The Ungrateful Refugee Read online

  ‘It seems that going from home to home, not having any place, is my curse,’ says one of the women. ‘I turn up. I feel like an imposition. All I wanted my entire life is to have the dignity of my own home.’ Instead, she has spent twenty years being passed from home to home as unpaid childcare. People offer her a place to sleep on the floor, often on a mattress that she has to procure herself from charity organisations, in exchange for taking full-time care of the children free of charge. If the authorities come, she has to identify herself as the child’s official caregiver, so that the parents don’t get in trouble. This, of course, poses a problem for her because she can be arrested, detained and deported – she is working for room and board, a clear violation of the rules. She has no choice and the families know this. Their excuse is that they, too, are poor Africans (though legal residents) who can’t afford childcare and they are helping someone. If there are houseguests, she is asked to leave for the night. Sometimes the men visit her in the night. She cannot report them. And when the kids are old enough for school, the families say, ‘We’ve done enough for you. You must leave.’

  When you have no rights, everyone has power over you.

  Shola’s mantra is ‘Educate yourself.’ In class, she shouts, points, paces. She teaches with her whole body, takes no back-talk or negativity, offers courage to sceptics. Inspiring and energetic as her activist heroines, she shines in her belief in these twenty-first-century suffragettes. Today’s fight isn’t for every woman, Shola knows. It is for the rootless, the powerless.

  On 8 March, many women told their stories; many begged ‘Set us free’. From Yarl’s Wood. From the torture of detainment after having been beaten and raped in our home countries. But mostly from statelessness, from those who would exploit us. ‘Isn’t the ability to say “no” a basic dignity?’ one woman asked in a poem. ‘Am I non-human?’

  When women are powerless the first thing the world exploits from them is what men perceive as the assets of their gender: sex, motherhood, homemaking. My mother hid this part of the larger refugee story from me, so I could grow up believing in myself, so I could think being a refugee is a series of open doors, to the United States, then college, then everywhere.

  Like Shola, mother to this roomful of castaway mothers, mine taught me that these labours men want to extract from us are female joys belonging only to us. And that they are most certainly not the entirety of our worth.

  After everything, exile has made my mother fearless. If home is gone, why fear smaller losses? In her fifties, she packed up her life and joined the Peace Corps in northern Thailand. When she became interested in organic farms, she moved to one as an intern. She can silence her Iranian pride if an education is calling. I hear echoes of feminists like Shola in her actions. Educate yourself! My mother has guided my assimilation, not to America, but to myself. If I were to write a model refugee narrative, it wouldn’t be the Good Immigrant, but the exile who, having endured many changes, now fears no risk. It is the immigrant who kept her agency, who has no shame, who believes in herself. The Good Immigrant would become the Capable Immigrant. Capable differs from good, because the choice to act isn’t taken for granted. And from whose point of view is ‘good’ defined, anyway?

  This, I know, is my own immigrant faith. In high school, I read Emerson’s ‘Self Reliance’, enraptured. I read it, not as instruction, but as permission. ‘Life only avails, not the having lived,’ Emerson writes. ‘Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of a gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact . . . turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.’ Astonishing – all that matters to Emerson is the state of transition, the toiling, the wanting, all the parts of myself I found ugliest. Darting to an aim.

  And yet, changing identity is a wallowing, self-loathing business. I know this, not because I’ve been a refugee, but because I’ve been a new mother. I’ve never been more wretched and unpalatable than in those first days of motherhood when my brain ached from the change, when every flavour seemed new and people watched me for mistakes. I was instructed to take classes, to learn a new language, a new culture and rules. I lost my strength, my personal power. I kept making schedules, to-do lists, goals. Every breath was impossible and yet it happened. The body knows how to change. That doesn’t stop it from resisting. The former me, the one who wasn’t a mother, fought annihilation, though she had no chance.

  For weeks, I sat in cafés with my new baby, staring into space, unable to write, knowing that people found me useless.

