The Ungrateful Refugee
Dina Nayeri was born in Iran during the revolution and arrived in America when she was ten years old. She is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize. The author of two novels - Refuge and A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea - and contributor to The Displaced, her work has been published in over twenty countries. Her stories and essays have been published in The O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, the New York Times, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Granta and many other publications. She lives in London.
@DinaNayeri | dinanayeri.com
Also by Dina Nayeri
Refuge
A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea
First published in Great Britain in 2019
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Dina Nayeri, 2019
‘Elegy for my Father’ by Mark Strand. Copyright © 1979,
1980, 2007, Mark Strand, used by permission of The Wylie
Agency (UK) Limited and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin
Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 28689 345 1
Export ISBN: 978 1 78689 346 8
eBook ISBN: 978 1 78689 347 5
For Sam and Elena.
You make every country home.
Why did you lie to me?
I always thought I told the truth.
Why did you lie to me?
Because the truth lies like nothing else and I love the truth.
– Mark Strand, ‘Elegy for My Father’
No Way. You will not make the Netherlands home.
– Geert Wilders, message to refugees, 2015
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, ‘age-old pastime of humanity’.
– Roland Barthes
Contents
Part One: Escape
I.
II. Darius
III.
IV. Kaweh and Kambiz
Part Two: Camp
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V. Majid and Farzaneh
VI.
VII. Valid and Taraa
VIII.
Part Three: Asylum
I.
II. Kaweh
III. Kambiz
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
Part Four: Assimilation
I.
II.
III.
IV.
Part Five: Cultural Repatriation
Acknowledgements
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have tried to recreate events, locales and conversations from my memories and interviews with others. I have changed the names of some individuals and places, as well as altered identifying characteristics and details, such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence. In general, if I have not provided a last name in the text, the first name is changed to protect the individual. Examples are Darius, Taraa, Farzaneh, Majid, Valid, Minoo and all the children. My family, for obvious reasons, is an exception to this rule.
In recounting the escape stories of others, I have dramatised, putting as much as I could in-scene. I have only written about events that were carefully recounted to me. Afterward, I researched the times, places and context around each story, and brought the stories to life using sensory details that I found and imagined. Any mistakes are my own.
I have kept my language true to particular times and places. For example, though I use the word ‘undocumented’ now, I didn’t in the 1980s. Our word then was ‘illegal’. Even now, in the casual talk of refugees and lawyers, the word I hear is ‘illegal’. Sanitising language has its dangers. I tried not to do that, even with my own thoughts. For example, I don’t use the word ‘pussy’ now to describe weakness. But I did at sixteen.
Regarding the story of Kambiz Roustayi, the scenes before his arrival in Europe are imagined using what little he told his friends and supporters. Scenes from later in his life, after he had met the people I interviewed, are their accounts of his years in Holland.
The line of poetry from the parliament petition in March 2018 is quoted from a public reading. The poet’s name is withheld since she may not be documented.
In the portions of this book about my own life, my accounts are true according to my memory and perspective.
PART ONE
ESCAPE
(on good faith, credible risk and opportunism)
I.
We became refugees. Somehow it felt more settled than what we had been for the past ten months, hiding out in the United Arab Emirates. There, we were illegal: all the same dizzying displacement, uncertainty and need, but we had to find our own shelter. Without a state to say, ‘Yes, we will be responsible for you,’ we were so unmoored it was hard to fathom a next step. Maybe that’s why every move had been last minute, someone’s kindness or a stroke of luck. Miracles. And so, when we landed in Rome in winter 1989, I bubbled with love for Italy and every Italian; it was unlike anything I had felt for Dubai or Sharjah. This airport was so European, so brimming with leisure; I wanted to run to every kiosk and smell the Western chocolate and touch the expensive fabrics. But a man in a black suit held a sign with Maman’s name and we were led away to a car.
My mother, younger brother and I bundled in the back seat, cold and dirty from the long flight. I tried to stay awake for the ride through the Italian countryside. Finally, after an hour, we spotted a house on a hill, breaking up the rolling valleys in the distance. We had been told that we’d be taken to ‘a good refugee camp’, a temporary safe space for transients seeking asylum outside Italy. It was called Barba and it had once been a hotel. The Italian government had leased this building to house the likes of us, political and religious asylum seekers and passers-through with particular need: elderly family, children. It was exciting to watch Barba appear and to know that, even though our clothes and bedding and daily routines would be those of refugees, though we would be confined there, our house would be on a hilltop, in the husk of a pretty hotel.
We pulled up a winding hill road after dinnertime. Our room was small, perhaps even smaller than the cockroach hostel in Sharjah, and we had no fridge or hot plate this time. Only a bathroom and a bed. We sat on our bed and wondered where we’d get money, if we’d find friends among our neighbours. Would we meet Farsi speakers? How long would we stay? Which country would finally take us? We wondered about that night’s meal.
