The Ungrateful Refugee Page 31

  Daniel is a good immigrant – hard-working and talented and grateful, the kind that makes America better. He thanks his new country with his every move. And yes, the United States and England and Holland and Germany would be better if all immigrants were like him. I wonder, though, how many are just keeping their mouths shut and their ideas trapped in for fear of seeming defiant to the mediocre white man scrutinising their papers.

  A few years ago, my brother told me that he couldn’t trust me. I think he may have been the first to compare me to a chameleon. He said I had a creepy ability to choose a person I wanted to be, then transform into that person so accurately that the overall effect was something sinister. And while, as a child, my obsessions and compulsions and tics were charming, they aren’t so palatable when wielded by an intelligent adult with motives.

  ‘Do you ever make a choice that goes against your desires?’ he said.

  He’s right. Each time we uprooted we had the option of crafting ourselves anew. I’ve always taken it. Should I have not?

  I don’t think Daniel needs me to be a Christian, or to be consistently one person year after year without changing or adapting. Daniel has read Emerson too. ‘A foolish consistency,’ wrote Emerson, ‘is the hobgoblin of little minds.’ I don’t think he even cares if my primary ethical tool is my own desires (which it isn’t). But I think he feels instinctively that my lighter skin, my range of hair colours and my sculpted nose have given me access to white privilege. Chameleon isn’t a casual metaphor to him. It is an accusation, because not everyone can go back and forth.

  In our early days in America, he didn’t blame me – there was a crack in the wall that kept us both out of the nicer rooms; I had found a way to peek in, but I was still just an Iranian kid with slightly lighter skin than her brother, still a kid who was mocked and excluded and made to feel like nothing. Daniel, though, like Minoo’s son, had found a kind of acceptance from football. We had our struggles, but I was still on his team.

  And later, as a college student, when I began to transform, it was a novelty. We joked about Philip’s WASPy ways. Sometimes in cafés, if I heard someone mention Oklahoma I would say, ‘Oh I’m from there!’ and I’d have an entire conversation without anyone saying, ‘Where are you really from, though?’ or, ‘Where did you live before that?’ (Mexico, they assumed). But, as a grown adult capable of slipping back and forth, ruthlessly choosing a face each morning, plucking the best of both identities: Iranian for college applications and essays and Norooz parties, unthreatening white girl in airports and taxi stands and dating sites . . . the sheer possibility appals him.

  It appals me too, not just my own too-frequent taste of white privilege but his lack of access to it and the fact that it exists at all. I can’t change my natural instinct to care for myself and for my family, or to live my life and share my stories, whatever they may reveal about the world. I am human and selfish. I feel no shame at displaying my Iranian face in my writings or in my private life, at remembering aloud how I once lived and what I lost and how I’ve been altered. The shame comes afterward, when I am waved into a waiting taxi while a darker person waits across the street. It has taken decades to see that Western society, this institution to which I aspired, is badly broken and that I benefit from its faults in ways that I didn’t as a child and that my brother still doesn’t.

  But I can try to fix it. I’d like to try to fix it.

  Though we often discuss this back-and-forth between cultures, my immigrant friends and I don’t talk much of a physical return. When we have discussed it, the conversation has devolved into fights – we fight about who can go back, who should go back and who is more Iranian. Who can go back is, of course, fraught. The refugees among us would never risk it. Communists and apostates and others who have spent any time in jail would rather stay safe than to reminisce. For those who can return, there’s cultural and economic hand-wringing. Let’s face it, most of them go back with wallets full of hefty Western currencies; they eat, drink, ski, swim and tour. They try to taste home and fail, then return unsatisfied, leaving their countrymen, the ones who looked after them, who cooked and cleaned for them, more miserable and desperate for a life abroad.

  Among Iranians, the people who can easily go back are the ones who left before or around the time of the revolution. I admit that it angers me to hear Iranians describe their hardships if they left before 1979 and were able to take their money with them, or if they left before they were four years old and started their education in the West. To me, it matters whether you lived with cockroaches as you fled. It matters whether school meant sweaty grey scarves and billowing black chadors, screaming dictées and bloody-fisted murals. It matters if you had to chant Death to America.

  I’m being possessive, I know. History belongs to everyone. I guard my story jealously precisely because I can’t go back. All that’s left is a series of scenes and the many orphan details stuck in my memory. In my family, the story is our currency. My stories grate on my mother partly because she sees me the way I see those baby refugees, the ones who arrived at one or two. She got her PhD in Iran, a degree that became useless in her new country. She spent her adulthood not understanding jokes, feeling always mocked, straining to remember words. I don’t get to complain to her about exile.

  My mother would say that a return isn’t worth thinking about – it would be foolish, wasteful and deeply ungrateful. And thinking about it hypothetically doesn’t change what you should do with your days. You must keep living. This is what I learned from her at Hotel Barba. You can’t fall into the waiting space. You must find work, some small gear you can turn – you must make something happen.

