The Ungrateful Refugee Read online

  Refugees will spend the rest of their lives battling to be believed. Not because they are liars but because they’re forced to make their facts fit narrow conceptions of truth. An officer digging for a single inconsistency does not act in good faith. This is not how honest people listen for truth.

  ‘I’ve been sleeping in phone booths with my children for a month.’ Your clothes are clean. Where do you wash them?

  ‘A powerful Basij vows to kill me.’ It sounds like a personal matter.

  ‘I’m a lesbian from Ethiopia. I will be killed.’ How do you have sex with another woman? Describe it to me.

  How is one to present the truth to such a listener? When he accepts only one danger and there are hundreds. When he has no empathy for the daily threat of unchecked violence, when the soldiers, who may not have been targeting you specifically, shattered your psyche, nonetheless. How do you make your true story the ‘right’ kind of true? If your listener already has far greater lies embedded into their worldview, then the only way to sneak the truth into their mind is covertly, like sneaking medicine into a child’s food. Perhaps this is why Christ spoke in parables.

  Truth is hard work – it is rigour. You can lie with sloppy facts. And you can tell the truth with well-crafted fiction. It is all a question of motive: whatever your technique, do you wish for the listener to come closer or further from understanding a place, a situation? If, after hearing your story, they could drop into your past and live it for themselves, would they say, ‘I understand now,’ or would they feel tricked?

  Stories lie when they’re dead, when they reveal nothing new about the world. When they’re heartless or mindless or a deflection from more important stories. When characters are one-dimensional or flat, they lie. Language lies when it obfuscates, or distracts from the way things are.

  George Orwell warned that the most common way we lie isn’t with stories but with words, which we twist to suit our purposes. When we rely on clichés, for instance, we try to pass off shallow ideas as considered ones.

  One of my business school classmates died. His friend shared the news via email. In minutes, replies appeared: ‘Words cannot describe,’ said one. ‘Beyond devastating,’ said another. We sincerely feel. Our sincerest grief. Our deepest condolences. I was struck by the hyperbole: ‘Beyond devastating’, from one who hasn’t chosen to see the deceased in a decade, is untrue. Devastating is the end of a spectrum: what is beyond it? What do you say if your own child dies?

  The language of grief is raw. Grieving people don’t use pre-fabricated phrases. They succumb to the five senses, to surprising images. My classmates weren’t sad. They were ‘replying all’. This is how our public figures speak to us. This is the language of ‘thoughts and prayers’ and, as recent experience shows, tired, empty sentiments lead to inaction. Lying happens in the most benign, well-meaning moments.

  Originality is the privilege of the educated. And yet, when the refugee refuses to be original or specific, her story fails; she is sent away. If, in her terror and shame, her memory alters or embellishes, collapsing ten years of suffering into a year, or changing a lost hand to a lost arm, it is because she knows that if you were transported to her home, you’d see hangings, shootings, beheadings. You’d say, ‘Get the hell out.’

  When you lift your babies into a dinghy, you show your truth. Shame, trauma and fear may strike you mute, but that act is enough. [N]o one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark, writes poet Warsan Shire.

  And here is the biggest lie in the refugee crisis. It isn’t the faulty individual stories. It is the language of disaster often used to describe incoming refugees – deluge or flood or swarm. These words are lies.

  Many news outlets report total asylum requests as a proxy for asylum seekers. ‘Sometimes, this includes second requests,’ says Mr Pouri. Another source of double-counting error is the Dublin Regulation, which limits asylum applications to one European country; many who enter the Netherlands have already registered in another European country. When they are sent back there, Dutch entry data aren’t adjusted. ‘You can’t just count each time someone enters the door. If the true number is a fraction of what some of the news claims, then this is fearmongering with a motive.’

