or a lot of specific personal details. Oh, the naivete and the ignorance question also, I think sometimes people, more sophisticated

readers, like people who are fairly well-read, there is that kind of reaction of how could this person have been so stupid? I mean, there has definitely been reactions like that. And I'm very skeptical of that response, to be quite honest. I thought that because of my background, because I grew up in a conservative town where people, you know, did not know that much about the rest of the world, as many of us did. And then I worked, I went to a good school and then I worked in the New York media. So it was like the evil liberal, liberal New York. I felt like I could kind of embody both of these worlds. And I was very much drawing on what I felt was the knowledge of the people I grew up with, and the knowledge of the people in New York, and even the knowledge of some of the expats in Turkey who even knew, and journalists. So my feeling in the end, I mean, the reason the book is not about the red states, or people in the red states, it's very

much, I think, much more about liberals and liberal institutions. And so I'm surprised when people who come from those institutions somehow see themselves as exempt from this kind of naivete. That's the whole point of the book. But I think some people do, or I think they feel kind of a little condescending toward the idea that, but I do believe that we all have this that it's something that that there is a common american character that and especially as this trump hillary nightmare was playing out when i was finishing the book from afar i think it really looked to us like those

two groups had way more in common than they were willing to acknowledge and yet and and a common source of of of their problems which is this idea of american exceptionalism and everything else and yet an unwillingness to recognize it so so that that's one thing i do think um you know this the question of putting in the thing the good things that the u.s did i think that that's an interesting critique a lot of people said that. There was one, someone said to me that I'm a little too melodramatic. I don't know, maybe the book was too melodramatic in terms of being emotional and sort of critical. That's interesting. Yeah. It depends what you're expecting, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it depends. But I think that's interesting because I was quite, I was in quite a dark place

when I was writing the book. So I thought maybe this person picked up on that. I mean, you know, it was, it was a dark time. It was the when bombs were going off in Turkey, and, you know, everyone was becoming more authoritarian. And, and every climate change was suddenly being accepted as, you know, something that was ruining our lives and would ruin them for good very, very soon. And then of course, Trump and everything else. I wrote the last pages of the book after the election and I was basically crying for two weeks. So I think the book is kind of mired in a sort of misery.

So I thought that was kind of acute. I think that what I found about Turkey, people doing talks and stuff, is that this idea of Turkey as a secular country and of Erdogan having contradicted or turned over Ataturk's vision for the country is very, very alive in the US. That there is a belief that it was secular and free

and democratic before Erdogan. And now that that has has all disappeared because of him or been destroyed because of him i thought that was that was interesting how strong that idea is right it's still controversial outside of academic circles to point to how the early kamala state me we're getting a little nerdy here but how the early kamala state actually put in like kind of permanent structures that have been been utilized by everyone who's come to power in turkey since then including erdogan yeah and yeah and also that the country has always been religious and religion has has played some sort of part so i mean all of that

um was was quite interesting uh and then of course i've definitely had criticisms from a lot of turks about the way that i portrayed certain aspects of the history. But that you have to expect. Well, to hear you explain it like that, maybe that's why I identified with some sections of the book. I'm also from a pretty conservative, socially conservative, religiously conservative milieu in the U.S. And also kind of became a bourgeois liberal pretty quickly once I got out of there. And, you know, that transition is pretty easy. You know, the process of going from being like a quote unquote ignorant red state person to an enlightened liberal, you read like two books and like you

can claim that. And I think, you know, for those who say, like, how could you be so naive from that vantage point? I think they're missing the point of what you're trying to critique. And for those who are from Turkey and say, how could you be so naive? That's exactly the point. Yeah, I think also the one thing, I mean, even some of my closest friends, when they read the book said, oh, come on, you didn't know this, or you didn't really think this or kind of thing. I think there's two things to say about that in terms of the way that a memoir is written, which is that you are creating a narrative. So you choose the things you put it in, you choose the things you don't.

And obviously, some of the things that I was learning or realizing that are in the book, I probably learned when I was 20, but I'm 29 when the book begins. So I think that that was what comes as a surprise to people a lot of the time. A memoir is something you're creating. It's not a diary. You know, it's like, it's a narrative that you're trying to, because you have an intention of how you want to do that. The other thing is, is that a lot of what I was doing was acknowledging these reflexes that you would never say out loud. Like the things that you would know better because you were educated, because you knew that it was politically incorrect, because you knew that your community, that you were the person you were talking to, would think it was horrific.

