{"id":6530,"date":"2022-01-15T00:00:43","date_gmt":"2022-01-14T22:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=6530"},"modified":"2022-12-17T11:04:33","modified_gmt":"2022-12-17T09:04:33","slug":"meditations-on-the-ungrateful-refugee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/meditations-on-the-ungrateful-refugee\/","title":{"rendered":"Meditations on The Ungrateful Refugee<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
The Khaju Bridge in beautiful Isfahan, Iran, home to writer Dina Nayeri until she was nearly nine years old.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You<\/em> by Dina Nayeri
\nCatapult Publishing<\/a> (2019)
\nISBN 1948226421<\/p>\n

\n

Rana Asfour<\/p>\n

\n<\/h4>\n

\"\"
The Ungrateful Refugee<\/em> is available from Catapult<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thirty years after American Iranian author Dina Nayeri\u2019s circuitous escape to refuge, from Iran to the United States, and distressed at the increasingly \u201chostile\u201d and \u201cunhinged\u201d discourse on refugees in 2016, she finally decided to tell her own story as a former refugee in a bid to make sense of the world she\u2019d delivered her daughter into. Her story is one that has, by her own admission, dominated her personality and compelled her every decision for over two decades, finding a way into her two novels, A Teaspoon of Earth and Salt <\/em>(2013) and Refuge<\/em> (2017). Her latest, The Ungrateful Refugee<\/em>, her first foray into non-fiction, was a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and winner of the 2020 Clara Johnson Award for Women\u2019s Literature.<\/p>\n

In 1985, when Dina was only six years old, her mother, a well-known physician in Isfahan, converted to Christianity in England while on a visit to Dina\u2019s maternal grandmother. And so Maman Moti had left Iran before the revolution, become a Christian and resolved to turn her back on the country and its people. \u201cWe had hoped for asylum in England,\u201d writes Nayeri, but, \u201cMaman\u2019s mother, had, I was told, refused to sponsor us \u2026 she wanted nothing to do with our post-revolutionary troubles.\u201d<\/p>\n

With no recourse but to return to Iran and buoyed by her new faith \u2014 with a huge cross dangling in her windshield \u2014 Nayeri\u2019s mother joined an underground church and became heavily engaged in proselytizing, handing out tracts to her patients \u2014 an act punishable by death in Iran. Despite the parents\u2019 well-respected status in Isfahan, where they had medical offices, friends in high places and degrees from Tehran University \u2014and although Dina\u2019s Baba remained Muslim \u2014 it wasn\u2019t enough to protect Maman from arbitrary arrests or to preserve Dina from abuse at school where teachers would constantly pull her aside, \u201cto a bench between the toilet cave and a nightmarish Khomeini mural,\u201d to ask her again and again about her religion. When she would incessantly declare herself her apostate mother\u2019s ally, the abuse worsened. \u201cVillainy starts on native soil,\u201d she writes, \u201cwhere rotten people can safely be rotten, where governments exist for their protection\u2026Since our return from London, we had lost our native rights; we were exiles in our own city, eyes suddenly open to the magic and promise of the West.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, it wasn\u2019t until 1988, after enduring the Iran-Iraq war, random arrests at the hands of the Gashte-Ershad <\/em>or \u201cGuidance Patrol\u201d and ultimately a threatening visit from the Sep\u00e2h under whose tyranny an unprecedented purge of intellectuals, leftists, and political dissidents disappeared or were massacred, that Dina\u2019s parents finally decided that the time had come for the family to flee. Despite her father\u2019s decision to remain in Iran, he managed, thanks to his influential patients, to secure places for his wife and two children aboard a cargo plane headed to the United Arab Emirates, a flight that would henceforth mark the beginning of their eighteen-month wandering, first as illegal residents in a cockroach-infested apartment in Dubai, then as asylum seekers \u201cfighting boredom\u201d waiting for sponsorship letters in a refugee camp in Italy, until finally heading to Oklahoma after being granted entry into the US \u2014 the refuge that would allow them to build their life anew.<\/p>\n

