The Ungrateful Refugee Read online

  What a clever girl she is. She describes school lunches. ‘The meat is orange!’ She tells me that when children tease her, she goes away and thinks, then writes down what she will say next time. Her brother is popular because of football (as mine was, for American football). He’s beginning to understand that he can outwit poverty, that displaying shame is an undoing. When the children ask if he has an Xbox, he smirks and says, ‘Xbox? I play with two magnets at night.’ They think it’s hilarious. Sport is making him confident. Good going, kid. I learned that trick at twenty-three.

  I find that I love the children, though Minoo exhausts me.

  In the evening, Maman Moti texts. How are the roses? Last time she visited, she brought a rose bush for our garden. Now if I’m silent for too long, she asks after them – this saves her pride. She has planted a piece of herself in our garden, rooting herself to us since her home frightens her.

  When I began volunteering with refugees in London, an aid worker warned me that I might be frustrated. ‘New arrivals have so many needs. Everything is hard at first. They drag their feet. You need to be patient in ways you wouldn’t be with a friend.’ I like this woman – she is frank and empathic. She understands shame and she handles people’s dignity with care. I promise her that I’ll try. I’m not a patient human, but I’ve been a terrified foreigner. There was a time when I wore the same outfit every day, aching for my school uniform, when I refused to shape a pile of wet papier-mâché.

  Sometimes Minoo appears in my nightmares – I see her accepting a dossier from a cleric; in the dream, she is sent by the Islamic Republic to find me. I wake up whispering, It’s in your head, you madwoman. On those mornings, I can’t separate the anger from the guilt and I lash out at Sam. I do insane things like count all the shirts I bought in Amsterdam, or find that lipstick from my thirtieth birthday. I have to locate it because the itch, the metal bar, need tending. Am I the right person for this? Look at me, trying to soothe myself by counting my possessions. It’s gross and unsubtle. I’m a caricature of myself. Should former refugees have a hand in assimilating the newly arrived? Maybe my grandmother has it right. I’ll fuck Minoo up.

  On a drive through the Cotswolds last year, I saw a poster, sponsored by UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party, demanding Integration, not multiculturalism. To crave transformation from each other – to want others to change into us – seems a natural survival instinct of the ego. That sign reeked of the ego’s fear of extinction. But in forcing assimilation, are we asking for performance? We want to see that newcomers are happy, grateful, that they’re trying. But real gratitude doesn’t present itself loudly, in lofty gestures. And learning to posture is a much quicker process than transforming – to quell nativist fears we grill burgers and attend church, listen to Coldplay, buy old polo shirts. What if one day we learn to like those things? Which is a truer moment of change?

  Whether born into safety or danger; sometimes people need rescue. They need to be let off the hook for that – after rescue, they need balance, work and rest, love, home. They need a chance to figure themselves out. The painful work of forging a new face must be slow, starting within.

  In his Confessions, Saint Augustine asks God for freedom from physical desire, but not yet. ‘For I was afraid lest You should hear me soon, and soon deliver me from the disease of concupiscence, which I desired to have satisfied rather than extinguished.’ He both craves and resents the transformation. He fights against it. And he knows it will take time. He wants it to take time, so that he can come to terms with his desire, to satisfy it one way or another, and perhaps because he realises that a quick transformation won’t be real or lasting.

  In asylum interviews, no one believes an instant conversion. And yet, the moment the refugee is welcomed in, he is expected to make just such a quick transformation, to shed his past, to walk through the gates clean, unencumbered by a past self. Can a person’s heart and mind change in an instant? Can the habits of his hands, the words on his tongue? My mother’s did, though her psyche had been preparing for it for years. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James famously describes the conversion of a fourteen-year-old boy, when, for only a second, Christ appears in his room, arms extended, bidding him to follow. To James, such experiences are as authentic as slow apostasy. More than that, they are the psyche’s way to redemption – James’s theory doesn’t reject the notion that my mother’s subconscious had been preparing for years. It embraces that. Her soul was looking for redemption and she found it.

  In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James says that psychology can’t give an answer to why there has to be a moment when a mind’s ‘centre of energy’ shifts, or why it comes when it comes. ‘All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystallize about it.’ I am reminded of Baxter’s irreversible axis-tilt, the wedge that is our truest story. What is my truest story? The day I fumed at the pasdars berating my mother? When I saw Khanom Yadolai transform into an old woman and understood the purpose of hijab? The day I read about Harvard in the college entrance book? The day I got a letter from Princeton that said ‘Yes!’? Maybe I am religious. But those moments weren’t my conversions. Since adolescence, my every transformation has been incremental, orbiting my intellectual life but leaving it intact – it is the core of my web; the one unchangeable thing. College, becoming a writer, they weren’t remakings. So maybe my conversion happened much earlier, that first morning on the blacktop when I decided to look away from Khomeini’s beard and look for my own name on a list on the wall. ‘Is nothing sacred to you?’ my ex-husband asked after I wrote about our divorce. I felt an instant of panic, then calm. An answer fell easily from my mouth. ‘Writing is sacred. Books are sacred.’ My point of view is sacred.