You would not say it out loud. Or you would have the reflex and you would immediately suppress it. And I thought that the reflexes were where the common American character actually was. And so I was trying to put them out there some of these embarrassing like the when I'm driving in the taxi to that wealthy neighborhood up the Bosphorus and which is Bebek and I'm surprised the first time I've ever seen it and I'm surprised that the wealth in the country that it in some weird way made me feel I think it made me feel in a weird way made me feel, I think it made me feel in a weird way badly that this place seemed almost better than us in a way. The Starbucks has a nicer view.

Yeah, exactly. The Starbucks is way nicer. But these kinds of reactions, again, I mean, that is such an embarrassing thing to have to say, but I do think that was the feeling I was having. Right. So I decided to just put it out there for the whole world to read about. And maybe the whole suppression mechanism isn't bad with those thoughts. No, of course.

But it's important to acknowledge that there's a suppression going on. How would you respond to the critique that would probably come from a lot of academic historians who would say, there's some nice work done here but this story is still fundamentally like an American centered narrative of the Middle East that actually reproduces that reproduces the the pervasive representation of the Middle East through the expectations and concerns of Westerners while you're talking about stuff that a lot of people don't know about, new stuff, you're still maybe replicating that kind of mode of representation.

Yeah, that was definitely a common critique. That's a good one. I think that my feeling was, first of all, yes, that I was trying to sort of balance that out by putting in a lot of real information in the book so that you are learning about these places as you go along. And hopefully that information that I'm presenting is not entirely through the American lens. However, I think, again, if we do think of the book as an exercise in breaking down American ideas of itself, that is what the book is about, you know, so that's why it is inevitably going to focus on some of these American events or this American centrism. Because the point was to show what happened to my own mind as I went on, but it was also to try to provoke this reaction in the reader to say, okay, this is the way that you tend

to think about this, but why do you see it that way? And this is why you see it that way. And this is what's flawed in that way of thinking this is what you know this is what's flawed in that way of thinking you know and i think that in some ways as i said because i had originally wanted to write a book about turkey this book was like it's like a precursor i almost feel like before you can write the book that you're talking about that is not american-centric i almost think you have to get yourself out of the way and is that one of your next projects it is actually yeah but i don't i think because it was so fun to write this book i mean the other reason why it's history and memoir and reporting and it's a mixture is because it's just a lot more fun to write a mixed

genre book it's it's just you can be much more creative you can be much more creative when you write in the first person as much as people hate it and as much as i myself was very terrified of it it's just it's much more fun to write I mean it's like mixed martial arts you just get to hit exactly exactly so I think that I probably would want to reproduce that okay type of form with with with another book but I think it'll it'll be much more straightforward just not about Susie Hansen and her relationship to Turkey but just about Turkey yeah so who plays Susie hansen in the hollywood feature film notes on a foreign country i don't see how you could possibly make the the movie would be just me sitting on a couch and like thinking you

know there's there's very little they take liberty sometimes it was a hard part of the reason why it was a very hard book to write because there weren't a lot of these kind of scenes that, you know, these kind of very colorful action scenes that you often see in books about Westerners in foreign countries. I mean, it just, it was much more of a, the experience I was having, I think, was much more cerebral. And I think also this thing that I think is hard to explain is that often it wasn't a big event that was changing my mind so much. It was one word. It was one sentence. It was one thing that one, you know, Turk or Greek person or Iraqi said. It was just that one thing that would suddenly be like a key in a lock and you'd realize something about the way that you had thought about things. Like you walk by a mirror for a second and you're like, what?

Yeah, exactly. That kind of process of realization. Yeah. But that's good. I mean... something about the way that you had thought about things. Like you walk by a mirror for a second, you're like, what? Yeah, exactly. That kind of process of realization. Yeah. But that's good. I mean. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that people thought that Istanbul, they think of Istanbul as this place that is in their minds, quote unquote, so much more exotic and different from their own lives.