We considered walking to a store in Mentana. Then someone knocked. An Italian woman, young, with a punkish haircut gestured to us that we had missed the dinner call. That night, for the first time, I saw the canteen, a glass circle overlooking all that lush valley. Now empty and dark, in the morning it would fill up with displaced families like us, Iranians, Afghans, Russians, Romanians. It would buzz with many languages, many kinds of prayers. There would be children, mothers, grandmothers. But for now, the room was silent. We ate bowls of leftover pasta in semi-dark and heavy silence and thanked God that meals were provided here.
Despite its grand skeleton, Hotel Barba was a refugee camp and we had to stay put, as we had no status in Italy. We were served soup, pasta, coffee, bread at precise times each day and we sat in the winter chill, praying that by summer we’d be gone from there. Every day when t
he postman arrived, we would swell outside the mail cubbies, jostling for a good view. We wanted to know, ‘Who got his letter today?’ When someone did, the crowd would hush as he opened the envelope, fingers trembling, eyes scanning, then either wept quietly into his palm, muttering curses, or loudly on his knees, thanking his god. Everyone was frantic for a letter from America or England or Australia or Canada (roomy anglophone countries). A letter would mean the wait was over; our lives could now begin.
In the absence of work or school, all we did was dream, a maddening state, and battle loneliness. We ate with people from our own countries; we prayed in our own ways, some before eating (sitting, heads bowed) and some after (standing, holding hands). On cool days, the children snuck into a neighbouring orchard to steal unripe peaches and plums, because our tongues were itching for something sour and there was nothing else to soothe the craving. I tried to teach some English words to a handful of burly Russian men, skipping around the yard in my pink skirt and pointing to a tree, a fence, a chador, a babushka (the men indulged me by taking notes).
We fought boredom in increasingly desperate ways: an Afghan grandmother collected bricks from a nearby construction site and carried them back to her room under her chador. Her daughter read our fortunes from the left-over sludge in mugs of instant coffee. A young Iranian soldier with his face half-bleached from a wartime chemical burn taught us how to play soccer. Despite his new kind of whiteness, he was as interesting to me as the princes in my storybooks. Perhaps I sensed that he was attracted to Maman. And wasn’t she just me, in another body? Here was a man who wanted us, who wanted to play games with me, to make me laugh and then to look out of the corner of his eye to see if Maman was watching.
We had left Baba behind in Isfahan. I began to understand, bit by bit, over years, that I would never live with my father again. I was beginning to understand other things, too, to peek out from inside my own skin. I spent time with loving grandmothers from many countries. I joined Maman for tea and oranges in the rooms of Russian Christians. I read English books and played hopscotch and became obsessed with having a home again, with ending the wander days, rooting, and with the mysteries of adulthood. I craved everyone’s stories – I was becoming some later version of myself.
In a refugee camp, stories are everything. Everyone has one, having just slipped out from the grip of a nightmare. Everyone is idle, without permission to work or run away, reckoning now with a new place in the world. Everyone is a stranger, in need of introduction. And tea is cheap (at Barba, we all came from tea-drinking countries). What better conditions than these to brew a pot, sit on pillows around a low table and talk? At Barba, I learned to listen and to savour startling details, byproducts of a strange confluence that may never recur: a grandmother hiding bricks in her chador, a splash of cream across a handsome face, a stampede for jam.
It wasn’t just a pastime. Our stories were drumming with power. Other people’s memories transported us out of our places of exile, to rich, vibrant lands and to home. They reminded us of the long, unknowable road. We couldn’t see yet, fresh from our escape, but other sharp turns lay ahead. We had created our life’s great story; next would come the waiting time, camp, where we would tell it. Then struggle for asylum, when we would craft it. Then assimilation into new lives, when we would perform it for the entertainment of the native-born and finally, maybe in our old age, we would return to it, face it without frenzy: a repatriation.
For two decades, our escape defined me. It dominated my personality and compelled my every decision. By college, half my life had led up to our escape and the other half was spent reliving it, in churches and retreats where my mother made it a hagiographic journey, on college applications where it was a plea, at sleepovers where it was entertainment and in discussion groups after public viewings of xenophobic melodramas like China Cry and Not Without My Daughter, films about Christian women facing death and escaping to America. Our story was a sacred thread woven into my identity. Sometimes people asked, But don’t a lot of Christians live there? or, Couldn’t your mother just say she was Muslim? It would take me a long time to get over those kinds of questions. They felt like a bad grade, like a criticism of my face and body, an unravelling of that sacred thread: I am rescued cargo; therefore, I am enchanted. I have purpose. With every good work, I repay the universe. If I didn’t have that, then I would be faceless, an ordinary person toiling for what? Soulless middle-class trifles?
