The Ungrateful Refugee Page 22

  To satisfy an asylum officer takes the same narrative sophistication it takes to please book critics. At once logical and judgmental of demeanour, both are on guard for manipulation and emotional trickery. Stick to the concrete, the five senses, they say. Sound natural, human, but also dazzle with your prose. Make me cry, but a whiff of sentimentality and you’re done. Stay in-scene, but also give compelling evidence of internal change. Go ahead. Try it. It’s not so hard, you penniless, traumatised fugitive from a ravaged village, just write a story worthy of The New Yorker.

  How does any ordinary person reprogramme the storytelling habits that they learned as children, listening on the laps of their mothers and fathers?

  Everyone wants ownership of their one, formative, true story – they want to choose how it will be told. My mother despises that I write about our escape, because that is her story, her tilting planet. She gets to decide what it looks like and she has settled on a hagiographic story of faith and the power of Jesus Christ. There are no muddying details revealed. Everyone is protected from embarrassment. Jesus is exalted and that’s that.

  On the other hand, when I write stories that have nothing to do with our escape, stories of mothers and fathers struggling in America, she thinks that I’ve chosen the wrong wedge – that the moment of irrevocable change is ignored elsewhere on my arc, while I gaze at a trivial spot a few metres down. My narrative, she believes, is salvation by a parent who toiled to offer opportunities that I squandered. My stories disregard this thread, though it should consume me, and so they lack an essential element: respect from the child. Respect and thanks from the world.

  Dutch asylum lawyer Marq Wijngaarden tells me of a Chinese woman from a persecuted sect. She was afraid for her life and she stretched herself, her sense of privacy and shame, to find her most essential story. She gave detail after detail of her conversion process, all those moments of agony and delight, just as she had been taught. But the IND officer called her uncooperative, because she wouldn’t give a straight answer to ‘Why did you leave?’ She found that part obvious (when you choose the right wedge, everything before and everything after falls into place; it becomes obvious). Her religious conversion was the point of no return in her story, the moment when the world is irreversibly altered. It was the undoing, the moment to which any good writer would ascribe the greatest importance. But it was also the part that IND officer had heard most often – he was numbed to it. Wijngaarden had the case reviewed and won, but the first rejection was unnerving: they need to be better at hearing people.

  So, you see, poor, traumatised fugitive from a ravaged village, even if you do choose the right wedge, even if you do gather up the sensory details, avoid melodrama and write that story worthy of The New Yorker, nothing’s guaranteed – even the greatest writer can’t reach a lazy, cynical reader.

  VI.

  In Amsterdam, my first stop is Parvis Noshirrani, Kambiz’s old friend. I take a train to Almere, a depressing suburb close to a refugee camp. I poke around the business park where Parvis has a Persian restaurant. I take a breath and push open the door. Parvis makes tea. All afternoon we sit in the empty eatery and talk, about exile, truth, Kambiz. Persian men come in and out. Some say hello and sit with us, reminiscing about Kambiz. A name comes up: Ahmed Pouri. Kambiz visited him once, maybe to ask for help. We drain our teas and Parvis puts on coffee. He invites me to return the next day to talk to others in the community. Before I leave, he gives me a phone number to call if I want a complete picture of asylum struggles in the Netherlands. I take the scrap of paper. It says: Ahmed Pouri.

  Over the next few days the name keeps appearing. Undocumented immigrants and long-time Dutch citizens and asylum lawyers and aid workers keep pushing his phone number into my hand, saying: Speak to Ahmed Pouri. He isn’t a lawyer. No, he’s not an asylum worker, either. He’s a helper. He makes things happen because he can see through both lenses. He understands the asylum process, Dutch culture, many Middle Eastern cultures (especially Iranian) and most of all human laziness, sloppiness and foolishness. That’s how he gets people their papers. Ahmed Pouri is a refugee whisperer, a fixer of status troubles – his NGO is called PRIME. One afternoon, I call him. He answers on the second ring, his voice rich and warm. Later I find that, though a stranger calls him every ten or fifteen minutes, he always answers as if expecting a friend. I tell him my name. ‘I know you, young lady!’ he says. ‘I read your work. You write very well.’

