The Ungrateful Refugee Page 21

  It was a boot to the gut. I felt like I was dropped in front of a tribunal of asylum officers, unhappy white men openly hating me for coming in and taking too much, wanting too much, their birthrights. Now they would tear up my passport and send me back. I raged at the gall of this man – an Armenian from Iran should know better. Casting doubt as if there is no universe of unseen and unrecorded favours and threats. As if, in Iran, only the guilty are hanged. As if every credible threat of death is recorded in triplicate at the ministry of intelligence. Memory is a tricky thing, I thought, but I have albums, I have vivid scenes in my mind, I have trinkets I carried in a backpack across the ocean. My life happened – how dare they question that. What’s more, the Three Miracles had made me; they shaped my identity. I thought of all the hours spent retelling that story for the approval of Americans and Europeans and even fellow Iranians, for parents of friends and admissions committees, anyone who cared to listen. I thought of Kambiz and how he had an Iranian community that had likely heard his story dozens of times, but was powerless to help him. Had they tried?

  Thank God that Home Office interviewers aren’t former asylum seekers. What great temptation to roll up the ladder behind you and move on, to question every story according to the narrowest standards, trying to match its peculiar details to your own. 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. Knowing this, how can a lucky petitioner believe those who come after?

  And even if the former refugee had no trouble with his own story, his memory flawless, his papers in place, there’s the sense of entitlement and heroism that follows escape, the desire to keep his story pure, to enforce that purity in others. And this desire is complicated by all that he knows of Iranian culture. ‘Iranians exaggerate, that is the main problem in preparing them for questioning,’ says a stellar Iranian asylum lawyer I met in London. ‘I won’t tolerate a lie.’

  For years I obsessed over this man’s doubts. When my relationship with my mother was strained, I doubted my own memories. Some of the man’s questions were easy to dismiss, like motive: my mother has been a faithful, hard-practising Christian for thirty years since immigrating. She is brutal in her judgment of new arrivals who claim faith but don’t practise, who don’t know the language and the secret codes of the underground church. ‘Yes, they deserve rescue, but they should tell the truth!’ She is also not an economic migrant, or else a terrible one, since she moved from the respect and comfort of a doctor’s life to poverty and factory work. She pulled herself up from that new starting point, working as a medical researcher, organic farmer, pastry chef, Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand. But never again did she enjoy the material comfort she had had in Iran. No more Diana haircuts and leather bags and black-market Nivea Creme – Maman rubs lemons on her face and plants basil and reads her Bible.

  And yet, if one were to swim deep into the dark waters of the psyche, would one find in my mother a pure and guileless love of Jesus or a desperation to please her own mother, to escape a bad marriage and to find some agency after a lifetime of obedience? After twisting into knots to reject every radical desire of her heart – to be seen, to be held equal to men – she couldn’t become a feminist, but she could rebel against most extreme injustice while making her mother happy; she could claim liberation while remaining a good girl who serves male ambition. Can such desires make the love of Jesus true? Well, who knows? Devotion is always murky. Anyone claiming pure love is lying.

  Hence the absurdity of at least one kind of asylum interview: the religious devotion test (and its cousin, the sexual orientation test). The very notion of it requires falseness. What is faith when it’s so mired in fear? What is devotion? Or desire? Terror can conjure or stifle any emotion. Fear can render it true in the moment, convincing in some, false in others.

  It is often a question of whether the storyteller herself believes. So maybe a practised ear can know, if he’s listening well, if he understands the language of truth. I take the question to that stellar asylum lawyer in London. He is Kaweh Beheshtizadeh, former runaway, teacher and archivist for the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran, who arrived outside of Birmingham in the back of a lorry and is now one of the most accomplished young asylum lawyers in London, winning Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year in 2017. When we meet in his Croydon offices in 2017, Kaweh has only heard of Kambiz in passing, but when I keep pressing the subject, he humours me. ‘It may have been a weak story, or maybe he had no evidence. Or there was a contradiction somewhere.’ Since 2011 Kaweh has worked on over 700 refugee cases from at least thirty countries. He has lost fewer than ten cases in the last two years. He still has the political ambitions of his youth and I won’t be surprised if one day he’s a member of parliament (MP).

  ‘Those who lie do so for three reasons.’ When he can, Kaweh numbers his answers – There are three issues here, or, Let’s establish four points of context – I can’t imagine a time he wasn’t a lawyer. And I can’t imagine speaking to him in Farsi. Our interviews are all in English and neither of us gives it a second thought, until a Persian dish or a Farsi expression is mentioned. ‘First, bad advice from friends. Second, success stories taken out of context. Third, experience in other countries, which they assume will apply to the UK.

  ‘I don’t let my clients tell lies. Before anything, I want to sleep at night. This is people’s lives. It’s my life.’

  I ask Kaweh to take me through a mock interview. ‘I want to see if I can pass it. Interview me as if I’m a Christian asylum seeker.’

