The Ungrateful Refugee Page 30

  ‘They cringe because they’re exactly one step above Javads,’ he said.

  His naked arrogance fascinated me. I had never heard an Iranian in America speak this way, as if he’s the best person in the room (or of his own kind). Still, I was confused. Because if a Javad was a point on a spectrum of Westernness (someone who fakes it from afar), then he ought to say they were ‘one step further along’. But my friend always chose his words carefully. He did mean that the Iranians in Iowa were one step closer to authentic Westernisation. And he also meant above.

  I thought about that conversation for a long time and decided that I couldn’t judge him, because I thought exactly the same way – for us to do American right was an accomplishment, whereas if an American ever did Iranian right, that was magnanimity of the highest order. As he spoke, I breathed out, relieved once again for having escaped Ardestoon, for not being a village girl. I wanted to hurt him for reminding me of my lowly roots. My grief in those days included a lot of self-loathing and shame.

  Later I would think that this man, who dropped in and out of my life, was the platonic chameleon. He travelled the world, blending in city and village, mansion and hut, always belonging. He could hang with Javads if he wanted to and yet he knew himself to be free of labels. I wanted to be him. But I wasn’t born here. I had sweated for years under mandatory hijab. I had shouted into an Islamic Republic bullhorn. I had seen my mother berated by pasdars. He didn’t do any of that. He didn’t wake up to those first confusing refugee mornings when everything is frighteningly foreign, when no food satisfies and no one quite relates to your stories and you keep replaying your social gaffes and coming no closer to understanding what you did wrong. One day, he played me a Persian rap, recorded in LA, with the lyric, ‘She preens in front of the Gashte-Ershad.’ I shuddered at the image, then listened to the song on repeat for a day.

  One day, as one of the newly arrived Iranian men drove me home, I played him the song. He grew tense. ‘Don’t American rappers write about their police?’ he asked. I saw a piece of paper in his cup-holder, symptoms for body dysmorphic disorder on a local clinic’s stationery. He glanced at me with nervous eyes, but I didn’t tell him that I understood his shame about his body, his craving for perfection, that it happens to so many displaced people, in just the same way. I thought of the Indian doctor who had stared at me in wonder: Who can survive like this?

  ‘Why do you have so much shame about Iran?’ I asked. He gripped the wheel, his eyes angry. After that, I remembered that assimilation is a long, slow process, at once imperceptible and unseemly, and though I may not be as clean and settled as my American-born friend, I couldn’t indulge in new exile theatre. Plunging a hand into another’s remaking is a serious business; I had taken it far too lightly. I drifted away from the Iranians.

  Years later, on a Greek highway between camps, Paul from Refugee Support told me that one of the biggest social issues at the camps is volunteers becoming romantically involved with refugees. An idealistic volunteer falls for an Iranian or Syrian man who seems strong despite his situation. She loses herself in the high of it, maybe even dreaming that she can save her new lover. After a few weeks, when she becomes his only hope for a life, when triggers abound and the logistics become a nightmarish tangle, she feels beset by so much need and abandons him, calling it ‘an experience for us both’. He is devastated. It wasn’t just about a passport for him; this capable, carefree woman represented life without psychological shackles. She was freedom and agency and the possibility of fitting in.

  But should the volunteer have stayed away? Was I right to pull away from my Iranian friends in Iowa? Now, as I try to navigate London’s refugee support system, all those English men and women wanting to help, I try to make sense of these stories. People ask, How can I help? Get involved? Give them space? I want to say, Be patient. Give them many chances.

  New immigrants are lonely and cautious. And refugees arrive traumatised. Every last one, even the happiest, is broken in places. They won’t always behave deservingly. Many suffer from shame, notions of inferiority. They are prone to embracing the very racism and classism that most harms them. They want to believe that the systems are fair, that they can earn their way into the good graces of the well-placed white man.

  They need friendship, not salvation. They need the dignity of becoming an essential part of a society. They have been so often on the receiving end of charity that when faced with someone else’s need, their generosity and skill shine. Now and then, they will fall short, their wounds will open; they will have too many needs. You might misstep and cause harm. That is better than drawing a thick line around them. In life, people disappoint each other. Messes are made. The only way to avoid pain is to distance yourself, to look down at them from the rescuer’s perch. But that denies them what they most urgently need: to be useful. To belong to a place.