And it's really just not that dramatic a difference. But I want to jump on one more thing that you've not, it's really just not that dramatic a difference. So, but I want to like jump on one more thing that you've published, which is you published this article in Vogue in January, 2017, in which you declared you can't quit Istanbul. You seem to love Istanbul. Maybe you don't love Istanbul.

I don't know. I hope for our Turkish listeners that you do, and you are going to say you love Istanbul, but like, why are you still here? Why, why'd you you come back what do you love about the place what keeps you connected to Turkey after all these years what had happened was and this is again a kind of it's interesting the in in in the assignment itself there's a kind of interesting perception misperception of things which is this was after the was the assignment came right after the airport bombing a series of other

bombings and and the military coup and so the question was for the assignment why would you stay in a place that is violent it was not about why do you stay in turkey for any other reason but violent where there are bombs going off and so my response to that was my god you know this is so interesting because i think of istanbul anyway as the safest place I've ever lived. And that was what the whole essay was about and why I felt that it was so safe. But what's interesting is that that article then came out after the Reyna bombing, but also after Ohal.

So after the state of emergency was declared and we started seeing so many people going to jail. And I have to say that this last period from 2016 till now has been far darker than the bombs going off in a lot of ways. And I think has probably given people a lot more pause about staying here. Not because they're afraid for themselves, but because you are watching what is happening to the Turkish people, what is happening to Turkish journalists, and it's sort of, you almost feel strange staying here and living outside of that, of sort of, you're living this very special privileged life, even more so now than before, it was always a privileged life. So it, and it's

also very, very sad to watch, of course. So if I had written that essay after the state of emergency, I might not have said so. How safe I feel just because, of course, Turks do not feel safe here in the same way. But all of that said, why do I stay here? I think there's very practical reasons that are very boring, which is I love my life here. It has been good for my professional life.

I think that my affection for this place very much has to do with Istanbul. One, I do think I have this just kind of aesthetic attachment to Istanbul. I just think the city is, I don't mean the Bosphorus and the obvious beautiful, I just think everything about it is extraordinary visually. I am happier when I am here. I am happier in these little old neighborhoods wherever they are in the city. I just think it I am here. I am happier in these little old neighborhoods, wherever they are in the city. I just think it's a kind of warmer, I do feel safer because people are always watching. So as a single woman, I think that in a weird way, whereas that surveillance, I'm sure is tremendously annoying for Turkish women. I think that that feeling of people always

being on the streets, of people always kind of watching and being involved in their neighborhoods is one that I find really wonderful in a way. I think that also it's something that is not particular to Turkey, which is that if you move to a foreign country after living in the US, and I was unhappy in New York, I think that has a lot to do with it. Everyone is so noisy. Like, I think everyone has like, post traumatic stress, like micro lesions in their brain from the subway. I'm not even joking. Well, there's that. But there's also the fact that, you know, it's just so hard to survive there, you know, and and it's a it is a pretty cold place. It's a lot of fun. Of course, I'm not New York is New York, but it's difficult when you're in your 20s. And so I came here and I just loved this city. It felt like a real reprieve from that.

Also, I just think it's the fact that Turkey is a country. I'm sure all countries are like this, but Turkey in particular is really difficult to understand. I mean, the political history, the party history, all of it. You really will never know this place. It will constantly surprise you. There's so much more to learn. And so if you're living in a place where every day you learn something new, that's a great way to live. It's just a nice way to live. You feel more engaged, and I think you feel more alive

in a way. It is a deep place with a deep history. And I think that you hit on something that is easy to forget sometimes when you have your little small travails as a American expat living in Istanbul, that it's a place where community is important in ways that it maybe isn't back where we come from, even if you are from small town America. And it's a fundamentally welcoming place. Well, there's that, I think it's something I'm trying to figure out, because when you say this, again, it's the Turks willks will say to you oh come on we we're so nasty to each other we hate each other you know this that they will be very self-critical about that they they you know i think that um on the one hand they would agree in the sense that like if you if you need milk for

your baby at 4 a.m you know your neighbor is going to understand that because there's just that kind of relationship of reciprocity and and interdependence that is just different here than it would be in the u.s but what i'm trying to figure out and this is a segue because this is what i think part of my next book will be about is is um is it doesn't have something to do with the way these neighborhoods are also set up because they are these narrow streets, the little shops, where people are actually independent. They are dependent on each other. The cleanliness, the health, the safety of the neighborhood

affects their livelihoods in a different way. And these are such intimate neighborhoods. Is there something about the neighborhoods that forces people to at least get along on a day-to-day basis, even if they don't like each other? Is one of the things I'm kind of trying to, it's like a Jane Jacobs, did you ever read The Death and Life of American Cities? I read it in college, it was one of my favorite books, it was, you know, just about what made the supposed ghettos or lower class neighborhoods of New York City and Greenwich Village in the in the 50s what made them such fantastic neighborhoods even though sort of elite people saw them as terrible neighborhoods but Jane

