Still, even in Turkey, Baldwin could not fully escape America. During the Cold War, relations between the United States and Turkey were founded on military collaboration and cooperation; the United States sent ships to Turkish waters to counter the threat of Soviet expansion, making Turkey a source of anti-Soviet military aid. As Baldwin said to Sedat Pakay, “American powers are everywhere.” His feelings fluctuated between entrapment, the sense that no matter how far he traveled from the violence in the United States he could not, existentially speaking, “get out,” and the feelings of transcendence and revival that Cezzar’s warm hospitality and Turkey itself afforded him.
If anything, as Zaborowska writes, “Baldwin’s awareness of the imperial presence of the United States and of global racism increased and sharpened while he was living in Turkey,” and he became even more conscious of America’s moral bankruptcy in the international arena. That led him to increase his efforts to address the gap between the myth of America’s benevolence and its violent reality. He dubbed the mental condition that allowed and perpetuated this gap “irreality,” argued that the very notion of nationalism and its associated narratives constituted a global pathology, and denounced the methods by which each of us is socialized to embrace its madness. In the 1970 Essence magazine conversation, Baldwin told Lewis,
During my Istanbul stay I learned a lot about dealing with people that are neither Western nor Eastern. In a way, Turkey is a satellite on the Russian border. That’s something to watch. You learn about the brutality and the power of the Western world. You’re living with people whom nobody cares about, who are bounced like a tennis ball between the great powers. Not that I wasn’t previously aware of the cynicism of power politics and foreign aid, but it was a revelation to see it functioning every day in that sort of theater.
Lewis pressed him further, asking if the injustices suffered by Turks at the hands of the United States were similar to those that affected Black men in America. No, Baldwin replied, adding that “the peoples of Turkey, Greece, even the peoples in Jamaica have not gone through the fire. They don’t know that the dream which was America is over.” At several points in the interview, Baldwin insisted that he left America in order to write, and that as long as he was writing it did not matter where he was. In any case, he said, he no longer believed in nations.