  This, I believe, is the way to help the displaced. It is what we owe each other, to love, to bring in outsiders. Again and again, I’ve failed at it.

  A few months ago, Sam’s mother’s Bulgarian housecleaner showed us photos of her daughter’s wedding back home. I was sitting at the kitchen table writing. Sam’s mother had been thawing a tart. When the photos came out, she poured three coffees and we huddled over her phone, gushing. In one shot, sisters and cousins lined up in purple chiffon dresses. Sam’s mother said, ‘Who made those beautiful dresses?’ She wanted to flatter, implying they had hired an expensive tailor. I thought, A villager from the East routinely makes her own clothes. She would take pride in buying off racks. I said, ‘Those look like Selfridges!’ Sam’s mother gave me a funny look. The housecleaner gave her a funny look. We shot back our coffees and returned to our work. I’m not sure who got it more wrong.

  Hours later, as the housecleaner was leaving, we had both rethought our compliments and started in on the physical beauty and youth of the daughter. She pulled out her phone again and showed us videos of the dancing. Now we had hit on something universal. Look at her dance! What a figure she has! May she have many happy years with him.

  I tell this story to a counsellor specialising in refugees. She laughs. ‘You were trying too hard to say the exact right thing. She can tell when you’re lying about what impresses you. You were honestly impressed with the dancing, right? It’s easy – just be you. Let them be them. That’s it.’

  I’m grateful for these translators and waymakers. Kind people like Paul Hutchings and Ahmed Pouri and Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu. They know that assimilation isn’t policy, to be advocated on road signs and measured by statisticians. It is personal, between two people, two families. It’s much like marrying into a family and gritting your teeth at their customs, the way your new father-in-law sits at the head of the table, waiting to be served, or the way your new aunt swipes a careless finger across a dirty plate. Assimilation is coming to understand that when your own grandmother plunges a dinner spoon into her boot, it will stain you.

  Assimilation is grappling with a language, the sting of shame until you learn. It is knowing not only the meaning of words, but how to use them, how to ask questions, how to make a joke, what gives offence. How society sees you makes your personality, my grandmother says.

  But there is help, waves of kindness spilling through the cracks of the day. People are generous, longing to plunge in with their fellow men.

  Sam told me a story about walking with a friend and seeing a dog jump into a pile of another dog’s shit. He rolled in it, eyes delirious. ‘He wants to lose himself in another dog’s scent,’ said the friend. It’s what we all want, to lose ourselves in each other. That means embracing our foulness. I never stop marvelling at the closeness of beauty and decay.

  Like most, I recoil from small, everyday scenes of human frailty. I think, ‘Is this too hard? Am I naïve? Should I protect myself?’

  Once on a London train, a man in prayer clothes patted my hand, almost lovingly. This felt somehow solicited.

  Once on another London train, in
front of a crowd of tired commuters, an Afghan man slapped me hard across the bridge of the nose, causing it to swell for a week. My first thought was Tourette’s, because I know the compulsions of the mind. My second thought was my hair, my face. Was this old-world sexism from home? That, too, was a devil I knew. His nephew began begging for forgiveness before he had returned his hand to its humble position, crossed across his groin. The nephew touched my face as if in mutual sorrow. All day long, I obsessed over that man, his foreignness, the itch in his brain. I thought of the discomfort on the faces of the commuters and the danger it posed for these two men. They shifted on their heels, every eye on them. I remembered soon after we arrived, I hated crowds. I wanted to disappear from them. So often in those years, we arrived in musty new homes – the hostel in Dubai or the apartment in Oklahoma. You could only smell them for one day, but, after that, you still worried. Had the smell gone? Had it become a part of you? You looked for it in the eyes of passersby. In crowds, you didn’t dare move.

  On sealed trains, all are vulnerable, the wait heightening our senses.