  UNHCR data show 68 million displaced people in the world. Of these, 40 million are internally displaced, 25 million are refugees and 3 million are asylum seekers. But these numbers don’t specify that most refugees go to neighbouring countries. Only a few million try for Europe, and yet everyone thinks that Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq are emptying into the West. In 2017, the twenty-eight European Union countries had 650,000 first-time asylum seekers. That’s 1,270 per million people in the population, or one refugee per thousand natives. Europe turned away more than half of those. The other half became EU refugees – adding one refugee per roughly two thousand in population for that year. Put another way, you’d need to go to four massive weddings or two graduations or a small concert to encounter a single new refugee. That is not a deluge. 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. In many cases, the pursuit of that bounty is the very thing that has impoverished and war-ravaged the East. Maybe we should just pay our dues. Maybe we shouldn’t lose our minds if we see four Muslims walking down the street, one time.

  Nativist fury, not an exile’s pleas for rescue, is the irrational spectacle, the unearned reaction, in today’s refugee narrative.

  And yet, here is the dilemma at the heart of asylum storytelling: with each passing day, the refugee behaves less like an honest petitioner. Like the lover kept waiting, his desire overwhelms him. He becomes intense, unattractive. What irony for the asylum seeker to know that every hour in limbo makes his story less believable (‘I can’t tell . . . he’s hysterical!’) and salvation less likely. He grows frantic, a risk to a new country. Meanwhile, the actual hysteria, the insidious nativist rhetoric shouted down from safe perches, doesn’t sound like a lie at all – it sounds clever, rational, calm.

  Waiting compels melodrama. So, if in desperation the exile decides to take a breath, learn the rules (according to those who cringe at Eastern manifestations of sorrow) and make a true thing appear true, is that a lie?

  This question never fails to plunge me in icy shame, transporting me to my high-school remaking, the admissions committees who, thinking they had found passion and talent, fell for the symptoms of my disproportion.

  The last thing Mr Pouri tells me is that, after a few months, all the refugees forget his phone number. They fall out of touch. They never return to thank him. ‘They think Europe is paradise. That if they can only be free of Iran or Iraq or Turkey, life will be heaven. Soon they realise that it’s not.’ Once the new life begins, bringing its own complications, people get mired in the everyday. They forget the rapture they once felt. Calming is a part of assimilation, after all. Great joys and dramas pass quickly into the air.

  I say goodbye to Mr Pouri an hour before my flight. He offers to walk me to the gate. As I’m packing up my things, he reaches into his briefcase and pulls out a box of mixed nuts. ‘I knew I’d take up your time to prepare for flying, so I brought you this for your journey.’

  I’m starving and unsure what to say. The nuts throw me off my game; he doesn’t seem to notice. ‘Thank you, Agha Pouri,’ I say in Farsi.

  At the gate, he says goodbye, pats me on the back. A guard stares at us. In our functional clothes, we look very much the refugees we once were.

  I’m grateful for all that he’s told me. On the plane, I remind myself to keep in touch, even as the months pass and that feeling wanes.

  When I grow up, I want to be like Agha Pouri. Why did his family leave him? Maybe I don’t know the whole story. Of course I don’t.

  I spend the
flight remembering Baba, his pockets full of sour cherries, whom I left behind thirty years ago, in a third-floor office in Isfahan.

  PART FOUR

  ASSIMILATION

  (on shame, past selves and chameleon life)

  I.

  In the Edmond Public Library, one early-nineties afternoon in the stacks, I came upon the solution to this puzzling universe we now inhabited – Harvard. It became the great project of my young life. I had found my future home, a place with no stepsisters eating their feelings, no stepfathers bursting with unspent fury, a place without tube-topped grandmothers watching and judging, without blond boys with names like Chad and Brad and Tanner and Taylor shouting that you belong in your druggie apartment complex. Instead, this new place would be full of strange girls who count everything, who maybe have a raw spot on their neck, or maybe their arms shoot out in front of them sometimes, or maybe they don’t have these quirks but they love stories and puzzles and math problems, funny girls, like I was in Iran, girls who would one day change the world. The criteria were daunting. Everyone with a hope of getting in had stellar grades and test scores. They were all athletic and brave. Most were nationally recognised for something. It would be hard, but not impossible. Soon I would be twelve and this was my great advantage – no one my age was planning yet, but they soon would. I only had a handful of years to learn to do something, anything, better than every other kid in the country.