\n

Once in an Oklahoma church, a woman said, \u201cWell, I sure do get it. You came for a better life.\u201d I thought I\u2019d pass out\u2014a better life? In Isfahan, we had yellow spray roses, a pool. A glass enclosure shot up through our living room, and inside that was a tree. I had\u00a0a tree\u00a0<\/i>inside my house; I had the papery hands of Morvarid, my friend and nanny, a ninety-year-old village woman; I had my grandmother\u2019s fruit leather and Hotel Koorosh schnitzels and sour cherries and orchards and a farm\u2014life in Iran was a fairytale. In Oklahoma, we lived in an apartment complex for the destitute and disenfranchised. Life was a big gray parking lot with cigarette butts baking in oil puddles, slick children idling in the beating sun, teachers who couldn\u2019t do math. \u2014Dina Nayeri<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Once in Oklahoma, Nayeri is ten years old. She spends the first two years learning English and understanding the culture. Despite the family\u2019s feeling of hope that they had found a new place to call home, Nayeri\u2019s initial experiences are brutal. Surrounded by people who know nothing about Iran, her mother faces \u201cprofessional hostility\u201d as a doctor from Iran as well as requests for her to \u201cperform\u201d her story in its skeletal form: the story of being saved by benevolent Americans.<\/p>\n

Dina\u2019s time at school didn\u2019t prove any better than in Iran when it came to bullying, despite spending her teenage years dedicated to diligently fitting in with her environment, \u201cmurdering\u201d all connections that tied her to Iran. In the process she was able to shed her accent and attend Harvard \u2014 she holds a B.A. from\u00a0Princeton University and a\u00a0Master of Education and\u00a0MBA from\u00a0Harvard University. So desperate was Nayeri to prove her worthiness as a \u201cpalatable immigrant,\u201d that she made no fuss when the kids at school labeled her with vulgarities like \u201ccat-eater,\u201d \u201cterrorist,\u201d and \u201csand nigger.\u201d Describing that time of her life, Nayeri writes of an \u201cuprooting and transformation without guarantees, of remaking the face and the body, those first murderous refugee steps \u2014 the annihilation of the self, then an ascent from the grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"
Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and The Ungrateful Refugee<\/em>, winner of the Geschwister Scholl Preis and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Kirkus Prize, and Elle Grand Prix des Lectrices, and called by The Guardian \u201ca work of astonishing, insistent importance.\u201d Her essay of the same name was one of The Guardian\u2019s most widely read long reads in 2017, and is taught in schools and anthologized around the world. Read more about her<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Besides her personal experience, Nayeri peppers her book with case studies of refugees and asylum seekers in recent years from Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria currently languishing in camps in Greece waiting indeterminate stretches for their asylum papers to go through. From interviews conducted in 2016, with the help of Paul Hutchings, the cofounder of Refugee Support, a charity that goes from camp to camp erecting stores with their own currency to distribute donated food and clothing \u2014 to give ref\u00adugees their familiar neighborhood grocery, readers get a vivid picture of the bitter truths and tragic circumstances refugees are up against. Nayeri\u2019s cut throat arguments for dismantling the destructive language of disaster often used to describe incoming refugees \u2014 deluge, flood, swarm, ungrateful, opportunists, economic migrants and liars \u2014 leave readers in no doubt that if anything, refugees are under no obligation to be grateful. Instead, the winner of the UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, believes that the \u201cfew broken and wretched lives the richest nations take in, should do so graciously,\u201d that opportunism is a lie created by the privileged to shame the suffering strangers, and that the asylum process \u201clike the tax system and property and everything else, is biased against the poor and the uneducated, the very people most likely to be running out of fear.\u201d She makes the argument that in conversations about the refugee crisis, educated people continue to make the \u201cbarbaric argument\u201d that open doors will benefit the host nation. The time, she believes, for this outdated colonialist argument has run out: \u201cmigrants don\u2019t derive their value from their benefit to the Western-born, and civilized people don\u2019t ask for r\u00e9sum\u00e9s from the edge of the grave.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Nayeri\u2019s experience and that of the other refugees in her book reveal is that stories and storytelling have the power to change lives, both literally and metaphorically. \u201cEveryone has a story, having just slipped out from the grip of a nightmare,\u201d writes Nayeri. However, refugees and asylum seekers are often forced to make their facts fit narrow conceptions of truth in order to become believable and palatable. Instead of finding truth in grieving, fearful eyes, in shaking hands, in the anxiety of children and sorrow of the elderly, the asylum officer \u2014 who appropriates the rules of good storytelling \u2014 fails to realize when sitting across from a petitioning refugee, that s\/he is speaking to a character in the story, and is not the author. Refugees are expected \u201cto tell the story the English way, or the Dutch or American way. Americans enjoy drama; they want to be moved. The Dutch want facts, the English have precedents, stories from each country deemed true that year, that month\u2026Americans like the possibility of a grand success story; they adore exceptionalism and want to make all the greatness American.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nayeri maintains that what people crave in a successful survival story is not necessarily the realization of the self or the fulfillment of individuals\u2019 true potential, but a desire for refugees to become them. \u201cTo crave transforma\u00adtion from each other \u2014 to want others to change into us \u2014 seems a natural survival instinct of the ego,\u201d she writes. \u201cBut in forcing assimilation, are we asking for performance? We want to see that newcomers are happy, grateful, that they\u2019re trying<\/em>. But real gratitude is private, it cannot be channeled and it doesn\u2019t present itself loudly, in lofty gestures. And learning to posture is a much quicker pro\u00adcess than transforming \u2014 to quell nativist fears we grill burgers and attend church, listen to Coldplay, buy old polo shirts. What if one day, we learn to like those things? Which is a truer moment of change?\u201d she asks. Kindness, she believes, is key. The type in which hosts realize that the toiling, fast-succumbing immigrant is gesturing peace and gratitude \u2014considering all it took to get there \u2014 and therefore to relieve them from the obligation of posturing.<\/p>\n

