The Difficulty of Being a Cultural Ambassador for America

The U.S. Embassy in Berlin.
The U.S. Embassy in Berlin, near the Reichstag.Photograph by Sean Gallup / Getty

In May, 1965, Langston Hughes invited Paule Marshall, a younger, less famous, but no less brilliant writer, to accompany him and William Melvin Kelley on a cultural tour of Europe sponsored by the State Department. Hughes, Marshall, and Kelley—black writers who espoused the everyday beauty and worthiness of their communities—would have likely disagreed with the political ideologies of the sponsors of their expedition, but the trio also had reasons to hope that acting as emissaries could do some good. John F. Kennedy was dead, but Martin Luther King, Jr., was yet alive. Movement leaders and cultural figures, including Marshall herself, were putting steady pressure on President Lyndon B. Johnson to reinforce the Civil Rights Act by signing the Voting Rights Act. Progress hung in a precarious balance, but if you squinted you might be able to see a brighter future ahead.

Marshall, an early Vietnam War protester and an active member of Northern organizations that supported the civil-rights movement in the South, was nervous when the group went to a pre-tour State Department briefing in Washington, D.C. A civil servant presented Marshall with a thick dossier listing the details of her activist history, then quickly set the file aside. It was an unsubtle reminder of the government’s surveillance capabilities, and perhaps a veiled threat to insure that Marshall tamped down her more radical inclinations while on tour. However intimidating it may have been, the dossier didn’t preclude Marshall from participating. “The fact that I would be openly critical of its policies could well serve as proof that the country was truly a democracy committed to respecting the First Amendment rights of even its most vocal detractors,” Marshall recalls in her memoir. “Thus, Washington might well come out the winner every time I opened my mouth.”

In 1965, there was no Twitter from which the President hurled threats and insults at American citizens, no cable news network dedicated to providing a platform for noxious propaganda and debunked conspiracy theories. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson was not declaring himself above every law, check, balance, and critique. And the government, while far from living up to its highest creeds, was not broadcasting a dangerous, pugilistic counter-narrative as Hughes, Marshall, and Kelley traversed the European continent. It was a simpler time to be a cultural worker called upon by one’s country to share one’s view of the country.

This past fall, I was approached by a cultural-affairs specialist at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin about doing a multicity tour through Germany in celebration of Black History Month. Marshall was on my mind as I accepted. The European tour changed Marshall’s writing life by deepening her friendship with Hughes and broadening her perspective, if not her readership. Mine wouldn’t be a tour of the Continent, and I would be alone, but the plan felt glamorous and sufficiently ambitious: Berlin, Leipzig, Halle, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Bonn in just nine days. I was on a fiction fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, and I was not ready to come home, where I, like many other independent writers and artists, have to navigate an exploitative health-care system for coverage; where I argue with people whom I’ve known and loved for a long time about the immorality of using the word “illegal” to describe a child; where I spend many moviegoing experiences on edge for fear that I might be machine-gunned before the credits roll. I agreed to participate in the tour not only in order to extend my time away from these now quotidian American conditions but also hoping that I could do some good. A mistake. My brain was working with an outdated system of norms.

On Saturday, January 4th, President Trump tweeted a litany of threats toward the Iranian government and people, warning them against retaliating for the killing of Qassem Suleimani. The most damning tweet threatened to “HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD” fifty-two targets within the country, some of which are “important to Iran & the Iranian culture.” Like many others, I was horrified, and also shocked at my own ability to still be shocked by this President. The United States Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist who mirrors the President’s mendacious sparring style on social media and in the press, retweeted the President’s thread. The official Twitter account of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin echoed the Ambassador’s rhetoric throughout the week. Senior members of the Administration have since backed away from the President’s threat to attack Iran’s cultural sites (which would be a war crime, according to the United Nations), and the President has too, though he has not deleted the original tweets. This is a familiar pattern: Trump says something beyond the pale and those around him assure us that it will never come to pass, or that the public misconstrued his words, but the original message lingers, both in our minds and, often, in his timeline. On Wednesday, January 8th, I pulled out of the Embassy-sponsored tour.