Once in an Oklahoma church, a woman said, ‘Well, I sure do get it. You came for a better life.’ I thought I’d pass out – a 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 a tree inside my house; I had the papery hands of Morvarid, my friend and nanny, a ninety-year-old village woman; I had my grandmother’s fruit leather and Hotel Koorosh schnitzels and sour cherries and orchards and a farm – life in Iran was a fairytale. In Oklahoma, we lived in an apartment complex for the destitute and disenfranchised. Life was a big grey parking lot with cigarette butts baking in oil puddles, slick children idling in the beating sun, teachers who couldn’t do math. I dedicated my youth and every ounce of my magic to get out of there. A better life? The words lodged in my ear like grit.
Gradually, all those retellings felt like pandering. The sceptics drew their conclusions based on details that I had provided them: my childhood dreams of KitKats and flawless bananas. My academic ambitions. I thought of how my first retelling was in an asylum office in Italy: how merciless that, with the sweat and dust of escape still on our brows, we had to turn our ordeal into a good, persuasive story or risk being sent back. Then, after asylum was secured, we had to relive that story again and again, to earn our place, to calm casual sceptics. Every day of her new life, the refugee is asked to differentiate herself from the opportunist, the economic migrant.
Like most refugees after a life-threatening escape, my family and I were compliant, ecstatic, grateful. But we had sustained damage. If the rational mind is a clean road, ours had potholes, pockets of paranoia and fear. Yes, I could summon joy and logic and change. But a single triggering word could trip me up for a day, a week, make me doubt my worth, my new place in this world. Am I a real refugee? The implication burned.
Why do the native-born perpetuate this distinction? Why harm the vulnerable with the threat of this stigma? It took me decades to know: the instinct to protect against competition from a talented horde. To draw a line around a birthright, a privilege. Unlike economic migrants, refugees have no agency; they are no threat. Often, they are so broken, they beg to be remade into the image of the native. As recipients of magnanimity, they can be pitied. I was a palatable immigrant because I programmed myself with chants: I am rescued cargo. I will prove, repay, transform. But if you are born in the Third World and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, your dreams are suspicious. You are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief. You are reaching above your station.
There’s something unnatural and sinister going on here.
My mother didn’t think to question people’s hardwired distinctions. Were we really refugees? She fended off that question by telling our story: she was almost murdered by the regime, so she shouldn’t have to deal with people’s prejudices. She fumed at stories of religious asylum seekers who had lied and she asked new arrivals about the Bible and their underground church – but unlike the native-born around us, she never asked anyone to prove their fear. A tortured mind, terror of a wasted future, is what enables you to abandon home, it’s a prerequisite for stepping into a dinghy, for braving militarised mountains. No one who has lived under a dictatorship, who has scooped up their children and run to a bomb shelter, doubts the fear. To my mother, Christianity is too sacred to lie about and it’s hard to accept that a rigid, illogical system leaves some no other choice, but, at the same time, she knows that the reasons for escape are complex and muddled. They always include a fear and a tangible hope. It’s a reinvention that grows ou
t of your nightmares, but also your drive and agency. And so, the bureaucratic parsing of dangers from opportunity is grating and absurd. Where is the humility? The compassion?
And what is a credible danger in a country that hangs apostates and homosexuals and adulterers and where a hateful finger in your direction is enough to make you one? A country so corrupt that one mullah’s whim can send you to the firing squad or the crane, your gallows, and the sunrise after challenging a pasdar can find you framed for drugs? A country where record keeping is a farce; where, in whispers, the land’s riches are divided among a few; where young men languish without work; where young women wither with unspent ambition and desire; where the enchanting whisper of opium is always in your ear and despair fills your lungs so thickly that your best chance is to be your own executioner?
What is escape in such circumstances and what is just opportunistic migration? Who is a true refugee? It makes me chuckle, this notion that ‘refugee’ is a sacred category, a people hallowed by evading hell. Thus, they can’t acknowledge a shred of joy left behind or they risk becoming migrants again. Modern Iran is a country of refugees making do with small joys, exiled from the pre-revolutionary paradise we knew. With the Iraq war over, their plight is often considered insufficient. Syria is hell. Afghanistan, South Sudan, Eritrea are hell. Iraq is . . . a bit less so? And Iran? What is hell enough for the West to feel responsible, not just as perpetrators of much of the madness, but as primary beneficiaries of the planet’s bounty, who sit behind screens watching suspicious and limp-fisted as strangers suffer?
Meanwhile, we assign our least talented, most cynical bureaucrats to be the arbiters of complicated truth, not instructing them to save lives, or search out the weary and the hopeless, but to root out lies, to protect our fat entitlements, our space, at any moral cost – it is a failure of duty. More infuriating is the word ‘opportunism’, a lie created by the privileged to shame suffering strangers who crave a small taste of a decent life. The same hopes in their own children would be labelled ‘motivation’ and ‘drive’.