Suzy Hansen's 'Notes on a Foreign Country: Seeing the U.S. as others see it
Notes on a Foreign Country
An American Abroad in a Post-American World
By Suzy Hansen
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 276 pp. $26
Reviewed by Ali Wyne
Early on in Notes on a Foreign Country, Suzy Hansen relates a conversation she had with an Iraqi man in 2012. When she "asked him what Iraq was like in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was growing up," he replied: " 'I am always amazed when Americans ask me this. How is it that you know nothing about us when you had so much to do with what became of our lives?' "
Abounding with such anecdotes, Notes on a Foreign Country is a compelling exhortation to introspection. Hansen, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, urges Americans to recognize the perspectives that shape – and sometimes distort – how they understand their country's role in the world.
Hansen spends much of her book analyzing her own preconceptions. She notes, for example, that as a writer on a grant, she initially approached Turkey "like some specimen I could place under a microscope," appraising its development according to Western notions of modernization. She concedes that she "had been invested in an idea of the East's inferiority without even knowing it" and cites an "unassailable, perhaps unconscious faith" in America's "Western way of living" that accompanied her during her travels.
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." We do not easily relinquish our assumptions. Indeed, the more we believe a proposition is self-evident, the more resistant we are when it is challenged: Overcoming that inertia, Hansen writes, is akin to "shedding layers of skin. It's a slow process, you break down, you open up, but you also resist, much like how the body can begin to heal, only to fall back into its sicker state."
Hansen's injunction to Americans to understand how others view them and their country's policies is timely and urgent. Though Notes on a Foreign Country makes for sobering reading at times, there may be a silver lining in Hansen's chronicle of widespread disillusionment with the United States: It reflects a residual hope in the power of the American example.
Ali Wyne is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, a security fellow with the Truman National Security Project, and a new leader with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. This review first appeared in the Washington Post.