  ‘Haven’t you already done this once?’ he asks, chuckling. I have – the fact that Daniel and I spoke like Christian children, the fact that we were obviously raised in the faith, was a deciding factor for our family.

  ‘I want to experience it as if it’s 2017,’ I say.

  He shrugs. ‘What is your religion?’ he says. The questions come quick and easy, like memory verses. He has heard them a thousand times.

  ‘I’m a Christian,’ I say – it was true once.

  ‘When did you become a Christian?’ he asks.

  ‘When I was six.’ I think of my first night in London, decades ago.

  ‘When did you become a Christian?’ His expression doesn’t change, except for a small squint in his eye and I almost don’t register that he’s repeating his question. He doesn’t believe me.

  ‘When I was six,’ I repeat, more emphatically.

  ‘OK, then please tell me about it.’

  ‘We were visiting London in May 1985. My grandmother told me about Jesus. My mom converted on that trip too. Then we returned to Iran.’

  ‘Did you go to church in Iran?’

  ‘Yes, it was an underground church.’

  ‘Which church?’

  ‘It was a home church. It rotated. It didn’t have a name. I don’t think.’

  ‘How often did you attend and for how long?’

  ‘Three years. Sundays and Wednesdays. Christmas. And sometimes when my mother needed to talk . . . I probably shouldn’t go into this . . .’

  ‘Does anyone there know you?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I mean, I don’t know how to reach them now.’

  ‘What’s the name of the pastor?’

  ‘Brother Yusuf . . . what was his last name? My mother would know.’

  ‘Did you get baptised there?’

  ‘Yes . . . No, actually, because my father wouldn’t agree and they had these sexist rules . . . I got baptised in Lake Bracciano, Italy, on 7 May 1989.’

 
‘Do you have a certificate?’

  ‘Somewhere . . . OK, I understand. When do they stop?’

  ‘When they’re satisfied. Hours. Days. Often after they find enough contradictions.’

  Kaweh doesn’t say it, but they’re not looking to rescue. They’re looking to reject.

  ‘You’d need documents for as much of this as possible,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know if my mother had all that. She probably did.’

  ‘It was a different time.’ He sits back in his chair.

  The questions are straightforward. They can be believably answered in many true and untrue ways. How can you separate a studious liar from a person who has stepped into that church, shaken hands with that pastor? I can’t tell. If you ask me, the biggest stretch of the imagination is that underpaid bureaucrats have such profound insight into the human heart.

  Since I met Kaweh, Kambiz has become more insistent in haunting my writing hours; I’ve so conflated his fate with Kaweh’s that the two men move side by side in my imagination – everything Kaweh accomplishes, every ounce of talent and pound that he spends on helping refugees and the English, is a triumph Kambiz will never have. Every fruitful minute in Kaweh’s life is a minute Kambiz spent aimless and waiting. Would he have become a successful contractor? A chef? An electrical engineer? Why was one believed and the other sent away? How did each tell his story?

  V.

  Twice in my life I have been instructed to tell a story that, if believed, would open the door to a new life, a chance to remake myself. Children know instinctively how to tell good stories, especially true ones, and so my asylum interview wasn’t the burden it is for adults. I didn’t agonise over it. It didn’t tickle the itchy spots in my neck and palms. The interview didn’t make them worse. I hardly remember it now. I know we were interviewed in spring 1989 in the American embassy in Rome, travelling there by bus from our refugee hostel in Mentana. I know I had not yet turned ten.

  My second petition for a new life was at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, after I left Amsterdam and started over as a writer. Again, I had landed in Middle America with its white porch swings and hot summer nights. My disorientation was so similar to those first Oklahoma days. I dragged my body. ‘I have exile sickness,’ I said to no one and tried to hold in the tics.

  On the crisp autumn afternoon when my novel was first workshopped, I was consumed with fear that I had told lies. Of course, I had lied. I had written a novel. A running joke in workshops is this: a novice submits a story and it falls flat. It isn’t believable. In defence of his story, he shouts, ‘But it happened!’ Too bad, our teachers say; that’s why the novelist has a tougher job than God. God can have coincidences and melodrama and silly, pointless scenes that don’t move the story forward. That it happened doesn’t make it true enough for fiction and, like the asylum seeker who isn’t believed, novels that are seen to lie are doomed to death.

  ‘What makes a story true?’ we would ask in seminars and workshops. There were many answers: vulnerability, a singular, unashamed voice, surprising inevitability, originality. Orphan details, Charles Baxter told us once, bring a story to life. These details are specific and strange and they seem not to belong. A naked woman wandering in the rain, a child gnawing a chicken bone on a bench – our protagonists pass by them, sometimes reflecting on them, sometimes not. They are part of the world. In How Fiction Works, James Wood asks, ‘How would we know when a detail seems really true? What guides us? The medieval theologian Duns Scotus gave the name “thisness” (haecceitas) to individuating form . . . Because thisness is palpability, it will tend toward substance – cow shit, red silk, the wax of a ballroom floor, a calendar for 1808 . . . But it can be a mere name or an anecdote; palpability can be represented in the form of an anecdote or a piquant fact.’ I scribbled in my notebook: Korean ribs on basmati rice.

