Dina Nayeri

In her first work of nonfiction, winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize Dina Nayeri--an author whose "exploration of the exile's predicament is tender and urgent" (The New Yorker)--examines what it means to be a refugee through her own story of childhood escape from Iran, and through the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers.

What Immigrants Never Tell You

The Ungrateful Refugee

Michelle

We are constantly assimilating to each other, all of us, because we want to love and be loved.

No one wants to transform. And yet no one can avoid it--we alter with every breath. Other people transform us with their love, their kindness, and also with their indifference. We change by being seen or unseen. We badly want to show ourselves to each other. Those who have suffered stumble in the attempt. In trying to connect without succumbing to harm, they behave clumsily, their words tense, cautious, sometimes hurtful.

Refugees will assimilate as surely as time will pass.... But whatever their place on the spectrum, assimilation begins in unseen places. To enforce it is to demand performance.

Sometimes I felt like a fraud, trying for something that wasn't meant for me.... But of the many things Tae Kwon Do taught me, the most vital was this: the body adjusts, just as the mind adjusts. "Habits take three weeks to form," said my instructor. "The suffering ends there." Every habit becomes easy with time. Every identity and practice and profession, no matter how grueling, is open to a person willing to survive for three weeks--it takes three weeks of hard work to transform into anything you are pretending to be. And if you look and behave like it, it doesn't occur to anyone to call you a fraud.

Looking down from high above, an honest image isn't a flood or swarm. It's a small stream, or a thin, dying herd, finding its way onto a vast, fertile land. The world isn't pouring into Europe. What few broken and wretched lives the richest nations take in, they should do so graciously, as the chief consumers of the world's bounty.

For centuries, the civilized world has respected "the right of asylum." It is an ancient juridical concept recognizing the right of the imperiled to sanctuary. Historically, whatever criticisms arise, every Western government has respected and understood this principle--until now. In the new century, this simple, foundational belief is in question among the world's freest, most comfortable populations.

Every true story has strangeness, things that can only happen to those people at that time--the unbiased listen for it, trying to imagine an unknown world. But the biased look only for familiar oddities, the ones that match and validate their own story.

And there is another complication. To offer a "true" story is a guilty business. I understood this only after becoming a writer. Every memory falters, skips, adorns; the story takes on mythic or hagiographic qualities because the mind is thirsty for meaning. How tricky our memories, how inconvenient their gaps and contradictions, how vulnerable to desire.

"In Iran, it was dangerous to call yourself a Christian. Only real believers found their way to our church. Here, everyone is just born with that label. It doesn't mean anything. It's not faith. It's habit. Here, the Christians are like the Muslims in Iran... praying out of habit." (Dina's Maman)

"You know what I love?" says Paul. "When they complain about the selection. Because that means that they've forgotten they're in a camp. They're briefly transported and they're just people in a store, with money in hand, complaining about yogurt."

Jayme Bosio

Dina Nayeri does an amazing job describing her experience as a refugee - so much so that I could feel her isolation and displacement. I wondered if we were in Italy at the same time; me as a young college student getting to explore the world for the first time, while Dina was stuck in a holding pattern in a country that did not want to claim her. Did I drive by the Hotel Barba on my many trips outside the city? I'll never know, but I desperately wanted to connect with her. I don't think I've read a book that evoked this level of empathy in me. I highly recommend it.

Alissa Thrasher

Christie Crandall 

Alexandra Vo

Cristina P Miclea 

What is it like to be a refugee? It is a question many of us do not give much thought, and yet there are more than 25 million refugees in the world. To be a refugee is to grapple with your place in society, attempting to reconcile the life you have known with a new, unfamiliar home. All this while bearing the burden of gratitude in your host nation: the expectation that you should be forever thankful for the space you have been allowed. Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother, and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually she was granted asylum in America. Now, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with those of other asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement. In these pages, a couple fall in love over the phone, and women gather to prepare the noodles that remind them of home. A closeted queer man tries to make his case truthfully as he seeks asylum, and a translator attempts to help new arrivals present their stories to officials.With surprising and provocative questions, The Ungrateful Refugee recalibrates the conversation around the refugee experience. Here are the real human stories of what it is like to be forced to flee your home, and to journey across borders in the hope of starting afresh.

Tamara Al-Qaisi-Coleman

A Finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction "Nayeri combines her own experience with those of refugees she meets as an adult, telling their stories with tenderness and reverence.” —The New York Times Book Review "Nayeri weaves her empowering personal story with those of the ‘feared swarms’ . . . Her family’s escape from Isfahan to Oklahoma, which involved waiting in Dubai and Italy, is wildly fascinating . . . Using energetic prose, Nayeri is an excellent conduit for these heart–rending stories, eschewing judgment and employing care in threading the stories in with her own . . . This is a memoir laced with stimulus and plenty of heart at a time when the latter has grown elusive.” —Star–Tribune (Minneapolis) Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel–turned–refugee camp. Eventually she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement. In these pages, a couple fall in love over the phone, and women gather to prepare the noodles that remind them of home. A closeted queer man tries to make his case truthfully as he seeks asylum, and a translator attempts to help new arrivals present their stories to officials. Nayeri confronts notions like “the swarm,” and, on the other hand, “good” immigrants. She calls attention to the harmful way in which Western governments privilege certain dangers over others. With surprising and provocative questions, The Ungrateful Refugee challenges us to rethink how we talk about the refugee crisis. “A writer who confronts issues that are key to the refugee experience.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees

The Ungrateful Refugee What Immigrants Never Tell You

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