...[a] remarkably revealing book ... a deeply honest and brave portrait of an individual sensibility reckoning with her country’s violent role in the world ... Notes on a Foreign Country is a sincere and intelligent act of self-questioning. It is a political and personal memoir that negotiates that vertiginous distance that exists between what America is and what it thinks of itself. That dramatic, dizzying and lonesome chasm is Hansen’s terrain ... 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 ... The tone is at once adamant and intimate. This is a book that is spoken softly rather than screamed; and one senses that it took great personal discipline to be so. In fact, what is admirable is the extent to which Hansen implicates herself. She does this soberly and without self-pity. She is, to herself, independent but by no means innocent ... The problem, however — and it is a problem to do with conversion — is that it is assumed that the question is one of persuasion. If only America were like Hansen: disquieted, self-analytic and imaginative. Perhaps, in other words, Americans know that they feel superior and are quite content with their superiority. Perhaps their naïveté, if that is what it is, is not as deep as Hansen imagines; perhaps they are aware of the myth of themselves and have simply decided it is too useful a myth to give up.
...a searching and searing book ... Hansen writes with both authority and humility and, occasionally, with sharp beauty ... Some of the book’s strongest passages involve her rigorous interrogation of the notion of American exceptionalism, of America as the pinnacle of a historical narrative of progress, which she realizes she has internalized ... Also fascinating is the author’s evolving understanding that despite her faith in her journalistic objectivity, the myths she has absorbed affect the way she tells stories from around the globe ... a testament to one journalist’s courage in digging deep within herself to understand the real story and to make sure she gets it right.
...a compelling exhortation to introspection ... She vividly captures the disorientation we experience when our preconceived notions collide with uncomfortable discoveries, likening that moment to 'a cavity filling: something drilled out, something shoved in, and afterward, a persistent, dull ache and a tooth that would never be the same' ... It is rare and refreshing for an observer to exhibit this level of candor about her internal tensions. But occasionally Hansen’s perceptions create tensions of their own. While she premises her book on the judgment that America is in decline, she also characterizes it as an empire ... and while Hansen rightly cautions against blind acceptance of America’s foreign policy, which has often departed from its self-professed values, blanket suspicion is not warranted, either. Her narrative would be more balanced if she acknowledged some of the contributions of U.S. power ... Still, with the U.S.-led postwar order under growing duress, and with long-standing U.S. allies increasingly questioning America’s reputation as the exemplar of openness and pluralism, Hansen’s principal injunction to Americans to understand how others view them and their country’s policies is timely and urgent.
On the surface, Hansen’s book appears to have a similar premise. A young, white, American woman decides to leave New York to take a writing fellowship in Turkey, and through this experience, she has a series of small realizations that culminate in an epiphany about her identity ...characterize her years as an American abroad not as 'a joyous romp of self-discovery and romance' but as 'more of a shattering and a shame' ... All of these pieces of her as an individual and as part of the collective white Americanness that she attempts to identify and define throughout the book snake through the historical and political narrative that she weaves ... While it bears traces of memoir and of travel writing, her methodology also taps into ethnography and political theory.
Hansen turns a coming-of-age travelogue into a geopolitical memoir of sorts, without sacrificing personal urgency in the process. She frankly confronts her ignorance about Turkey, long the West’s go-to model for modernizing the Middle East. And she wrestles with her assumptions about American beneficence abroad ... Hansen’s disillusionment with the U.S. is so deep that it can sometimes feel doctrinaire. Yet her long stay in Istanbul (she’s still there) gives her an outsider’s vantage on myopic American arrogance that is bracing. And her fascinating insider’s view of Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s rise upends Western simplicities. 'I had the space to look at everything so differently that I actually felt as if my brain were breathing,' she writes. The experience is contagious.
The innocuous title of Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country offers little sense of the eloquent and impassioned prose that lies within the book’s covers ... Hansen has much to say on the civilian cost of regime change. If this section of the book suffers, it is because she is no longer being flooded with epiphanies while living the Turkish experience; here she is mostly reporting ... America has much to learn about the rest of the world, and Hansen leaves us with the fervent hope that Americans can reconnect to the rest of humanity. America’s future, she writes, 'will, hopefully, not be about breaking from the past, but about breaking from the habit of its disavowal.'
Notes on a Foreign Country is Hansen's ardent, often lovely attempt to take self-awareness overseas. It doesn't come along peacefully. But then Baldwin wrote of people in intimate proximity, while Hansen tackles the sins of U.S. foreign policy. Her humans are separated by thousand of miles and opposing governments — Washington, and the ones it manipulates. The one easy thing here is Hansen's company. In Dubai, 'sky and the water melt into an aluminum-hued oblivion.' A Hilton 'had the benevolent totalitarian aesthetic of the United Nations.' A nurse speaks 'in a tone that makes you want to put your head on her shoulder.' If Noam Chomsky could write like this, Hansen's work would already be done.
Can knowledge of the history provide a way out of the current crisis? In Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, Suzy Hansen posits that the answer to these questions is, at least potentially, yes ... As the book progresses, her perspective expands; Hansen highlights how even these 'positive' ways of viewing Turkey are themselves steeped in imperialism ... Hansen uses a litany of horrifying historical examples of American imperialism to combat what she sees as the standard American practice of pretending that it isn’t a colonial force... It would be difficult for an American reader not feel changed by this book.
Hansen’s must-read book makes the argument that Americans, specifically white Americans, are decades overdue in examining and accepting their country’s imperial identity ... Hansen’s argument goes beyond the factual assertion that Americans are ignorant of the country’s long, complicated, invasive histories with many other countries around the world. She makes the paradigm-breaking claim that what Americans are taught about their national and personal identities disallows the very acquisition of this knowledge ... Hansen builds her winning argument by combining personal examination and observation with geopolitical history lessons. She is a fearless patriot, and this is a book for the brave.
Hansen offers a heartfelt plea for empathy and a recognition of 'the realities of millions of people,' but honing a sophisticated global perspective seems far more complicated than she acknowledges here. A mostly illuminating literary debut that shows how Americans’ ignorance about the world has made turmoil and terrorism possible.
The book is a revelatory indictment of American policy both domestic and foreign, made gripping by Hansen’s confident—if overreaching—distillation of complicated historical processes and her detailed, evocative descriptions of places, people, and experiences most American audiences can’t imagine.