Jacobs was arguing no no these are these neighborhoods are so safe they're so strong they're happy it's because of this kind of reciprocity and small business ownership, essentially. So anyway, so that's... Oops. SNOP, anyone? Yeah. So, yeah, it's all about the SNOPs. Well, we're looking forward to the next project. Take your time with it. It'll be a while.

I know you're publishing regularly in press outlets such as New York Times Magazine, and so our listeners will be well served to follow your work. You're somebody who has clearly evolved as a thinker and an author, like everyone, but have tried to very self-consciously document it. And fundamentally, as well, like I really liked about it and really made me think about. So I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing all this and really talking to me in a very frank manner about this very readable and interesting work. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I want to remind our listeners to check out

Notes on a Foreign Country by Susie Hansen. It's currently about 15 bucks on amazon.com. You can afford it. It's a really great read about, you know, a wide-eyed American, as we said, setting out to learn about the world, only to learn about herself, and then sort of overcoming that and writing something much more interesting than that. If you feel like you know nothing about Turkey, it's a great place to start. And if you think already you know everything about Turkey, I think it's going to make you think twice. I also want to invite you all to visit our website, adamhistorypodcast.com, for a bibliography, images, and more episodes about the history and culture of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, and the Islamic world. Now, the music you've

been hearing throughout this podcast is by an Istanbul-based ensemble called Muhtalif. The lead singer is a friend of mine and a friend of the podcast, Dr. Nurcin Ileri. Thanks to our friends at Muhtalif for letting us use their music on the program. You'll find them in cafes in Istanbul, performing a lot of great old songs in Turkish, Greek, Arabic, and Armenian. And

here's one of their own compositions. It's called Samsa. Thanks again for listening, and join us next time in another installment of Ottoman History Podcast. Kapalı kapılar susturmuş saati bırakmıyor kuşlar. Gözleri pahalı taşı sekiyor tavanda. Geziyor ruhu bir örümcek alında. Vurma beni elmayla unuttum tüm belediğimi çıkardım. Yola kendimi dönüyorum hep en başa

Vurma beni elmayla unuttum tüm bildiğimi çıkardım yola kendimi dönüyorum hep en başa Ne oldu sana sansa sorsan aynaya Var mı senden güzeli şu sefili dünyada? Ne oldu sana sansa, sorsan aynaya, var mı senden güzeli şu sefili dünyada? Ayna ayna söyle ona, ayna ayna söyle ona Ayna ayna söyle ona Karanlık bir sabah kapalı kapılar Sustur mu saati bırakmıyor kuşlar Gözleri bal taşı sekiyor tavanda

Geziyor ruhu bir örümcek alında Vurma beni elmayla Unuttum tüm bildiğimi Çıkardım yola kendimi Dönüyorum hep en başa Durma beni elmayla Unuttum tüm bildiğimi Çıkardım yola kendimi

Dönüyorum hep en başa Ne oldu sana Samsa? Sorsan aynaya Var mı senden güzeli şu sefil dünyada? Ne oldu sana Samsa? Sorsan aynaya Var mı senden güzeli şu sefil dünyada? Ayna ayna söyle ona Ayna ayna söyle ona

Ayna ayna söyle ona Ayna ayna söyle ona Ayna ayna söyle ona Ne oldu sana sansa sorsan aynaya Var mı senden güzeli şu sefi dünyada Ne oldu sana sansa sorsan aynaya Var mı senden güzeli şu sefi dünyada Ne oldu sana sansa, sorsan aynaya Var mı senden güzeli şu sefi dünyada

Ne oldu sana sansa, sorsan aynaya Var mı senden güzeli şüset bir dünyada Ayna ayna söyle ona