Dignity, not shame, should be the dominion of refugees and asylum seekers, and that is what lies at the heart of this book. \u201cWhether born into safety or danger, sometimes people need to be rescued \u2026 after rescue, they need balance, work and rest, love, home. They need a chance to figure themselves out. The painful work of forging a new face must be slow, starting within.\u201d Refugees, like most outsiders, won\u2019t help themselves be seen, with an instinct to self-sanitize and to hide their moral struggles, for the benefit of the powerful. This shame, she explains, has contributed to a cynical, sedated world wherein being a fully realized human is the privilege of whites, Christians, and the native-born. Ensuring dignity for those in need, advocates Nayeri, means that we all have a duty to step up, as individuals and governments, to work harder to welcome refugees, and to help them thrive if we are to create multicultural communities that are ready for the future. We owe it to them to ask ourselves painful questions: Why is it, that to some, help must always come with a slap on the wrist? Why do we ask the desperate to strip off their dignity as the price of that help? And why is it that if you are born in the Third World, and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, then your dreams are deemed suspicious, \u201cyou are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief and you are reaching above your station?\u201d<\/p>\n

In the last part of the book Nayeri returns to her story and feels that being a former child refugee has turned her into a nomad, a chameleon, a person who constantly craves resettlement and the urge to start over \u2014 since leaving Iran, Nayeri has lived in the US, the UK and France. Inhabiting different places has given her a clear view in recent years on how people\u2019s attitudes and the governments\u2019 sense of duty towards refugees have shifted considerably when compared with the time her family sought refuge in the West. Today, the acrimonious vitriol springing from \u201cnativist fury\u201d has grown not only louder but become more dangerous. Waits in camp for asylum papers are longer, competing dangerously against finite resources. \u201cWhat,\u201d she asks, \u201cis hell enough for the West to feel responsible, not just as perpetrators of much of the madness, but as primary beneficiaries of the planet\u2019s bounty?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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