The Ungrateful Refugee Page 32

  Baba is silent.

  I’m panting. ‘Do you want me to send you links to the universities? Or I can talk to her about exam prep and how to plan for the next year. I know all about university admissions. I can edit essays—’

  ‘She doesn’t need you to do much once she’s claimed asylum. You’d just vouch for her until she is settled into school . . . Isn’t your work all about helping refugees?’ Sam brings me a glass of water. I gulp it down noisily.

  ‘I won’t let you turn her into an unaccompanied minor when she has family and a home and food and a good education. Tell her to study. If she wants to apply to English programmes, I’m here. The universities are here. Baba joon, she’s not some poor villager born into an unlucky situation. Tell her to study. Other refugees, all they wish for is access to books and a good education.’ The memory of Shola’s women emboldens me. ‘Education is everything. English is vital. Pay for a class. Force her to go. Then maybe she can come for a college visit and stay with me.’

  For two hours, I pace my flat. Has everyone gone mad? Have I gone mad? Am I a hypocrite? Am I appraising my half-sister, who is a stranger to me but also another self, with the same casual mistrust that shades my mother and grandmother’s view of new arrivals? Why do her motives infuriate me? It isn’t only that I want her to work hard, or that I want to save her the torture of living as an undocumented migrant. I’m angry with her because her idea is unresearched and half-baked. Because she has a good life and resources that many migrants lack. She has the one thing I didn’t: Baba. And she has Ardestoon’s fruit orchards and Maman Masi’s henna hands. She was born into a relatively modern family and when she marries, she will (or can) marry a man who will want her to have a PhD and a job. She is learning math and science and great Iranian literature. She is beloved and well fed. Slowly, the Iranian women that surround her, the lawyers and activists and writers and artists and doctors back home, are asserting their identity. They are casting off the mandatory hijab and claiming their place in Iranian society. She can join them – or she can study quietly for a while and set off for the West. That she wants to hop down from a safe perch and breeze on into England, right past the tortured dissidents and the starving babies, past the mothers clutching their children in boats, past Farzaneh and Majid, past Taraa and Vaild and Naser, who still haunts me, past Darius, whose feet will probably never touch British or American soil, this is what angers me.

  Maybe I am a hypocrite. I believe in open borders, but Europe is no paradise. The notion that the rest of the world is without beauty or joy, that everyone is clamouring to break down Europe’s doors, is nonsense. For many, the West would be unequivocally worse – my mother lost her degree and worked in factories; if Iran had been safe she would never have left her home. I have no doubt that, without a university to claim my sister as its own, she would wither here. Unaccompanied minors aren’t waved into the country. They are questioned, doubted. The ones without family or friends are left to sleep on park benches. They suffer, though they’re so young. Each night, they fall asleep conjuring a mother’s soft lap, her singular smell. They are cold, hungry. They don’t savour freedom; they crave their families.

  And, yes, I am selfish. I don’t want to go backward. I don’t want to witness the ugliness of assimilation again. I don’t want to see my family ashamed, hiding tics, posturing gratitude as they carry out an endless search for home and identity. I wish I could give my half-sister a tour of my inner world, the place I spend most of my time. It is a wreck. Though I’ve lived in the West for three decades, despite my degrees and passports and fluent English, I still carry my backpack everywhere I go. Though I have no reason to do so, I sigh in relief when my credit card goes through for a coffee. I hold my breath when checking my bank balance, for fear of a coup or a bank crash. The awe and wonder of ordinary things leaves me sometimes crippled for an hour, or a day. I marvel that I get my mail, that a bulb turns on when I tell it, that someone sells me food, that someone cuts my hair, that my days aren’t apocalyptic. Now and then, without warning, I stumble into a scene that I saw on television thirty years ago: two boys wandering into a post-bomb rubble, looking for the bodies of their parents.

