EBOOK
About
At 21, Belén left the U.S. and didn't look back. Alone, far off the beaten path in places like Syria and Tajikistan, she confronts violence, lechery, and places where it's hard to find a good glass of wine, and reflects on what it means to be an American in a largely American-made mess of a world.
After growing up in Washington, D.C. and Texas, and then attending Columbia University in New York, Belén Fernández ended up in a state of self-imposed exile from the United States. From trekking-through Europe, the Middle East, Morocco, and Latin America-to packing avocados in southern Spain, to marrying a Palestinian-Lebanese man, to witnessing the violent aftermath of the 2009 coup in Honduras, the international travel allowed her by an American passport has, ironically, given her a direct view of the devastating consequences of U.S. machinations worldwide. For some years Fernández survived thanks to the generosity of strangers who picked her up hitchhiking, fed her, and offered accommodations; then she discovered people would pay her for her powerful, unfiltered journalism, enabling-as of the present moment-continued survival.
In just a few short years of publishing her observations on world politics and writing from places as varied as Lebanon, Italy, Uzbekistan, Syria, Mexico, Turkey, Honduras, and Iran, Belén Fernández has earned a place alongside Martha Gellhorn and Susan Sontag as one of the most trenchant observers of American actions abroad.
After growing up in Washington, D.C. and Texas, and then attending Columbia University in New York, Belén Fernández ended up in a state of self-imposed exile from the United States. From trekking-through Europe, the Middle East, Morocco, and Latin America-to packing avocados in southern Spain, to marrying a Palestinian-Lebanese man, to witnessing the violent aftermath of the 2009 coup in Honduras, the international travel allowed her by an American passport has, ironically, given her a direct view of the devastating consequences of U.S. machinations worldwide. For some years Fernández survived thanks to the generosity of strangers who picked her up hitchhiking, fed her, and offered accommodations; then she discovered people would pay her for her powerful, unfiltered journalism, enabling-as of the present moment-continued survival.
In just a few short years of publishing her observations on world politics and writing from places as varied as Lebanon, Italy, Uzbekistan, Syria, Mexico, Turkey, Honduras, and Iran, Belén Fernández has earned a place alongside Martha Gellhorn and Susan Sontag as one of the most trenchant observers of American actions abroad.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"The peripatetic is political. For more than a decade, Belén Fernández's dispatches from her self-imposed exile from the United States have charted the global sequela of U.S. post- 9/11 economic and military interventionism, its structural causes and traumatic effects, in countries such as Honduras, Turkey, and Iraq. Now, as the imperial core itself decomposes, Fernández's fascinating memoir, Exil
Greg Grandin, author of Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle Cit
"A searing critique of U.S. imperialism that couldn't be more perfectly timed in its release."
Dahr Jamail, author of The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of
"Filleting the silliest man on the planet needs a sure scalpel, and Belén Fernández wields hers with deadly finesse."
Alexander Cockburn