  ‘A mind is a system of ideas . . . which mutually check or reinforce one another,’ writes James. ‘The collection of ideas alters by subtraction or by addition in the course of experience, and the tendencies alter as the organism gets more aged . . . But a new perception, a sudden emotional shock, or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration, will make the whole fabric fall together; and then the centre of gravity sinks into an attitude more stable, for the new ideas that reach the centre in the rearrangement seem now to be locked there and the new structure remains permanent.’ This description of religious conversion sounds an awful lot like the core of the web being blasted away. Like Pooyan, I don’t believe that adults can do away with their core; it’s too fundamental. A refugee’s sudden conversion from Islam to Christianity can be honest and powerful and life-changing, but I take that to mean that she had never made Islam a foundation for her identity, or that Islam had slowly lost that position. Either way, at the time of conversion, instantaneous as it was, the centre of her identity was safe elsewhere. Over time, that centre may, or may not, shift toward the new religion and merge with it. Again, I don’t think that happens in a day; though (and this is vital for immigration officers to understand) awareness, commitment and euphoria might.

  Accepting that conversion can only be an outcome of a psychological process, not a disruption of the self, James’s description sounds more like assimilation: never sudden, never an epiphany, even if it is attached to a dramatic moment. It is always a long time coming, an answer to a search.

  It sounds like my assimilation – my devotion to an academy, offering myself up for a grade, these weren’t new. Toiling slowly remade me, but the basic nugget of my identity was unchanged from year to year. That the psyche enables conversion, that the soul prepares for redemption, over years, this makes me question the notion that conversion remakes the soul into some ‘new structure’. You can’t prepare for annihilation – preparation implies that something, some tiny thing, will survive it.

  Early in my teenage years, Baba got a visa to visit us in Oklahoma – it was surreal, the most jarring thing that could happen to a teen in the mi
dst of an American remaking. I was embarrassed by his loud, marrow-sucking ways: his big, red moustache and enormous ice creams and tangerine shorts. The way he took us to a Japanese grill and ordered a bottle of sake for himself. When I kept blushing and turning away, Baba joked that next time he would stop in Dallas or New York to have the Iranian washed off him. After a few weeks with us, Baba succumbed to the church’s proselytising and allowed himself to be baptised. I didn’t object, but I was appalled by the way everyone was playing along. He hated religion. Didn’t they see that he was faking? And for the worst reason, to avoid social discomfort!

  And yet, maybe, that is where cultural change begins. We fake new habits, we commit to the task, until the habits come without forethought. Maman’s first prayer to Jesus can’t have sounded all that natural. My first American spelling test was a mess of backward letters. But we were already the thing we were pretending to be, because we were devoted.

  I believe in slow baking. I also know that the flavour is decided long before the baking is done, when the batter is mixed and poured. Transformation is decided in an instant and it takes years. Augustine’s prayer to be remade slowly, to have a while longer with his desire but ultimately to change, moves me. It is wise, humble and self-aware.

  A sign says Integration, not multiculturalism! It might as well say, Don’t stop time! Refugees will assimilate just as surely as time will pass. Some will live for three decades as if they’re in the home country, then call it a done deed when they enjoy their first bite of Marmite or peanut butter. Others will be indistinguishable from their hosts in a year or two. Most will become chameleons, able to go back and forth. But whatever their place on the spectrum, assimilation begins in unseen places. To enforce it is to demand performance. There are things we crave from each other whose value we diminish by asking for them: love, gratitude, understanding. To have these things, we must first offer something of ourselves. In refugee communities, volunteers often ask each other, ‘What can I do to make it easier for them?’ They offer their homes, run errands, set up language tables, soccer games, meals. Again and again, I’ve met neighbours like these. The question, though, isn’t one of generosity but of shame, dignity and belonging. Permission for the stranger to show his true face. In every small interaction, one ego shines, while the other fades. To the native-born who want to open their arms, I would say: let yourself fade away, ever briefly. Don’t shine in your good deeds, because people keep their dignity quite near the core of their identity. Show your humblest face (at first). See what happens to the question of assimilation in a year, in two years. 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.

  Minoo’s caseworker leaves her job. It turns out she never even put Minoo’s family on the list for subsidised private housing. I rage – I call Sam’s brother, Daniel, the human rights lawyer. ‘It’s time for the lawyer treatment,’ I say. I write to the council, demanding a meeting. They delay, for a translator. I am the translator she has chosen, I write. I am taking careful note of all your actions from here on out. They find a translator.

  Her Persian is bad. She’s a Kurd from the evictions unit that they’ve dragged in. I end up doing most of the translation; she jumps in now and then. Sam’s brother is fabulously intimidating. We discover that the humiliating questionnaire has to be repeated. Minoo bursts into tears, her chin dimpling, shoulders shaking. She hides her face in her hands.

  Halfway through the interview, we find out that the Kurdish woman is an expert in London housing. Feeling underused, she begins advising us on neighbourhoods where Minoo’s family may have a shot of getting a house. Minoo sniffles. We describe Enfield and Haringey, assuring her that there are safe boroughs outside central London. Afterward, I get the translator’s number. ‘Should we call her to hang out?’ I ask Minoo. ‘She’s Persian.’