  For a moment, as I speak to Baba, I fantasise about forcing my indulged little sister to endure what Kaweh did, the long days in the library, the non-stop English radio, all that rigour – I will sit beside her and I will force the learning into her mind and I will make her a doctor or a lawyer. I will remake her in my own image, or in the image of someone I admire, like Kaweh. But what if she rebels? What if my family isn’t strong and resolute like Kaweh’s and the only explanation for my own hard work is that I arrived at the right age and had the right influences? I don’t want my half-sister to think that she’s coming to paradise and end up doing nothing but illegal childcare, vulnerable to every human wickedness.

  All day after the call with Baba, I think of Ahmed Pouri at the airport. Would he find a way for her? Would he advise her to stay?

  I don’t want to turn back. I don’t want to meet my sister, the version of me that was raised in Iran, and to face the truth that everything I hold most sacred and dear about myself was given to me by the West. I don’t want to believe that I am the generic product of Eurocentric, colonialist thinking, that there is no going back, because America has remade me into its image. I don’t want to believe that I come from an idle, ordinary people or that I am not an inevitable version of myself. I don’t want to watch the Swiss peasant and find my history meagre in comparison. I want to believe in my own agency and power. And so, whether or not I accept, as Baldwin eventually did, that it was never intended for me to look backward, that my disdain and judgment were installed there for the benefit of others, that my talents are routinely siphoned away from my own family, I turn away willingly, afraid to peek into another universe and see my own altered face.

  Though I can’t return, the suffering of today’s refugees erodes my sense of home, acceptance and belonging. I turn over orphan images; can I trust my memories? Each time I deposit the richest details into my fiction, I leave their wrung-out casings for my own story. And worse, I am not who I think – I am leagues worse. How did I evolve? Vladimir Nabokov writes, in Speak, Memory: ‘Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap.’

  Writing, then, is a repatriation for me, my way toward home.

  Every week, I receive emails from strangers sharing stories and ideas. I love that they trust me in this way. Many, whether hostile or kind, end with a reminder that gratitude is healthy, as if to say, Why not try it?

  How did I fail, again, to make myself understood? Every day, in the casual talk of migrants, I hear echoes of people I have known, stories I’ve heard, going back to Hotel Barba. ‘We count every second,’ they say, about the waiting. ‘If they open the door, we will repay the kindness.’ Everyone is jostling to show the West what a good investment, a good neighbour, he’d be. That fever doesn’t just disappear as soon as the migrant is settled. Gratitude is a fact of a refugee’s inner life; it doesn’t need to be compelled. Every day after rescue pulses with thanks. My gratitude is personal and vast and it steers my every footfall. But it is mine. I no longer need to offer it as appeasement to citizens who had nothing to do with my rescue. Still, I know that new refugees will succumb to the instinct to bow for years, decades. It’s a part of a journey toward home, wherever that is.

  Westward travellers crave to repay, to prove our worth, to build homes and to abandon them and begin again. So many doors have opened to us, it’s impossible to accept that there is no obligation, that we’ve arrived in a place we can relax and stretch out, that all the honest work to prove our worth, to assuage the helplessness, to rub out our previous identities, was for nothing. Is it possible ever to repay this imagined debt? What if we allow ou
rselves to relax and our children grow comfortable and entitled, demanding gratitude from the next batch knocking at the gates?

  Have I demanded some kind of posturing from my own half-sister?

  In every generation, someone has to stay vigilant. Someone has to toil and compel others to do the same. But how to toil without bowing?

  And when do the exile years finally end? My fear is that they never will – being marooned again is at once a refugee’s nightmare and craving. It’s a strange affliction that we immigrants share. The longing to return begins almost the instant the refugee has settled into their host country. The dream of return fuels the desire to live and, until then, to wander. We settle and take root only in each other, planting ourselves like roses at each other’s houses. I like that this is an option, that maybe finding my way back home isn’t an obligation, or even a possibility, for happiness.

  Becoming a mother to a dark little girl with a mischievous smile in the age of Brexit and Trump terrifies me – whatever her gifts, she’s going to get herself into trouble in this hateful world slowly coalescing around us. I fear the inevitable generational divide. It happened to me when I saw my mother struggle in Oklahoma, when she complained of racism and bias and lack of respect or true welcome. I thought she wasn’t working hard enough. Slowly I became American and that element that parents and children recognise in each other was no longer so easy for either of us to see.