  Instantly I like him. Here is another fatherly voice to tell me I’m clever. Before I have a chance to ask him for an interview, he begins talking – he doesn’t stop for a long time. He has made it his life’s work to teach refugees how to be believed by the Dutch, how to tell a convincing story the Western way. He tells me about families and lone wanderers he’s worked with, about the many suicides, about his efforts to make Iranians understand Dutch logic, about the injustices of the detention centres, about Hegel and other philosophers. He quotes Sun Tzu, that to win you must know yourself, your enemy and the battlefield. ‘They know zero of the three! How can they win? How can a 2500-year-old foreigner understand and not an Iranian doctor?’ I laugh at the presumption of Iranian superiority that all middle-aged Persians share. ‘The asylum process is about crafting a story that is believed so you can stop waiting and make a life,’ he says. ‘I tell refugees what to say to IND and to reporters so they don’t work against themselves, so they don’t make all refugees look like crazies and liars and manipulators. So that their humanity shows the European way.’ I find this moving and start to speak, but he continues on, ‘There are two things to know about your audience (your ‘enemy’, to continue the Sun Tzu analogy): who he is and what he considers truth.’

  ‘Yes,’ I begin again. ‘Can we set a time to—?’

  ‘Look, Ms Dina, the asylum officer is cynical and overworked. He’s not listening for the truth. He’s looking for a single lie. Just one. An asylum lawyer stood up at a recent conference and spoke about a conversation he overhead in the IND lunchroom at Ter Apel: one asylum officer bragging to another: “Today I had a real and true political dissident. It was hard work, but after three hours of pressing, I got a contradiction out of him and sent him packing.” He was so proud that he had found his needle in the hay, he didn’t even hear himself call the man “a real and true political dissident”.

  ‘That is your audience,’ says Mr Pouri. ‘Then there’s their notion of truth. There’s a terrible tactic in Holland. In a given year from each country, there are two or three stories that are most successful. If they only let in gays and Christians from Iran, that’s the story they hear most – what choice does anyone have? After a while they say, “How can everyone from that country be gay and Christian?” They don’t think, We’re the ones who said those are the only legitimate reasons to run, when in truth there are a hundred. So, they say, “Some must be lying”. They lead you down a funnel with a dead end. If you’re a communist in Iran your life is in greater danger than a quiet Christian. But no one gives a communist case because the Dutch don’t acknowledge the gruesome things the Iranian government does to communists – they hang them for drugs or kill them in secret and the Dutch say, “They don’t persecute communists.” If your life is in danger, the Dutch force you into a gay or Christian case. After a while, those stories grow stale, overused and the channel closes. People hear of another.’

  I’m starting to wonder if Dutch calls are covered by my UK phone plan. If they’re not, this trip just got really expensive. He continues on.

  ‘They’ve already decided what is true. If you offer a different story, you are lying. If you confirm their preferred story too often, you are lying.’

  ‘Madness,’ I say. ‘I’d love to sit down with you and—’

  ‘And again, I should emphasise, Miss Dina, that they are dishonest about what goes on in these countries! Many of the rejections come from things they say are impossible, that actually happen all the time in Iran. They apply the logic of a democratic nat
ion to brutal dictatorships.

  ‘I once helped a badly raped Kurdish girl. Soldiers came through her village and raped her in the stable beside the horses. She kept weeping, “I wish I could find a pill to forget the past. I wish I didn’t remember.” She was losing her mind. They rejected her claim. Do you know why? Because half the village had been raped. They said, “You are not an interesting person for the government. It was a random act and you were in the wrong place. You don’t have a credible fear that the soldiers will return for you.” See, your story must be individual. If she had said, “They took me away and raped and tortured me”, that’s individual; but a public pillage isn’t about you. You’re not a dissident, just an ordinary rape victim. You must say, “The government is targeting me. I am a threat to them.” Then, you’re a real refugee. But, tell me, Dina, do you know any Western country where soldiers do this? Those men went to that village to target Kurds. Surely, there is a case in that?

