Notes on a Foreign Country by Suzy Hansen

Author:Suzy Hansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

5.

MONEY AND MILITARY COUPS: THE ARAB WORLD AND TURKEY

What the hell do the Americans want, ignorant people?

—SAID ABURISH

SOME YEARS BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, I visited Cairo as a tourist, taking the requisite camel ride to the pyramids, trying on Bedouin dresses in the souk, getting lost among the mummies in the antiquities museum. It was a short, superficial, and sensual trip, about which most of my memories are visual, including the shock of seeing blond American girl tourists in tight short shorts outside a mosque, which filled me with shame. The week before, I had flooded my downstairs neighbors by absentmindedly pulling at one of the haphazard pipes that lived on the outside of the apartment’s nineteenth-century walls, drenching the Turkish rugs that lined the stone floors, eliciting screams from below. I had no idea how to stop the water, so clueless was I to the phenomenon of central water controls in apartment buildings. I had no friends in the building to call on, and all my efforts to learn the language yielded few intelligible words as I screamed from my front door. I was dressed in my pajamas, a tank top and shorts, and terrified of running out and exposing myself that way, so I stood for a while before the pipe, trying to hold it together with my hands as the water belted me like a hose. I was lonely and clumsy, wreaking havoc on things I knew nothing about. There was no worse feeling in a foreign country; it was easy for such small, manifestly human events to take on heavy symbolic significance. Random things said to me on a touristic visit seemed weighted with significance, too, as when, one evening in Cairo, a young activist told me he admired the Turks because “they built their Metro themselves.”

We were walking through the center of the city at night, the streets empty, craning to admire the marble colonial facades that had survived the fires of the late colonial era and the poverty of Mubarak’s. The Egyptian activist had been in jail before for criticizing the regime. The Turks didn’t have foreigners build their Metro for them, he said. I was not sure that was true, but I got the point; Turkey was seen as a more independent country, a country that built itself. Yet, at the time, I didn’t know what this statement meant in the Egyptian context, or what it meant more broadly. My understanding of global economic systems was still so limited that instead I was surprised the Egyptians did not build their Metro themselves—who else would have done it? (The French, and others.) We Westerners talked of Istanbul’s sea views. Egyptians spoke of its metros.

Turkey was in fact building more metros, more bridges, more airports, more office parks. By the time of the Egyptian revolution in 2011, Istanbul’s city limits were exploding with development, office towers shooting up as if in some real-time video sequence. Turkish friends saw the European side of Istanbul from a boat

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.