  I considered swimming and tennis. I had learned to swim in the brain-melting heat of Dubai, so I had stamina, and tennis was my mother’s girlhood sport, her pastime before the revolution. I signed up for a beginner’s lesson at the YMCA. I showed up with an old racket and blue street shorts down to my knees and glanced around. ‘Am I in the wrong class?’ I asked the instructor, a boy my age, when the class filled with six-year-olds. ‘Nope,’ he said, undaunted. ‘Let’s do this!’ In our suburb, it seemed, people chose their sports early. There were too many wealthy girls in Oklahoma with more passion for tennis than I had, more money, more time and muscle. I would never even win a local title. I ruled out swimming for the same reason, though I found a low-hanging fruit: I could be an American Red Cross lifeguard just by passing a series of timed tests.

  I chose Taekwondo, not because of my stepfather and his third-degree black belt, but over his loud objections that it wasn’t a sport for women. I chose it precisely because it was deeply unattractive to other girls. It wasn’t sexy or elegant. All the glory came from bloodying or being bloodied. You could really fuck up your face.

  I convinced my mother that it was ideal – it would teach me self-defence. I would have to share sweaty helmets and practise strangleholds on geriatric hobbyists for months before being allowed to practise on serious athletes, but when I walked into that studio, I knew I was right. There were almost no girls my age. The male-to-female ratio was roughly three-to-one. And, further improving my odds, championships at the local, state and national levels were handed out by gender, belt, age and weight categories. I could win a national championship against skinny greenbelt girls; I could starve myself into their weight category, make myself a block of muscle competing with anorexics. If this was the way one gained admission to a top university in the United States, strange as it might seem, I could adapt.

  I began practising Taekwondo for an hour, three times a week. Soon, I was at the studio every weekday, then every day, then four or five hours a day. I stopped eating fats. Then fats and sugar. Soon, I was surviving on water-packed tuna, pitta bread, mustard, baked potatoes, watery fruit and gallons of water. In a year, I was one long block of muscle and had stopped menstruating. My thighs no longer touched. I never relaxed my abs. Highly literal as I was in my new language, I thought bouncing a coin off my abs was a real thing – I made it a goal. I woke from frequent nightmares and my first waking instinct was to tighten my abs. Each time I performed drills on the kicking bag, pivoting on the thick carpet until the balls of my feet bled, I thought: I am a refugee girl with brains and muscles and I’ve landed in a country where every road is open to me. There may be stronger, better people who hate Iranians or women, but I’m deaf to them. I have a green card tucked away with Maman’s treasures, in a spot I can check. I have everything. I won’t be a pussy about bloody feet.

  Some nights I failed to lift my own spirits. I would wake up and cry in Maman’s arms. ‘I’ll never get into Harvard. I’ll die ordinary and forgotten.’

  ‘You won’t!’ said Maman. ‘You’re already not ordinary.’

  ‘I’m not Harvard-worthy,’ I’d weep. ‘Look, my knees are a mess.’

  Maman snorted. ‘Oh God, Dina joon,’ she said in English. ‘You’re crazy but very proudable! You get in. Please eat something.’

  I won many trophies and medals, including a state title in both forms and sparring – every medal was stamped with two men fighting, just like the wrestling medal I had found in the empty closet. I displayed them proudly: those girls who had teased me were cheerleaders now, a sport founded on the notion that women should stand aside and cheer on men instead of sweating and bleeding for their own success. Girls like that would get into Oklahoma State and they’d throw parties to celebrate. I felt sad for their wasted potential. What happens, I wondered, if the next Marie Curie is born into a pretty Oklahoma body? She’d take a science class or two where the teacher would keep calling on Chad or Brad, she’d stamp out her frustrations on the tennis court and die the wife of some middle manager – America, I was learning, was no feminist paradise.