  ‘I swear, I want to gather these stories and make a play of them. I used to joke that if a rapist comes, it’s best to ask, “Please, sir, take me into a room alone for the rape. Please single me out.” Then you’ve got a hope. But group rape won’t help you. You see, the criminal has to acknowledge your humanity for the IND to respect it. If the criminal treats you like a cow in a stable, the IND will too. They say, soldiers don’t come back for the cows.

  ‘I had a former communist come to me, an honest man, no case-bazi. He had spent ten years in Iranian jail. He was tortured in the horrifying ways of the 1980s. His body is a torture museum. He had been free and inactive for years. Every month he checked in with the authorities and got a stamp. One day he saw that the old political boys of the past were being rounded up. Two of his friends disappeared. Memories flooded back and he ran. The IND asked, “Did you get involved in underground work again?” He said, “No, but I have experience with this regime. I know the signs.” The Dutch said, “Impossible. You didn’t do anything, so you’re fine. Your friends must have been involved. But your fear is psychological. Not based on fact.”

  ‘If that man understood Dutch logic, he would have said, “Yes, I did it. The three of us started underground work again. They caught the other two and I ran.” He’d be accepted in an hour. But he told them the facts, expecting knowledge of Iran, and he spent five years in camps. Finally Amnesty lawyers got him his papers, but he’s mental now. Ten years in Iranian jail and five years in Dutch camp. He’s gone. He won’t have peace until he dies.’

  How can this be true? It seems that anyone using such logic is either so foolish that they don’t realise the Islamic Republic is corrupt and fallible. Or they are disingenuous and reckless with refugee lives.

  Briefly, I stop worrying about my phone bill and consider Mr Pouri’s mental space – it is clogged with this one global injustice – that people from the poor and war-ravaged countries of the world are routinely labelled liars and opportunists. How devastating to know something is right and to stand alone against the planet – how torturous to be a socialist or a feminist or a migrant, vilified when you’re only saying, ‘We’re all worth the same.’

  It wasn’t like this for us. We were believed, at least by asylum people. Some asylum officer saw us and waved us through. In 1989, ‘I’m Christian’ wasn’t the most common excuse for leaving Iran. Still, I’ve heard Baba and others casually say that Maman brought it on herself, that she didn’t have to be so reckless. She could have been happy in Iran. She chose to shed her skin and she loves her Lazarus story; it’s her new identity. Before coming to Amsterdam, I asked Kaweh, my resource now for legal and philosophical dilemmas, ‘What if a person puts themselves in the way of danger? Is their escape diminished? Will the officer say, You did this to yourself?’

  He leaned back in his chair. This time his answer was simple and sure, no lists or legal caveats. ‘There is no such a thing as bad faith in life-or-death situations,’ he said. ‘This was established in 2001. If you put your life in danger in order to escape or be granted asylum, you’re still in danger.’

  ‘So, if I come here and get rejected and I have some writing ability, so I write ten articles blasting the regime and I sell five to The Guardian . . .’

  ‘I guarantee you asylum in two weeks,’ he said. ‘Courts have accepted that prisons in Iran are so bad, just being there for a few days will breach your human rights. There’s the prospect of detention, torture, rape. These are breaches of human rights. Bad faith is irrelevant in this case.’

  Funny, the things they let go.

  ‘This is an area where people have the wrong instincts,’ says Mr Pouri. ‘They want to claim innocence. It’s better to claim guilt.’ The more dumb and reckless you were at home, the better. The same applies after you’re in Europe. If you’re the one poking the lion, you get pulled out first.

  So then, what do they want? The story must be compelling, full of strange, but not too strange, details. It must not mimic other stories, but the heart of it, its motive and inciting incident, can be contrived, impure, selfish. You can posture. You must posture. Show that you behaved as a Christian or communist or gay: we don’t care why. What a strange storytelling tradition. In MFA workshop, we learned that the why matters more than almost anything else. How can Iranians – who are trained in poetry and polemic, for whom love is a wordy monologue, every truth buried under layers of meaning and all stories begin at creation – adjust to it? In Holland, they pass around Mr Pouri’s phone number.

