Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (5 page)

If we want to avoid learning why the rest of the world at once loves and hates us, it is advisable to stay at home. I remain an American patriot when I am abroad, but I also see my country’s failures of dignity, empathy, and wisdom. You can’t fully interpret the American invective against immigration without visiting centers of emigration and refugee camps. You can’t understand the bizarre tyranny of the NRA until you have spent time in other countries (most other countries, actually) where sensible gun laws limit violent crime. You can’t discern how far America has lapsed in social mobility until you encounter a society moving toward economic justice. Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet’s blurred reality. When E. M. Forster was asked how much time he had needed to write
A Passage to India
, he replied that it was a question not of time but of place. He had been unable to write it when he lived in India, he explained; “When I got away, I could get on with it.”

Sometimes, these new perspectives are raw, but they are almost always useful. “All travel has its advantages,” Samuel Johnson wrote. “If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” I had started traveling out of curiosity, but I have come to believe in travel’s political importance, that encouraging a nation’s citizenry to travel may be as important as encouraging school attendance, environmental conservation, or national thrift. I recalled my high school singing tour in Romania and Bulgaria, when the reality I witnessed seemed so obvious, even though most reports contradicted it. You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world’s diplomatic problems could be solved. It wouldn’t matter what country they visited or what they did during their stays. They would simply need to come to terms
with the existence of other places, and recognize that people live differently there—that some phenomena are universal and others, culturally particular.

Relatively porous immigration serves the same ends. You cannot know your own country if you are unobserved; people from elsewhere help you to reimagine your problems, which is requisite to solving them. We understand them not only by voyaging out but also by receiving those who voyage in. Free passage from home to abroad and free passage for others from their homes to yours abroad are of equal value. Not love, nor work, nor favorable prospects, is a zero-sum game. Sharing good fortune replenishes it. We find our boundaries both through encounters with otherness and through being that otherness. Identity is both contingent and reciprocal.

My forebears suffered from anti-Semitism, but unlike those who died in the Holocaust, they did have someplace to go: the United States. My paternal grandmother’s parents were born in Russia and came to New York before my grandmother was born. My paternal grandfather, born in Romania, made his way across difficult terrain to get here. My maternal grandmother came from Poland; my maternal grandfather’s parents, from Vienna and Ukraine. Without such liberal opportunities for immigration, I would never have existed. But they have likewise served to keep American culture vigorous. My ancestors crossed the Atlantic for freedom, which has been the United States’ most subsidized export. By investigating places apparently less free than my native country, I learned not only a deeper appreciation of American liberties, but also that my life is less free than I have tended to imagine. Freedom is a slippery concept and entails the option to choose adherence to strict ideologies; a large part of what I have championed constitutes liberalism rather than freedom. Oppressive societies have freedoms that are unknowable here, freedoms shaped by the lack of choice and the battle to achieve dignity in the face of disenfranchisement. When Chinese intellectuals spoke to me of the good that came of the Tiananmen massacre, when Pakistani women spoke of their pride in wearing the hijab, when Cubans enthused about their autocracy, I had to reconsider my reflexive enthusiasm for self-determination. In a free society, you have a chance
to achieve your ambitions; in an unfree one, you lack that choice, and this often allows for more visionary ambitions. In Moscow in the 1980s, I became close to a group that called themselves “paper architects.” Knowing there were no supplies to build to their specifications even if the Soviet bureaucracy had afforded them the chance, they harnessed their architectural training to their imaginations and designed, for example, the Tower of Babel, or proposed whole cities, or suggested a structure for a theater that might float on the sea. Their creative energies were loosed, but they were always architects, and their discourse—new and conceptualist though it was—used the basic grammar of architecture. No Western architect governed by materials has ever thought so freely.

Freedom is seldom correlated with stasis; it comes in short bursts at times of enormous change. One of its constituents is optimism, which entails the belief that what is about to happen may be better than what is happening now. Change is often heady; change often goes horribly wrong; change often electrifies the air only to evanesce, unrealized. Democratizing requires that each member of a population accept the partial weight of decision-making. To many, that idea is appealing in the abstract and daunting when it comes time to vote. When the Burmese author and activist Dr. Ma Thida came to New York eighteen months after I interviewed her in Myanmar, she said she was shattered to realize that not only did the government need to change—which could happen quickly—but so did the minds of people conditioned by oppression, which could take an entire generation. In witnessing how people break forth into freedom, I have seen how glorious and hard the shift can be. Of course, after you win your freedom, you must learn to be free; in Toni Morrison’s phrase, you must “claim a freed self.” Many Westerners presume that democracy is the underlying preference of all people, and that it will simply emerge when obstructions are eliminated. (George W. Bush and Tony Blair seemed to operate on this presumption in Iraq.) The evidence does not support this projection.

Freedom must be learned and then put into practice. When I was in Afghanistan in February 2002, my friend Marla Ruzicka arranged for me to speak to three educated, liberal-minded women. They ar
rived wearing burkas, which they promptly removed, but I wondered why they were wearing them at all. The Taliban had fallen, and the law no longer constrained them. The first one said, “I always assumed I would be rid of this thing if times changed. But now I am afraid that the change is not stable. If I go out without a burka and the Taliban returns to power, perhaps I will be stoned to death.” The second said, “I would like to give it up, but the standards of our society have not yet shifted, and if I go out without wearing this and I am raped, they will tell me it is my own fault.” The third woman said, “I hate this garment and I always assumed that I would give it up as soon as the Taliban was out. But over time, you get used to being invisible. It defines you. And the prospect of being visible again then seems extremely stressful.” So much needs to change within individuals before a change in society ensues.