  ‘What makes a story important?’ we’d ask. This seemed more urgent.

  In a seminar called ‘Undoings’, Charles Baxter told us that the stories worth telling are the ones in which someone’s world tilts on its axis and they are forever changed – there is no undoing what’s done. He told us to aim for stories that, though they cover a day or a week of a life, allow the reader to imagine everything that came before and everything after. Most lifetimes only have a handful of stories like that – you must slice out a ‘wedge’ from the arc of a life. The wedge is that life’s most vital story. The consequence of choosing the wrong wedge is that your story strikes false.

  I spent those two years confused. Here I was trying to dial back my life’s biggest lie (that I had turned myself into someone’s European wife) and I had chosen a school for making up people and inventing stories. Still, in 2012, I started writing the kind of stories Baxter told us would strike true – moments of undoing, however subtle. And I populated them with the orphan details I knew, the ones from my home, my family.

  I started writing ‘auto-fiction’, staying close to stories I had lived, but used the tools of fiction, combining characters, collapsing time, inserting invented images. It was, I believe, the purest, most powerful way to tell honest stories. Auto-fiction removes any impediment to vulnerability, so that the writer can focus on creating a fresh, compelling voice and a moving narrative. At the same time, it stays close to the raw story that only a single person can know and contains all the power of that lived reality. It is a chance to rewrite the facts in service of a larger truth.

  My mother, on the other hand, believes in facts as they happened – one universal, irrefutable reality. She is brutal in questioning new refugees; sometimes she embarrasses me. She thinks that, if something is true, we should all remember it the same way. If we don’t, someone is mistaken or lying. So, when I choose from her traits for my fiction, she believes that I’m writing about her, the real her, and that I owe my invented story the perfect truth of who she is. ‘Is this what you learned in writing school?’ she said after reading one of my stories. ‘You lied about me!’

  ‘It wasn’t real! It’s fiction,’ I said.

  ‘Yes . . . but it was still full of lies,’ she said.

  My mother and I have been having this same argument for years. She keeps saying that the facts are sacred. I keep saying that they’re a tool – that truth requires point of view, as well; it needs to be cobbled from facts.

  I wonder what our world would look like if refugees were asked, instead of reciting facts, to write a story that shows their truth in another way. What if those stories were then evaluated by professional editors, using the same skills they use to see if novels are ‘true’ enough? It is a fantasy, but I decide to try it. In 2017, I join SINGA UK to launch a refugee storytelling workshop. For our first session, we sit around a big table at Libreria Bookshop in London and we struggle for two hours. Half the class demurs. The other half doesn’t speak English – why are they here? I keep thinking of a story from my cousin Pooyan’s wife, a visual artist and fellow Iranian: she gave an Afghani boy pencils and asked him to draw. He drew Sponge Bob. He drew a truck. He drew a crane with spidery arms, two men hanging from it with crosses for eyes. Then, another Sponge Bob.

  I want to ask everyone in my class to draw a crane, the way in beginning writing workshops you are asked to describe a barn.

  Maybe the new arrivals sitting around my table at Libreria are tired of crafting their one story according to other people’s rules. Maybe they want to create something different now, or to finally tell their story truly, raw and full of dirty details, in the authentic storytelling language of their youth. Because to pass an asylum interview, you don’t just need a true story. You need to tell that story the English way, or 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. The Dutch have something similar. Americans like the possibility of a grand success story, they adore exceptionalism and want to make all greatness American.

  Iranian storytelling doesn’t
satisfy any of these requirements – just watch a film by Abbas Kiarostami. No narrative rules. Iranians have no problem with spoilers – the ending isn’t the pleasure of a story for them. They don’t start in the middle of the action (as Western writers are taught to do) or even at the beginning (where Western logic may take them), they start long before the beginning: ‘Let me tell you about modern Iran,’ they say, because that is how they are trained to begin. And those are the savvy ones; the rest begin with the creation of the universe. But you start philosophising and you’ve lost your Western listener.

  Iranians like symbols and metaphors. Lies aren’t lies if they point somewhere. And you can signal your trauma and shame with a pointed ‘this isn’t something for saying’. Try that on a Dutch asylum officer who asks ‘Why did you run?’ Sometimes traumatised Iranians speak in generalities. ‘The government is corrupt. They’re murderers. I cannot say more. Please.’ So, the Dutch officer decides you’re lying; he won’t change his mind. The English and the American will give you a few seconds more. In Iran, our literature is winding and dramatic. We bury the lede. We flourish and twist. The Dutch and Germans see these as markers of deception – in the Western world, literary critics condemn these techniques as false.