Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

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 arrived 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.