  And yet, Oklahoma gave me some of my greatest joys.

  In 1994, when I was fifteen, we became American citizens. I was relieved. The following Fourth of July, we attended a citizenship ceremony on the football field of a local college campus. Dozens of new citizens from the last year would be sworn in with us. It was a bittersweet day, the stadium filled with cheering locals, a line of men, women and children winding around and around the field toward a microphone at the end zone, where each of us would be named and sworn in. I stared in wonder at the others in line: I didn’t realise there were this many other brown and yellow people in Oklahoma. Yes, there were a handful of black people, a few Jews here or there. But this many Indians? This many Sri Lankans and Pakistanis and Chinese and Bangladeshis and Iranians and Afghans? Where had they been hiding? (Not that I had looked.)

  Halfway through the ceremony, an elderly Indian man was led to the microphone, where he introduced himself and swore allegiance to the United States. When he was finished, he raised his fists and thrashed the sky. ‘I AM AMERICAN!’ he shouted into the microphone. ‘FINALLY, I AM AMERICAN!’ The crowd erupted, joining his celebration. As he stepped away, he wobbled and collapsed from the effort, but someone caught him. He turned back and smiled to the crowd to show he was OK, that this fit of joy hadn’t killed him, then walked away.

  That’s my favourite day as an American, my first one as a citizen, still unsurpassed. No one was putting on a face that day. No one felt obliged or humbled, imagining their truer home. That old man was heaving with love. The people in the stands were roaring with it. It’s a complicated memory for me now. I refuse to deny the simple and vast beauty of it, though I know that they cheered not the old man himself, but his spasm of gratitude, an avowal of transformation into someone new, into them.

  I loved winning at a male sport. I was still angry about so many things – hijab, the Islamic Republic, the fat old church men who made high-school football players feel like gods while they shamed women who dared to want too much. Try as I did, I couldn’t reconcile Christianity with what every instinct told me I deserved; I couldn’t believe that God wanted humility and submission from me and greatness from some boy who could hardly add. Now and then, I had a small triumph. One fall, at sixteen, I spent a Saturday in an advanced Red Cross Lifeguarding course. After years of intensive Taekwondo, my legs were skinny and iron hard, like golf clubs. That morning, twenty teenage lifeguards entered the pool for an endurance test, treading water without arms
for ten minutes. It was an easy test: most of the kids in the class were on swim teams. We yawned through it. But, when the whistle blew and the test was done, only half the group left the water. The rest smiled and treaded on. Everyone cheered – a challenge! At the thirty-minute mark, it was down to a handful of boys, me and one other girl. ‘Let’s get the ladies out and see who’s got this thing!’ someone shouted. The girl and I glanced at each other. She mouthed, ‘Keep going?’ and I nodded. When she dragged herself out at around fifty minutes, the boys hooted. Someone slapped her butt. I decided I would die in this water before I let those boys outlast me. I closed my eyes and conjured up the moral police and our leering associate pastor and the Oklahoma parishioners who talked casually of protecting their daughters from the corruption of college. And when I opened my eyes, eighty-seven minutes had passed, a whistle was blowing and the last boy was lifting himself out. The class stood dripping at the edge of the pool, clapping as if it had been a friendly game. I treaded water for another minute as a ‘Fuck you, bro’.’ Then I got out, accepting somebody’s extended arm, and I collapsed on the tiles.

  I lay there for a while watching the inside of my eyelids change from reds to blues. ‘Well, that was weird and intense,’ a far-off voice muttered.

  How else was a person supposed to live, I wondered? How do you find any happiness without goals? Without a place to go? Maybe it was just me – home was already far away; I couldn’t be stuck in this nothing land.