  I travel to Berlin, where a friend introduces me to a group of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan. I meet a writer who tells me that in Syria, he had ninety minutes of electricity every six hours. He would sleep and smoke and think during the dark hours, then, when the lights came on, he would plug in his laptop and write, continuing as long as his battery lasted. He can’t imagine anyone would want his stories now, because the writers in the West have had all the hours of the day to practise their craft. How will he compete? ‘When I arrived, I made that assumption too,’ I tell him. ‘But a life of plenty doesn’t translate to discipline. It’s full of distractions. Let those other writers have their unlimited TV. You keep writing.’

  He laughs. It’s not always so easy as that. The wounded mind rebels.

  Displacement isn’t mental illness but it makes visible the daily, hourly, work of staying sane – work that is unconscious in the rooted life. Suddenly, it takes effort to hold on to reason. And, like breathing, the work doesn’t store up. If you stop, its rewards are gone, like vapour.

  Another Syrian refugee tells me quick joys come easy in Berlin. ‘If you’re young, you look healthy and strong, full of potential. People are happy for you and you want to preserve that good faith.’ He tells me that the fitful black nights are easy to hide. Sometimes, he wakes to memories of the day in Sicily when, without a word, border control sprayed him with chemicals, gave him an injection. He pauses. ‘I lost the human inside me.’

  One young man travelled on foot across the world to be with his mother and when he found her in an English hospital, they wouldn’t let him care for her. ‘I wanted to lotion my mother’s legs. They said no. Did they think I was a danger to her? If I didn’t die that day, I’ll never die.’

  It’s not so easy to seize back your power. Memories of home mix so toxically with shame, it’s hard to hold both in the mind at the same time. And yet they always appear together. How can one be self-reliant, in the Emersonian way, never reposing, always transitioning, taking control of the change in oneself, if one is taught to hate the very self that is supposed to do all this work? What if that self is no longer part of a desired class? What if every sign points to its inferiority? Years ago, Philip and I travelled to Istanbul. While touring Topkapı Palace, we saw a family from Iran. My life then contained so little of Iran that I couldn’t resist greeting them in Farsi as we passed. Their daughter, a young woman in her early twenties, stopped short. She returned the greeting shyly, then turned back, eyeing us now and again. An hour later, we crossed paths in another room. She whispered to her family. Then she walked over to me and said, ‘Are you Iranian?’ I nodded and, as explanation for my bad accent, said that I had finished growing up in the United States. I asked her what city she came from. I thought, Now we’ll reminisce about home or complain about Turkish food. But she glanced behind her, then said, rather formally, in Farsi, ‘Can you please tell me how you got that man to marry you?’

  IV.

  Iowa was like a foreign country. Miles and miles of emptiness with no car, I was trapped inside a circle of four or five blocks. I ate the same hummus sandwich every day. Watched the same TV shows, blindly, deafly. Skipped dinner. Went to workshop. Grew thin. Sometimes I forgot to shower. Sometimes I stared at the same spot on the wall for three hours, motionless. The television blared; I pretended to engage. I drank carafes
of coffee and tea, pairing three cups with one vanilla wafer. It was fall 2011 and I was living alone for the first time in a decade. I missed my friend. It was another assimilation: to singleness, to life as a writer, to myself.

  My only joy, the only time I savoured food and felt briefly human, was when I cooked for my classmates – dishes of aubergine and lamb and butternut squash and pomegranate that took hours and saturated the air in my friends’ houses. By April I would move into a house, with roommates and a fireplace. I would buy the first bed of my own, having gone from my childhood beds to the ones in dorms to the ones I shared with Philip. In the new house, I inhabited the kitchen. Even when I wasn’t cooking I sat at the counter, in the same chair, waiting for someone to come down and talk.

  I was marooned. I craved the domestic and yet I was mired in so much errancy and strangeness that I sank to the ground, lying with my face on the wooden floor slats for hours. Maybe I was hoping to take root again.

  The craving to build a home is a tricky thing: when you have it, it’s like a heavy woollen coat in summer. Without it you’re naked, skinless. I cooked so much in that wild, hopeless season. I was delirious. I shed fat and tears, wrote garbage and made food, watching rapturously as others ate and drank and grew full and satisfied. Fullness was alien.