History is rife with waves of joyful transformation followed by descent into horror. A culture’s relationship to its history often reflects the citizenry’s sense of agency. Some cultures see history primarily as something that happened to them; others, primarily as something they did. Chronologies of events are often less significant than people’s understanding of the relationship between past and present; a revolution may represent both the full realization of a long tradition and a break from it. Democracy tends to arrive with an aura of revelry, which is partly to do with democracy but partly to do simply with arrival. Witness the Arab Spring, which delighted people in the countries where change was occurring as well as people abroad, many of whom erroneously assumed that whatever would come next must be better than what was being left behind.

The nearly universal fear of extreme change on an individual level sits comfortably beside the heady prospect of change in the vast company of one’s fellow citizens. I am susceptible to that little moment of romance when a society on the brink of change falls temporarily in love with itself. I’ve heard the same people speak of the great hope they felt when Stalin came to power and the hope they later felt when he died; others, of the hope they felt when the Cultural Revolution
began and the hope they felt when it ended. The insistence that change is possible is a manifestation of hope. Many societies have reached forward, and for some, conditions really did improve; for others, not. Life in Russia in the twenty-first century is better for the average Russian than it was when the serfs were freed, but not by nearly enough. Afghanistan remains a mess. Iraq and Syria have degenerated from ostensible liberation to vicious bedlam. Libya was much worse under Qaddafi than anyone who hadn’t been there could understand, but it would be a stretch to describe its current condition as anything short of disastrous.

Sometimes, however, a great tyranny is dismantled. For all that has gone wrong in South Africa, the downfall of apartheid has renewed the world’s faith in decency. Life is better in China, too, than before Deng Xiaoping, though with plenty of room for improvement. Hope is a regular chime of political life; Americans lapse into it every four years, when many of us presume that our one-minute act of self-determination at the polling station might shift history. Walter Pater identified experience, rather than the fruit of experience, as life’s goal. Zhou Enlai is said to have suggested that it is too soon to judge whether the French Revolution was a success. But the French Revolution was not only a route to a new order; it was also an event in itself. Moments of shift can be valuable even if their promises are never realized. My lifelong fascination with resilience has often propelled me to places in the throes of transformation. Time has made me more cynical than I used to be; at history’s crossroads, changes that seem to be for the better often backfire, while great advancement sometimes goes hand in hand with tragedy. Nonetheless, the feeling of newness and rebirth is significant even when it dawns in a society muddled in perennial uncertainties. Furthermore, change is often the product not of gradual erosion but of burgeoning false starts; transformation arrives only when two or three or ten failed inceptions accumulate into a breakthrough.

Conversely, change prompts immediate nostalgia. A better present does not erase a flawed past, and no past wants for elements of great beauty. A person’s ability to remember an expired identity yet live in the present tense contains real valor. In 1993, one of my Moscow
friends took me to see an old woman she knew. We climbed seven narrow flights of stairs to reach her cramped, dark apartment. She told me about growing up in a palace in St. Petersburg. Almost everyone she knew had been killed in the 1917 revolution. Later, she had lost her husband to hard labor in the gulag. She had managed to keep only one relic of her aristocratic origins: a teacup of nearly transparent Imperial Porcelain, elaborately painted with a pastoral scene. Because I was an honored guest, she served me tea in it. I have shaky hands at the best of times and have never wanted less to handle anything than I did that fragile emblem of a vanished life. “Who knows?” said my friend, who knew the older woman’s stories by heart. “Maybe with glasnost we will live in this way again.” The old woman only laughed. “No one will ever live this way again,” she said, and urged us to have more of the cake she had baked following a recipe from the czar’s court, with ingredients that she’d stood in lines four consecutive days to buy. That cake and that teacup: what courage she had evinced in her survival, and what passion lay in those last links to who she had been. She was wistful only as most old people are homesick for their youth.

The stories in this book are from the past. They did not predict the future when they were written, and while some of the dreams expressed in them have come to fruition, others have foundered. These are non-agenda-driven accounts of particular places at particular times. Even the most intensively reported pieces do not reflect expertise in their locations. I was in Russia a good bit and have often traveled in China, but I visited Afghanistan for less than two weeks, Libya for six. I did plenty of research before, after, and during these trips and have kept up with many of the people I got to know, but my observations are based on a relative breadth of cumulative knowledge rather than depth of singular knowledge. I can’t compete with sinologists or Kremlinologists or Africanists. My art writing has been more about artists than about what they have produced. Complex stories are best told by those who can embrace complexity, and art forces its makers to grapple with social ambiguities and tensions. These reports are
in many ways psychological studies rather than political ones, documents of a passing zeitgeist rather than policy papers. I am only a generalist, a collector of experiences, and an eccentric one at that.

Reading through one’s assembled work is a humbling, occasionally agonizing experience. While these stories reflect a world in flux and development, they also reflect my own flux and development, and I have resisted the impulse to edit them to hew to my current opinions and perceptions. This is what I wrote then, not what I would write today. If it is disappointing to grow old, it is likewise embarrassing to have been young. One is startled by what one did then but wouldn’t do now. Having started out from the rather supercilious perspective that the problems of both nations and individuals could be solved, I have come to believe that accepting problems is often wiser than trying to fix them. I have attempted to find patterns in the few things that change—new borders, general progress on civil and disability rights—and the many things that don’t—the failure of elections to bring justice, the tendency of power to corrupt. I’ve tried to become less prescriptive, better at questions and less quick with answers. I used to be sure of transformative revolution, but I still believe in ameliorative evolution. Yet the convictions that now appear naïve motivated some of my investigations of other cultures.