  Minoo wipes her face and says, ‘Maybe.’ She heads for her Tube.

  One day over coffee, Minoo opens up to me. She tells me about the family’s first nights in a London hostel. Mice dashed brazenly about as the children pulled their feet onto the shared bed and screamed. Then they all held each other and collapsed into laughter. ‘With us it was cockroaches in Dubai,’ I say. Minoo and I chuckle into our coffees, like real friends. I think I would’ve liked the version of Minoo who lived in Isfahan. She says, ‘I used to work all the time. I was like you, with nursery and a job. But did you know sometimes in Iranian nursery they sedate the children? They give them cold medicine with sleep aids. You can’t do anything about it. You can’t prove it.’ She sighs, sips her coffee. ‘When we were crouching from the mice, my son said, “I like it here because you can be my mom.” So, the mouse room is actually a sweet memory for me.’ I remember my brother looking worriedly at Maman. But who will do your man things?

  ‘You’ll tell each other that story,’ I say, ‘when you have a big house and he’s a doctor and famous footballer.’

  ‘Yes!’ she says, ‘God willing.’

  The next day, the man from the council visits Minoo at the hostel building and compels her, without me or Daniel present, to add a ground-floor restriction to her housing request. She loses the next available flat, which is on the second floor. When we complain, they write to Minoo and Daniel that they won’t communicate with me any more, having discovered that I’m a writer, a thing I’ve told them in every call and meeting. They are certain I’m writing a book about Minoo, a thing they have no way of knowing and isn’t true (yet). They demand a medical examination, to decide if Minoo’s husband can use stairs. The family’s assurances aren’t enough, as if they don’t suffer daily alongside him, as if they aren’t the ones on whose shoulders he will lean. Barred from communication, I dictate emails for Minoo to send the council. They ignore all pleas on behalf of the children, who have grown into adolescence in a tiny room, in one bed, with their parents. On our next call, Minoo’s voice is barely above a whisper.

  III.

  On 8 March 2018, International Women’s Day, I walked into parliament with several hundred women from forty organisations, mostly undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers from Sub-Saharan Africa, to lobby for safety, dignity and liberty. ‘Shut down Yarl’s Wood!’ we cried, protesting the infamous detention centre where many are held for weeks or months with no purpose. Eventually, most Yarl’s Wood inmates are released back into English society, though not exactly, because when you are barred from work you become a part of a separate underground society.

  How do you assimilate if you’re in quarantine?

  Lawyer and activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, who chaired the parliament lobby, teaches a class on intersectional feminism in the headquarters of the advocacy group Women for Refugee Women. Last spring, I attended a prep session for the parliament lobby. Her students, most in their forties and fifties, sat around a long table in their worn cardigans and bright mismatched jackets, having taken care with their hair, with their accessories. I was hypnotised by the rainbow of purses, all big and bright and fat with necessities. The women in Shola’s class have left everything behind, sometimes even their children. Some are trafficked, raped, prostituted, many undocumented, vagrant, without hope or family or welcome. Some have endured female genital mutilation. Some have been going from basement to basement, couch to couch for two decades, the asylum rejections piling as their years slip away.

  In class, their excitement, their questions and casual scepticism betrayed the fact that these women had only recently found their voices, their own power. Their enthusiasm was childlike and yet they were hardened by years of rejection and indifference. Most had been in detention centres at one time or another. But here they were making political campaign plans, poundi
ng the table, sipping weak tea from paper cups as a handful of children ran around the room, amusing themselves. ‘Train us, don’t detain us!’ one said, her accent thick and melodic, a hard emphasis on the rhyme. Though the ladies were prone to bouts of elation, no one laughed at that. ‘Yes!’ they said. Others chimed in. ‘I have a brain,’ said one woman, ‘why can’t I use it here? I am being wasted.’ Others wanted to ask MPs about the cruelties at Yarl’s Wood detention centre, or the use of the National Health Service to root out undocumented immigrants. ‘If I am sick, treat me! Don’t try to find my status. My status is that I’m sick.’ Most wanted freedom, a status so they could begin living.

  Shola’s class is a marvel: it’s not about surviving in a foreign land, or about perfecting English, or how to write a résumé. It’s about the rights and obligations of women: We must learn! It’s about the suffragettes and their modern counterparts in the Me Too and Times Up movements. Shola is preparing her students to speak out with their stories and to make a case for themselves to lawmakers. They have no freedom to build a life and a vocation and most are left to stagnate and grow old without roots. They are abandoned. Many use this word, along with another: ‘I am a slave here,’ they say, well aware of the weight of that word.

  Without the liberty to work, the confidence to report violence and exploitation without fear of one’s own smaller crimes, a dark economy springs up. To stateless women, those without refuge or protection, it assigns three uses: household work, sex and childcare. Once branded ‘illegal’, most women find their way into these kinds of work, sometimes for cash, sometimes for food and a place to sleep. It always begins with childcare, then they are expected to perform the other two duties.