  One night, my roommate hosted Passover and something about the ritual hinted of home – here was a table of strangers reciting text that meant nothing to them; they did it to connect with their friend. How miraculous! And haven’t my American neighbours always been curious about me? Maybe it isn’t their fault that all we felt comfortable offering were the dramatic escape stories, that we didn’t show them pomegranate stews and photos of the duck ponds and rivers and mountain hikes. Maybe if we had shown ourselves, they would have loved what they saw. But we were afraid, like Minoo. We couldn’t manage it.

  I lay awake for many dark nights, thinking of where I had gone wrong. I spent my marriage feeling guilty: I wanted too much, I made everything political, I didn’t appreciate the life Philip provided for us; I didn’t have babies. And yet I couldn’t shake the notion that I lived and breathed the sexist, racist fumes of a society that I had chosen because I thought they were ‘America’s best’. At Princeton, and later at Harvard, I was surrounded by right-wing Christian ideology. As a woman, I was expected to be just a bit humbler, quieter, more patient. Both my mother and Philip’s wrung their hands at the notion that I should displease him. And I went to bed each night thinking they were right. I needed to kill the selfish beast inside. And yet, I wanted to know, why were his ambitions laudable and mine unimportant, despite my better grades and more rigorous academic history? Why were my views second-class? Why did I have to learn French and Philip never learned Farsi? Why did my mother ask me not to hang my diplomas, which outnumbered Philip’s? Why did she say that it was boastful to hang my MBA from Harvard Business School beside (and level with) the one he earned in France?

  I had been fooling myself. My biggest sin was denying that all those afternoons by the river in Ardestoon, the hikes at dawn, the Thirty-Three Arches, the sour cherries and the music and the henna-scented grandmothers with their stories – these had made me. In Iowa, safe in another stellar academic home, I needed to undo the excesses of my assimilation. I was done with my immigrant inferiority complex. Now, if I wanted to excel, I’d do it right – honestly, as myself, an Iranian girl who has inherited math and literature and sport and whatever savvy I have from thousands of years of Iranian excellence – not from America.

  I needed Iranian friends and American ones who knew me.

  I learned that the University of Iowa had a good medical programme and engineering schools that attracted foreign students, including Iranians. I decided to look. I sat in a café called Java House, where I often wrote, and I listened until I heard the familiar music of spoken Farsi. Then I got up to say hello, an act that felt much like asking to sit at a fifth-grade lunch table.

  ‘Do you go to school here?’ I used the word for primary school.

  My accent in Farsi had deteriorated so much that I was a curiosity: a foreigner who spoke their mother tongue. They were a mix of graduate students – engineers, scientists, doctors, their wives from Tehran and Shiraz and elsewhere. They invited me to sit, so I fetched my coffee and laptop and joined them at their table. They peppered their talk with slang that they were happy to explain, along with a year or location. ‘This one is very Rashti,’ or, ‘People started saying this in the mid-90s.’

  A young woman sat up when I mentioned that I would divorce soon. The table shifted a little, as they glanced at each other, leaned forward: they knew that, as an American, divorce wouldn’t devastate my life, but a woman owning up to it so gleefully was absurd. I wasn’t gleeful; I wanted to perform my Americanness and I wanted to show disdain for sexist Iranian ways. ‘It was a good first marriage,’ I said. ‘Maybe my next will be an Iranian Javad.’ I giggled at my own joke. I had recently learned the word from an American-born Iranian friend who visited me sometimes from Chicago. A Javad is the Tehrani equivalent of a Jersey girl or Chav, the kind of Iranian who, in an attempt to display American culture, covers himself in gold chains and listens to Farsi rap produced in LA or Paris and is generally embarrassing to our people. Javad men are slick-haired and smooth-talking, bathed in cologne. The women take the Jackie O look too far – Bumpits and massive sunglasses with pushed-back scarves, pounds of makeup, streaky highlights. Some wear dainty nose-job plasters long after their noses have healed, or if they never had the operation at all.