For cultural workers without the protection of university tenure or other secure institutional backing, the stakes of being affiliated with the wrong people or organizations, thereby alienating our readership or audience, are high. We are obligated to don the many-brimmed hat of opposition researcher, publicist, and political strategist. We comb through the biographies of the philanthropists who fund our prizes and fellowships, making sure our participation doesn’t harm the larger work that we intend to do through our art or hang a cloud over that most fickle of modern intangibles—optics. The organizations we partner with do much the same vetting, lest we enter a room of strangers eager to hear what we have to say and somehow kill the mood.

Under the Trump Administration, the challenge for cultural workers who agree to participate in official events is akin to swimming upstream in boiling waters. Civil servants, thinking of the long game—the point in the future when Trump will be gone and our democracy will be restored—task cultural workers with creating a counter-narrative of America while their employer puts forth a pernicious, deleterious version of the country. But how will this anticipated moment of restored democracy arrive if we behave as if events unfolding in this country were normal, as if our collective house were not on fire?

These cultural attachés are, in effect, saying, “These are the lies we are currently obligated to put forth, but you are welcome to be our guest and, within reason, present a different opinion,” as if countering lies with facts were a mere matter of perspective. Even worse, whatever critiques you do make feed the image that the members of the current Administration have carefully constructed for themselves: embattled, scorned by the élite (artists, no matter their income, are always classified as members of the élite), and the wielders of their own special brand of truth. What we have learned as we enter the fourth year of the Trump Administration is that it feeds off attention of nearly any kind—to such an extent that I was initially loath to even mention the Ambassador’s name.

The President’s threat to Iran’s cultural sites not only exemplified the depth of his Islamophobia and interest in prizing certain cultures over others; it also highlighted the worst of this President’s penchant for contradictory narratives. He would endanger civilians if necessary, and also wipe out evidence of centuries’ worth of cultural accomplishments made in their country. Then he would turn around and paint those same citizens as victims of a terrible, oppressive regime, while simultaneously keeping in place the ban that prevents them from travelling to the United States and restricting their ability to seek asylum. In my case, participating in Embassy-sponsored events in Germany would be tacitly co-signing the President’s narrative of winners and losers in the larger world order: the universities, theatres, and civic centers where I was scheduled to appear in Germany being winners, worthy of artistic engagement, and the mosques, libraries, and institutions of his enemies being losers.

The civil servant who approached me in Berlin last fall did not pull out a dossier of my donations or political activities, as the one who met with Marshall had, but by the end of our conversation I got the sense that it would be preferable for me to refrain from making too many overt criticisms of the current Administration. The fears that career Foreign Service professionals feel under this Administration are informed by the President’s dogged pursuit of dissenters and outliers within the government, and we have seen how quickly he will throw an individual or an entire agency to his wolves. Being inside is better than being cast out, these civil servants reason, for the sake of continuity and the preservation of relationships abroad. This is not the job of the artist.

In my case, as a fiction writer, the artist’s job is to harness experiences, images, and language to create a narrative with multiple entry points for exploration, in the hope of scratching the surface of some broader truth. The truth is, admittedly, squirrelly, but in fiction it might take the form of a narrative that aims to correct the historical record, provide context, or imagine a different future. The writer John Keene, to cite one brilliant example, in his collection “Counternarratives,” provides new avenues and alternatives for exploring established historical events, such as the story of the first black man to arrive on the island of Manhattan, in the seventeenth century.

While at the American Academy in Berlin, I wrote and presented an essay as part of a symposium at SAVVY Contemporary, a collective art space that marries its visual-art exhibitions with related public events. Scientists, historians, musicians, dancers, and writers from around the world presented on the topic of toxic exchanges, which occur most often when Western nations pay developing nations to house or dispose of their waste and cast-offs—everything from factory runoff to defective clothing. I was one of just a few Americans who presented that day, and many of the artists’ narratives rightfully highlighted the role of the United States as an outsized creator of trash and toxic waste in the global waste-management crisis. My essay, a recounting of my family’s history of living in Southern California, in close proximity to oil refineries and a former toxic-waste dump, was not aimed at papering over these views of the United States. Its only aim was to explore how toxic exchanges happen on a smaller, more intimate scale. Like all the other arguments, it was written and presented in the good faith that our goals were the same: to better understand phenomena that were rapidly affecting us all. Because of this, my essay was a success, at least as much as any writer speaking in front of a room of strangers can dare to hope.