  ‘You are a girl from Iran,’ my mother says every time life deals me a blow. ‘A refugee girl who should have grown trapped under the scarf, running from bombs, but instead spent her life reading good books in other people’s best universities. You don’t cry at hardship. You adapt!’ Such logic is a habit for refugee mothers. They expect their children to adapt quickly and contribute heftily to other people’s communities. Though nothing is theirs, they are free and toughened by displacement. Why shouldn’t they spend their lives showing their mothers what miracles they can perform?

  In his 1988 essay ‘Spelling Our Proper Name’, Chinua Achebe talks about African American writer James Baldwin, who, as a tormented child and young man, judged Africa for its ‘lack of achievement’ and compared himself harshly to Swiss peasants whose ancestors were marginally related to the likes of Dante, Shakespeare and Rembrandt. Their legacy of achievement would forever give them a leg-up and Baldwin’s young instinct told him to blame his ancestors, who had failed to measure up, though he had been deprived of their stories by the very Western education that he so revered.

  Achebe recoiled at the notion that achievement should be any kind of gauge of our human obligations to one another. In conversations about the refugee crisis, educated people continue to make the barbaric argument that open doors will benefit the host nation. The time for this outdated colonialist argument has run out; migrants don’t derive their value from their benefit to the Western-born and civilised people don’t ask for résumés from the edge of the grave. Achebe said, in 1988, ‘I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they built cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety. Flowing from that, it is not necessary for black people to invent a great fictitious past in order to justify their human existence and dignity today. What they must do is recover what belongs to them – their story – and tell it themselves.’

  Achebe describes meeting James Baldwin at a 1983 conference. He recalls Baldwin addressing him in this way: ‘My brother, whom I met yesterday – who I have not seen in four hundred years; it was never intended that we should meet.’ Achebe is struck by the word intended, which echoes a warning Baldwin gave to his nephew: ‘It was intended that you should perish in the ghetto.’ Contained in that word intended, Achebe argues, is the realisation that the w
hite conquerors benefit from keeping the two brothers apart, from hiding their legacies from history and from sowing bitterness in the hearts of African Americans by propagating the idea that Africans achieved little before the Europeans came along. This, I would add, justifies the hoarding of modern African American talents and achievements for the West and deprives Africa of the stellar work of its descendants. To keep the African and the African American separate, to make one look down on the other (‘They’re just one step above Javad’), is the way to continue claiming people of colour as their own, by annexing their best work as a byproduct of Western education and creativity.

  In a recent monologue to his audience, television host Trevor Noah read an angry response from the French ambassador to the joke: ‘Africa won the World Cup.’ The letter accused Noah of denying the winning players’ Frenchness and went on repeatedly to claim them, their talents, training and education, for France. ‘Why can’t they be both?’ said Noah. ‘In order to be French you have to erase everything that is African? Why?’

  Because if they turned their attention homeward, they would stop being indebted to France, they would no longer belong to the West. After my 2017 Guardian Long Read about how refugees are expected to behave toward their adopted countrymen, a reader wrote to me, reminding me that the direction of gratitude posturing isn’t always from newcomers toward native-born. In formerly colonised countries, it is the darker native-born who must still bow and thank the children of their past colonisers. Another reader, a man in his seventies, wrote to me that, despite a lifetime of displacement and dramatic fits and starts, he never felt removed from his own identity. He found he could be at home anywhere. Though he was an exile, he never felt like one. He felt like a traveller with his roots firmly intact. Is it a surprise that the direction of his exile was Eastward?

  It is a question of racial dominance. If whiteness is to be linked to education, culture, the creation of great cities, the brightest people of colour cannot have their attention on home. They must belong to white culture.

  Noah points out in his segment that France recently gave citizenship to an African man who saved a baby. Suddenly, he belonged to France. If he had committed a crime, he would, of course, still be African. ‘The first order of business for Africans and their relatives, African Americans,’ says Achebe, ‘is to defeat the intention Baldwin speaks about. They must work together to uncover their story, whose truth has been buried so deeply in mischief and prejudice that a whole army of archeologists will now be needed to unearth it. We must be that army on both sides of the Atlantic.’

  Maybe the West wants the same for me – I have been an investment. It would be a shame if I offer no return on that investment. But even if I were to swim against the tide of Western intention and connect to my native country somehow, would Iran want anything to do with me? I sound like a foreigner. I act like one. Home is never the same, for anyone, not just refugees. You go back and find that you’ve grown and so has your country. Home is gone; it lives in the mind. Time exiles us all from our childhood.

  Once, on a dark day, a friend quoted the late Jim Harrison to me, an echo of a warning from Rilke: Beware o wanderer, the road is walking too.

  By the time I was thirty, I had given that hungry immigrant girl everything she wanted. Left without goals, I felt hollowed out, without identity. Slowly I filled the void with Iranian things, all that I had ignored or put away in the quest to become American. Now firmly entrenched in my borrowed Western identity, I could afford to add a few Iranian flourishes. I cooked and cooked, trying every recipe I knew. I invited dozens of people over to taste these Persian feasts. I discovered Persian music of many eras, the art, the movies, the poetry. Before long, I was plunging back into my old life, digging for photos and videos, trying to remember. All this led, inevitably, to writing about home.