  They didn’t laugh. Why didn’t they laugh? Had I offended? None were that kind of Iranian. Maybe I was being too much again – why did being around Iranians turn me into a fanged and skinless monster, striking and retreating and afraid of my own footfalls? Our phones beeped in unison. A security warning from Iowa City Police that a menacing person had been reported following an undergraduate and was still at large. ‘These alarms are madness,’ said an engineering student with dark cropped hair, who had, until now, been silent, her gaze always down. ‘In Chicago,’ she said, ‘maybe they bother to call the news if there’s a corpse in the river. Here, some guy looks at an undergrad and we all have to wake up so we can know about it.’

  She said a Farsi word I hadn’t heard in decades: corpse. I felt giddy for every resurrected word. I repeated it, turning it over in my mouth.

  One of the men laughed. ‘They forget they have Iranians here.’

  ‘It’s true!’ one said. ‘Eight years in war and it’s not even voluntary: if there’s an alarm, you grab your children and run to the neighbour’s. How many Iowans did you wake up the first night there was an alarm?’

  Chairs tipped back in laughter. ‘There has to be a report somewhere of the Iranians running into the street in their underwear, random children tucked under each arm, because they got a text with the word alert.’

  ‘And then the next alarm: Middle Eastern agitator taking children into basements.’ I choked on my coffee. I hadn’t laughed so much in years.

  ‘Just turn off your ringer,’ said the quiet female engineer. ‘No text in this country is ever important, anyway.’ I noted her sadness.

  I told a story of Baba visiting Oklahoma when I was fourteen, how he had asked me to lotion his mane of red back-hair at a waterpark. They hooted and slapped the table. I found that this was the intersection in our severed cultures: shame about our Iranian antics and those of our families.

  I invited the whole crew of Iranians to dinner. I told my roommates that I was planning to cook a huge Persian meal. I researched music and found an album called Pomegranates: Persian Pop, Funk, Folk and Psych of the 60s and 70s. I moved the dining table and set up a sofreh on the living-room floor using blankets and many decorative pillows. For two days, I sweated aubergines and fried them, roasted walnut, stewed lamb, chopped cucumbers.

  I was delirious with excitement and my roommates were eager to join in, helping set up the sofreh, asking if they had done it c
orrectly. Though it satisfied my private needs, I had created a caricature of an Iranian dinner and I hadn’t bothered to tell my guests; I had only said I would serve Persian food. My new friends arrived thinking they were attending a normal Iowa City dinner party. ‘What is this music?’ said a tall, athletic man named Rohan. ‘I haven’t heard this since I was a kid.’

  ‘It used to play in my dentist’s office,’ one of the women giggled.

  ‘My baba is a dentist! Is that why I like it? Oh God, I thought this was hip vintage music. Is it waiting room music?’ Maybe it wasn’t so embarrassing to be laughed at by this group – their teasing felt kind, as if they found my efforts charming.

  Around the sofreh a young woman said, ‘You know, usually this is done on a very thick Persian carpet, not on a wooden floor.’ She tucked a pillow under her haunches. ‘The boys could just move the table back.’

  ‘Oh, but it’s so nice,’ said one of my roommates. I took a breath and started bringing out the sauces and salads and rice to whistles and cheers.

  ‘What is this?’ said the oldest guest, a visiting scholar from Tehran, lifting a forkful of kale. ‘It’s like lettuce made love to a piece of fabric.’

  We ate and drank and talked about the origins of the songs. I thought, as we ate dessert, I’m going to remember this night for a long time.

  I was seeing a man from Chicago, an American-born Persian with an accent like mine and a Columbia degree. His relationship with East, West, nomadism and exile was familiar and comforting. We were cynical and cruel and insecure in precisely the same ways.

  ‘Know something weird?’ I said, one night when we were talking about home. ‘The Iranians got uncomfortable when I talked about Javads. They sort of cringed.’ I had assumed it was acceptable to joke about Javads, as it is hipsters, because it crosses economic class (the worst offenders are rich). To be a Javad, I thought, is to have overshot the unsavoury goal of seeming American, just as hipsters have overshot seeming artsy and poor.