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

"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."

"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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Ungrateful Refugee quotes

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