  One day, there will be an event like this, a breaking. I may look back and find that my daughter and I are foreigners, that we’ve drifted across different oceans. She will have chosen a country. I may have returned to Iran, or to any one of the other places where I’ve tried to make a home.

  For now, somehow, without thinking, a village has sprung up inside my little flat. Mothers and neighbours and friends drop in. A stubborn grandmother sits at my table, being served tea and Gü. An Iran-born aunt arrives with gardening books and a loud infectious laugh. A cousin plays guitar. Elena sings and fakes Farsi words. Sam builds a shed. Home happened, just like that. It seems that I’ve grown roots. How did I miss that?

  Outside our doors, things aren’t as frightening as I expected in 2016. The English are kind. England might open its doors wider still. Kaweh might become an MP. Best of all, Elena is here. She has helped me connect with the child I once was, a hoarder of joy, an eccentric girl with an itchy brain.

  My daughter is my repatriation. She is my taste of home. I can grow with her, carry her with me wherever I go. She will probably be free to return to her birthplace her entire life, though that doesn’t mean that she will never be a stranger here, or elsewhere. Her future is a foreign place, as are all futures. But every refugee once set off into the dark, unsure of which way the road would turn – Elena, too, will make her own way.

  We drift from the safe places of our childhood. There is no going back. Like stories, villages and cities are always growing or fading or melding into each other. We are all immigrants from the past and home lives inside the memory, where we lock it up and pretend it is unchanged.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to Jamie Byng who believed in this book when it was just an idea. And to Jonathan Lee with whom I’ve wanted to work for years. Thank you, my brilliant editor Simon Thorogood, who understood and protected my vision (sometimes from myself), and my amazing American editor, Megha Majumdar, who challenged me always to improve. Thank you to my UK agent Georgina Capel and her team, and most of all, to my faithful and wise agent Kathleen Anderson, who has had my back for so many years.

  To the refugee support community in London, you’ve been so generous. Thank you for opening your doors to me and for sharing your wisdom and stories. To the impossibly kind Paul Hutchings of Refugee Support and his co-founder John Sloan, and Jon Slack of SINGA UK, Anneke Elwes of HostNation, and Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, Natasha Walter, and all the brave and hardworking ladies at Women for Refugee Women: I’m proud to know you. To Steve Crawshaw of Human Rights Watch and Freedom from Torture, Melissa Fleming of UNHCR, Eduard Nazarski and Annemarie Busser of Amnesty International Netherlands, and Anneke Van Woudenberg of RAID, and to asylum lawyers Kaweh Beheshtizadeh, Marq Wijngaarden, Frank van Haren, and human rights lawyer, Daniel Leader: thank you for smoothing so many paths. Parvis Noshirrani, thank you for telling me Kambiz’s story and for that extraordinary lunch that you conjured. Ahmed Pouri, thank you for giving your life to the refugees in The Netherlands, for sharing your stories with me, and for the nuts. Thank you, cousins Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Sara Emami, and Forough Tamimi for the talks, and Kate Wiedmann Punwani for offering me a beautiful place to sleep in Amsterdam. Ros Ereira of Solidarity with Refugees (c/o Amnesty International), who spends her days thinking of ways to mend the hidden wounds of the displaced – going so far as to petition television shows like Coronation Street to introduce refugee storylines, in an effort to normalise their struggles for the British – you jumpstarted my research with your generosity, opening your rolodex and introducing me to what seemed like every refugee helper in London. You are a star! Thank you to Ariane Simard who introduced me to her incredible refugee writing workshop for Bard College Berlin. And to my friend, journalist Jen Percy who, before I left for Greece, reminded me that sometimes the search is the story. My thanks to Iowa City, UNESCO City of Literature for recognising this work with funding and support through the Paul Engle Prize.

  Finally, to my family around the world, especially my parents. To my partner, Samuel Leader, who ran our lives as I travelled and wrote. And to all of the asylum seekers, refugees, and otherwise displaced people in these pages who entrusted me with their stories. Thank you.

  ‘Hugely moving’ Observer