  For my parents, this was a betrayal. For so many Iranians who left in their adulthood, my decade of work to shed my skin makes me ineligible to romanticise Iran. Memory is a tricky thing and my mother prefers her own. And yet, the past, however far gone, is the business of writers; writing allows me to live in an unchanged past. In my memory, home is just the same, not a dish or a book misplaced. It’s there, though returning to it may be considered a tic, an illness of the mind. Maybe it is a writer’s disease, the choice to live in the waiting space for ever. The refugee can leave it behind, with time, with effort. Maybe my grandmother and I share this disease because we’re both writers. Wherever her letters and poems ended up, however indifferent their recipient, they were written. They existed.

  My grandmother wants nothing to do with Iran. She will never return. She is English now. Those letters, though, are brimming with Iran. She puts her longing to return on the page, though she may not be aware of it. But to be united with her ‘other self’, the person she would be if she had stayed in Iran, that would be unthinkable, an existential threat. I imagine that if she heard Baldwin lament the loss of access to his African brother, she would say that it’s better for everyone to stay away.

  I have spent a lot of imagination on the question of who I would be, had I stayed. What if I hadn’t gotten on that plane? If I honestly wanted to know, I could: I have a half-sister, now sixteen and raised in Iran.

  One day in late summer, Baba phones. ‘Dina joon,’ he says, ‘I want you to do something for your sister.’

  My defences engage and I stand to pace. ‘What does she need?’

  ‘She wants to go to university in England,’ he says. ‘She’s smart and there’s no future for her here.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I ask. ‘Why no future?’

  Baba tells me that my half-sister knows a girl who got a visa for a school trip and, on a stopover in Amsterdam, ripped up her passport and gave herself up as an unaccompanied minor. He says she is learning English now, that she has a place in school, that she is happy. He is convinced that if his daughter does something similar, if she becomes a refugee before she turns eighteen, the government will care for her, give her healthcare and protection. Didn’t we, after all, do the same thirty years ago? Didn’t we blow through a tourist visa? ‘You have to help your sister,’ he says.

  ‘Are you crazy? How can I sponsor her if you just told me that plan?’ I shout into my phone, which is already drenched in sweat. ‘Have you fully lost your mind? Do you know what people go through when they try that?’

  He doesn’t sound surprised by my reaction. ‘Her friend—’

  ‘Without a passport, they’ll decide her age themselves. She could end up on the streets. The bureaucrats don’t care! They’re paid to create mazes that will destroy your soul.’ I am pacing, shouting, waving my hands. Sam peeks into the room and watches me. He knows I’m on the phone with Iran.

  ‘Yes, but we have family who could . . .’ His voice is softening. Maybe he’s realising the ridiculousness of this plan. I can see that she’s worked on him for weeks, months. Maybe he was reluctant at first. Maybe he still is. But who can say no to their pleading children?

  ‘Baba, did you for a second think that if she really wanted to go to university here, she would just apply?’ Already I’m looking up admissions pages of British universities on my computer, looking for the section on international applicants. I find many, even one specifically for Iranians.

  ‘Yes, but her English isn’t good enough,’ he says. ‘She wouldn’t pass.’

  Now I’m livid, because our conversation years ago is still fresh for me. I’ve thought about it now and then over the past decade; especially after I became a mother, I wondered, did my half-sister ever learn English? ‘Did I not tell you to put her in English classes?’

  ‘Yes, but what’s done is done. She’s smart. She gets all twenties, like you did. Shouldn’t she have the same opportunities as you?’ Now I think to Katsikas, quiet Naser, whose mother asked me to take him, to drop him off at a camp. How can Baba be so naïve? How can he fail to realise that Iran is a good place for a Muslim girl with a family and mon
ey and a quiet village to run to on Fridays? Refugees escape because their lives are in danger. Even the ones we call ‘economic migrants’, those so-called opportunists, they run from brutal, impoverished lives. This girl may be my own sister, but she’ll have to prove her commitment to me. Because there is no native as judgmental of rule-breakers as a former refugee.

  ‘If she’s so committed, then I’ll help her pass the exams and fill out her application and come to the UK through the proper channels. Baba joon, the refugee crisis isn’t about privileged daughters of Iranian dentists. To this day I feel like I’m taking someone else’s place, and Maman almost got killed, remember? There are places for girls like her at the universities, if they’re willing to work.’ Now I’m standing by a plant in my living room, picking off the leaves. Sam gestures for me to stop. I step away. ‘Do you know what I would’ve said if I were in her shoes? I would say, “Great! I have a year to perfect my English and get into university.” If she’s resisting that option, it’s because her studies aren’t the real priority. Do you think she couldn’t get into the most mediocre British university if she tried? Because they all have loads of money and the lowest bar, academically, is low, Baba joon. It’s easier than the Konkour, by a lot. And, sister or not, I refuse to let you turn this girl into a refugee. Do you know what will happen? England won’t be all freedom and parties and hijab-burning. They’ll tell her that she’s lying and she’s actually twenty and she’ll end up on the streets or raped in a camp. Is that what you want?’