  When I put this paradox to Marq Wijngaarden, he says I have bad information – in Holland all they care about in conversion and LGBTQ cases is the process, the motivation. What compelled you to live this way? He is adamant that the law forbids officers from asking for any sexual facts and certainly they can’t ask for any to be performed. They must reject any photos or videos freely offered – this is the ruling of the European Court of Justice. In fact, he says, you can gain asylum without ever having had sex with someone of the same gender, if you can give a full account of your coming out process and the discovery of your desires. For conversion, you must first prove your rejection of Islam. It’s not enough to behave like a Christian. You must be an apostate and a slow-cooked one.

  Mr Pouri says, ‘This is one of the Dutch lies. They say they’re evolving, but the officers still ask humiliating questions. If you’re gay, you have to prove that you’re part of the gay community. You go to clubs. You are out.’ The law may have adapted, but the nuances of coming out haven’t sunk in for the individual asylum officers. Until they do, you can’t be a quiet, bookish lesbian. Forget about being questioning, bi, celibate, heartbroken and not in the mood for new love, culturally beaten down or too afraid to act. Every gay person has to be a flamboyant scene-kid, out at clubs and fashion shows and on Grindr texting strangers at a nightclub. And according to Mr Pouri, you have a better chance if you act out the cliché than if you try to convince them of a complex internal process.

  It’s easier to hang a case on big, showy gestures and concrete dangers than good faith or motivation. Maybe it depends much more on the individual officer’s ego and biases than we’d care to admit. Some want an honest motive and a convincing intellectual process in the home country; others demand evidence of danger. Many have no respect for international standards. I remember Shrouk El-Attar, a twenty-five-year-old queer Egyptian engineering student who, during a petition to the UK Parliament in March 2018, spoke of the humiliation of having to describe her sexual encounters in graphic detail to asylum officers. Whatever the official line, many gay asylum seekers have such tales. They are asked to perform their gayness, to prove they have acted on it.

  Mr Pouri stops mid-sentence to take a call. Then he rushes off. He is meeting a family of deportees about to be put on a plane. He agrees to meet me at Schiphol Airport four hours before my departure back to London.

  The next day, I return to Almere. Parvis introduces me to Houshiar, a day worker for a local Iranian businessman in construction, handbags and tailoring. ‘T
his boy has a good story,’ Parvis says. ‘He’s illegal. Keeps getting rejected. You’ll see.’ After two rejections, Houshiar has given up on asylum. He lives illegally at the camp, sneaking in and bunking with friends.

  About an hour into my conversation with Houshiar, I realise I am missing a vital chunk of the truth. There is something here that is perhaps hidden from me. We are talking about Houshiar’s faith, the day he became a Christian and his struggle to be believed. But, somehow, I sense that I have the wrong wedge. This man has a story and I’m not hearing it.

  Houshiar wears a leather jacket and skinny jeans. He is young, modern, except for all the hair gel. He shows me photos of his beautiful son, a boy styled to look like a European adult from the late nineties. Every photo is a studio shot. He shows me his unhappy wife, speaks casually of the way his family took the boy from her. He says he converted because the boy was gravely ill and, in the hospital, a Christian man prayed with him. His boy was set to die, but when he recovered, Houshiar believed.

  The more he speaks, the more I crave the real story – it isn’t that I don’t believe the one he is offering. I just know he has a better, more fundamental one. What compelled him to drop everything and run? Though he knows the language of the convert (‘I gave my heart’, ‘I repented’, ‘I found a flock’), nothing he says feels like enough.

  He pauses and looks at me, searching my eyes. Do I believe?

  The restaurant door chimes announce three new visitors, a well-dressed Iranian-Dutch couple in their early sixties and a man around Parvis’s age – he is Houshiar’s employer, the one who gives him odd jobs. The couple were naturalised decades ago. They have lived in Holland for thirty years, speak Dutch and have raised their children in both cultures.