It was a view her parents shared, too, ditching America for Spain, once they got past their "mercifully brief...patriotic sentiment" and came to realize that, after the bellicose presidency of G.W. Bush, "the ensuing reign of Obama -- the king of drone strikes, deportations, and other damage" was just more of the same. There was no real difference in the policies of Republicans and Democrats. Ferna'ndez's dad, once settled into Barcelona, spends time writing postcards to the warmongers of the Middle East -- "Beelzebub" (Obama) and "Mephistopheles" (Netanyahu), which probably put him on at least a couple of watchlists.
Early in Exile, Ferna'ndez makes clear her disdain for American-style hypocrisy -- its willingness to force its brand of Exceptionalism, an olio of neoconservative militarism married to debt-inducing neoliberalism, while allowing its own domestic policy-making to so erode confidence in the American Dream that the country entered social and economic crises, so catastrophic that citizens risked everything to elect a populist clown as president. As Ferna'ndez puts it,
Lest folks start to view the state itself as public enemy number one, however, more convenient menaces are regularly trotted out. In addition to the usual domestic suspects --blacks, poor people, immigrants, and so on -- the wider world has proved fertile terrain for the manufacture of any number of freedom-imperiling demons.
They say, 'America, love it or leave it': She left.
But it doesn't mean she doesn't love America -- it's just that, like Nolan, her voice goes against the grain of the times, her tone sounding treasonous (see Susan Sontag) in the ongoing narrative of vigilance against terrorism at any cost, even if the price is compromised freedom. Ferna'ndez grew up hearing her fair share of soldierly tales of foreign deployment in the service of setting people free. Her grandfather "facilitated patriotic assimilation by joining the armed forces, thanks to which he was able to participate in not only the D-Day landings at Normandy but also the Korean and Vietnam wars." And she has a brother who was in Special Forces who discovered through tours in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria that he liked to kill Arabs.
However, she really takes after her journalist father -- Belen, too, writes op-eds (for Jacobin magazine) that question the motivations of various heads of state. She also seems to carry his romanticism. He reads and re-reads Don Quixote, resulting in a memoir that took 17 years to complete. One can see how Ferna'ndez's travels seem quixotic, although, rather than chasing after windmills, she tends toward tracking down the nearest wine bar, with her sidekick Polish-American friend, Amelia.
In her travels with Amelia through Lebanon, Turkey, and Italy, Ferna'ndez's quirky humor is especially effective in painting a droll picture of her locale or situation. While hitchhiking she and Amelia discover "some damn fine people," and "Relatively rare was the occasion on which we had to leap out of a moving vehicle to thwart molestation...." And when things did go bad that way, luckily they went comically bad, such as the time when hitchhiking near the Black Sea, they were picked up by a drunken Turkish doctor, who brought them to a remote locale, then got aggressive and chased them, "leaving us no choice but to hide dramatically beside a stream-facedown-until the coast was clear."
She has a flair for describing scenes that can seem comically self-indulgent, such as when she writes of jogging, "clad in a hideous pileup of sweaters, scarves, and socks," through the mortar-pocked streets of snowy Sarajevo which remind her of "the siege of Sarajevo in the mid-1990s." She ends up in an apartment "not far from the bridge where the 1914 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand sparked World War I," being attended to by a girl who teaches her "essential Bosnian words like 'wine,' 'spinach-and-cheese pie,' and 'catastrophe.'" It's an attractive observational humor.
Similarly, when she writes, "...Italy may not always be the most helpful society on the planet -- witness the boatloads of refugees left to drown in recent years by the Italian coast guard -- the ubiquity of cheap wine made it a suitable spot to sit out the inaugural year of the War on Terror," one pictures a blogger sitting at a cafe table overlooking the sea, getting her post in for the day, while people drown -- all recalling the tone of W. C. Williams' Landscape with the Fall of Icarus ("a splash quite unnoticed"). Her arch, but jocular attitude seems like the right approach for a disgusted, opinionated feminist turning her back on America's fatwa against the Shia world.
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