  To assimilate is to please other people’s senses. It is submission, but also a powerful act of love, unity, brotherhood. It is a complicated and misunderstood metamorphosis. So often, we ask refugees to perform an open mimicry of our culture. This we call assimilation. It is theatre. In return, we try to show our good faith by displaying enjoyment of palatable segments of their culture: sushi and curry, bubble tea and baklava. But assimilation isn’t like tourism. You don’t get to dabble for a day. Refugees resign themselves to deep-tissue change from the day their feet touch new soil, when the shape and sound of it is still unimaginable. They commit to changing their senses, to making a practice of their new culture – it happens only by repetition. As a teenager, when I thought it useless to treat myself to a single fancy coffee, valuing only what came regularly, this was assimilation instinct. I didn’t want to play the outsider to yet another life. I wanted to alter my senses, so that I could trust them again.

  While assimilation isn’t scalable (and shouldn’t be framed that way), it also can’t be done alone. We need each other to make a community – the immigrant can’t transform by sheer will. My grandmother sitting alone in a park, writing her stories for a man who doesn’t care, this isn’t assimilation but capitulation. She is offering her power, the wealth of our scattered family and the source of its division, letter by letter, story by story, to an unimpressed white man who doesn’t want her. It is abjection, shame.

  A lasting, progressive kind of assimilation requires reciprocation. It is mutual and humble and intertwined with multiculturalism, never at odds with it. It is about allowing newcomers to affect you on your native soil, to change you. It is about understanding that, for centuries, the white native-born (and, more brazenly, white colonisers) have blithely chosen what habits and sensations from other people’s homes are worth keeping. The Western palate holds so much unearned attention and value. What it finds unpalatable, what fails to spark its curiosity, is often lost.

  And yet, refugees, like most outsiders, won’t help themselves be seen. We have an instinct to self-sanitise, to hide our moral struggles, for the benefit of the powerful. In a 1963 essay, ‘Writing About Jews,’ Philip Roth responded to Jewish readers claiming that his pungent characters fuel anti-Semitism. Publish in Israel, they suggested, keep it private. ‘This is not fighting anti-Semitism, but submitting to it,’ said Roth. ‘All the tolerance of persecution that has seeped into the Jewish character – the adaptability, the patience, the resignation, the silence, the self-denial, must be squeezed out.’ Fight hatred, but ‘not by putting on a good face . . . not by pretending that Jews have existences less in need of, less deserving of, honest attention than the lives of their neighbors; not by making Jews invisible’. To publish in Israel is to imply that ‘there is nothing in our lives we need to tell the Gentiles about, unless it has to do with how well we manage. Beyond that, it’s none of their business. We are important to no one but ourselves.’

  Our shame has helped create a cynical, sedated world wherein being a fully realised human is the privilege of whites, Christians and the native-born. Insiders never question their most basic impulses; they just are, an inevitable ingredient in the air others breathe. The rest of us tiptoe and dance for their good opinion, filtering every smell and sound through a second skin. It is hardened instinct, but those with power can help break it.

  Curiosity is a powerful corrective tool. It returns people to their natural state, however briefly. You need no expertise to aim for curiosity. To care is enough. If you love a person, a family, you don’t want them to change into you. You want them to be them. You want to know about their tics and foibles, the home they left behind and all its strange flavours, their childhood songs, their bad habits, the music of their every celebration.

  When I was a teenager, I attended a church retreat called Chrysalis (it was billed as ‘a transformation’ and I was drawn to that) wherein the staff orchestrated a number of surprises for each attendee. One such gesture was to gather encouraging letters from friends, teachers and family to give to each attendee on the final afternoon. It was a programme tradition, designed to stir up emotions. As I entered the room where white paper bags full of letters were awaiting each girl, a pastor called to me. ‘I hear you have a very special letter in there,’ he said, ‘from Isfahan?’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Are you serious?’ I ran into the room. Had this tiny local organisation managed to get a letter from Baba? I sat in a row of girls, unpacking my paper bag. I leafed through the letters, fingers shaking, each one a burst of pride and joy – I was loved. Glancing back, I saw the preacher watching me from a bench. His eager smile was gone. He sat swaying, arms on knees, hands folded. A woman was whispering in his ear.

  I returned to my letters. A few minutes later, I glanced back again. The two adults were still watching me. Finally, the woman got up and walked over to my bench. ‘Honey,’ she whispered. ‘I thought I should tell you before you reach the bottom of that pile. The pastor made a terrible mistake. We weren’t able to get that letter. I’m so sorry.’

  I wish I had held back the tears; the pastor misread them. He hurried over to apologise. I was too young and inarticulate to explain that it didn’t matter. Yes, I had wanted that letter, but Baba had disappointed me before and there would be other letters. I was moved by the image of the pastor on the bench, wringing his hands. After years of daily calibrations – one day I belonged to someone or someplace, the next day I didn’t – I knew I could eventually earn my place in America, but I never expected to register in the emotional calculus of an American adult. I didn’t have that kind of power. Was his swaying for my sake? Now, years later, I remember how much he cared, how the possibility of hurting me affected him. How, as an insecure teenager, I marvelled at that and thought better of myself. Here was someone who wasn’t pretending to want me around. What a thing, to be loved by a stranger, to have a stranger bother to meddle in your life.

  We are constantly assimilating to each other, all of us, because we want to love and be loved. We find redemption and kinship in the superficial, these small nothings that contain our shared joy – dancing brides, letters from fathers, a first taste of kale. These small moments remake us in each other’s image. It is a kindness to realise that the toiling, fast-succumbing immigrant is gesturing peace and to relieve him from the obligation of keeping it up. He makes a show of conversion and gratitude because he wants his neighbour to trust him, to know that he is adaptable. Change is coming, but it will take years – in that time, his neighbours, too, will seem altered. Time softens everyone’s contours. Though, to have your edges smoothed, I suppose, you must first allow yourself to be touched.

  Once, in a Mexican restaurant in Iowa City, I saw two newly arrived Iranian men staring into a bowl of guacamole, as if waiting for the green paste to identify itself. One said, ‘What is this?’ The other, a doctor, whispered with perfect sincerity, ‘Don’t touc
h it. It tastes like Nivea Creme.’ His friend laughed and they both ate – there was never any question of it. They had suffered for their place in this new country. Every taste and smell made them shiver with curiosity and they couldn’t trust their senses to know what’s good. I thought, To assimilate is exactly this, played out over years. You eat the Nivea Creme again and again, not because it will change but because you know one day your tongue will.

  PART FIVE

  CULTURAL REPATRIATION

  (on being claimed, gratitude and the return home)

  In 2009, my younger brother Daniel and I were travelling together in Texas. In the airport security line, an officer waved us through while choosing the old white woman behind us for a random check. I breathed a sigh of relief, since the ‘born in Tehran’ in our American passports always got us a pat-down, at least. As we passed, Daniel said to the officer in a jokey American tone, ‘I don’t feel safe on this flight.’ The officer looked up. I thought, What the hell is happening right now? This was the Daniel who, as a toddler, watched airport security disembowel his toy sheep, the person whose dark face and unpronounceable first name still on his passport routinely invite second and third glances from border control. What was he doing rousing the attention of a white officer? Was he tired of freedom? He smiled at the officer and said, ‘You’re checking her? Isn’t the random checking for guys like me?’

  I snorted, but I was also terrified. The guard laughed and waved us through. We walked onto the plane without trouble but, for a solid ten minutes, I wanted to pull down the oxygen mask and crouch in a corner sucking in good air. Brown men don’t taunt the police. He knew this.

  For years I tried to untangle that memory. It pained me to know that my brother lived, for a part of each day, in a menacing universe of white male aggression, every gesture an assessment of belonging or otherness, a place to which I’d never have access. How maddening that he should need to nod to the officer’s beliefs, to make him laugh. To say ‘Hey, I may be dark and foreign, but I get you. I’m not scary. I love God and America and pumpkin pie.’ Maybe the officer had eyed him and he wanted to respond by displaying his American accent. Regardless, I doubt he’d make that joke today. He was young and idealistic and, even though it was post-9/11, airport security wasn’t as fraught for Iranians as it is in Trump’s America.