The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri
almost murdered by the regime, so she shouldn’t have to deal with people’s prejudices. She fumed at stories of religious asylum seekers who had lied, and she asked new arrivals about the Bible and their underground church—but unlike the native-born around us, she never asked anyone to prove their fear. A tortured mind, terror of a wasted future, is what enables you to abandon home; it’s a prerequisite for stepping into a dinghy, for braving militarized mountains. No one who has lived under a dictatorship, who has scooped up their children and run to a bomb shelter, doubts the fear. To my mother, Christianity is too sacred to lie about, and it’s hard to accept that a rigid, illogical system leaves some no other choice, but, at the same time, she knows that the reasons for escape are complex and muddled. They always include a fear and a tangible hope. It’s a reinvention that grows out of your nightmares, but also your drive and agency. And so, the bureaucratic parsing of dangers from opportunity is grating and absurd. Where is the humility? The compassion?
And what is a credible danger in a country that hangs apostates and homosexuals and adulterers, and where a hateful finger in your direction is enough to make you one? A country so corrupt that one mullah’s whim can send you to the firing squad or the crane, your gallows, and the sunrise after challenging a pasdar can find you framed for drugs? A country where record keeping is a farce, where in whispers the land’s riches are divided among a few, where young men languish without work, where young women wither with unspent ambition and desire, where the enchanting whisper of opium is always in your ear, and despair fills your lungs so thickly that your best chance is to be your own executioner?
What is escape in such circumstances, and what is just opportunistic migration? Who is a true refugee? It makes me chuckle, this notion that “refugee” is a sacred category, a people hallowed by evading hell. Thus, they can’t acknowledge a shred of joy left behind or they risk becoming migrants again. Modern Iran is a country of refugees making do with small joys, exiled from the prerevolutionary paradise we knew. With the Iraq war over, their plight is often considered insufficient. Syria is hell. Afghanistan, South Sudan, Eritrea are hell. Iraq is . . . a bit less so? And Iran? What is hell enough for the West to feel responsible, not just as perpetrators of much of the madness, but as primary beneficiaries of the planet’s bounty, who sit behind screens watching, suspicious and limp-fisted, as strangers suffer?
Meanwhile, we assign our least talented, most cynical bureaucrats to be the arbiters of complicated truth, not instructing them to save lives, or search out the weary and the hopeless, but to root out lies, to protect our fat entitlements, our space, at any moral cost—it is a failure of duty. More infuriating is the word “opportunism,” a lie created by the privileged to shame suffering strangers who crave a small taste of a decent life. The same hopes in their own children would be labeled “motivation” and “drive.”
And while we grumble over what we are owed and how much we get to keep, the displaced wait at the door. They are painters and surgeons and craftsmen and students. Children. Mothers. The neighbor who made the good sauce. The funny girl from science class. The boy who can really dance. The great-uncle who always turns down the wrong street. They endure painful transformation, rising from death, discarding their faces and bodies, their identities, without guarantee of new ones.
A Dutch officer asks an Iranian refugee, “Do you fear for your safety?”
He says, “Yes, my two friends and I were arrested as communists twenty years ago. Each week we check into the local police headquarters. Last week, both my friends disappeared after their check. I ran.”
“Have you become involved with underground communists again?”
“No,” says the petitioner. He isn’t a dissident. But he is hunted.
“Then you’re safe,” says the officer. “It seems your friends resumed their political activities. But you didn’t, so you have no reason to fear.”
The assumption of the office isn’t just thoroughness and justice on the part of the Iranian government (laughable), but also infallibility. How is one to honestly navigate such a dishonest, self-serving system? The savvy ones who have asked around know not to explain how the Islamic Republic works, how often innocent people disappear. They simply say, “Yes, I got involved again,” so that the officer can check a box.
Escape marks the first day of a refugee’s life. On the day we left home, I was told that I could live however I wished, that my gender would no longer limit my potential. And this was true. I was born out of Maman’s Three Miracles. But already a limit had been imposed. Until now, the world waited for me to define myself. Would I be artistic or analytical? Shy or bold? Religious or secular? But now, my first category had been assigned: refugee, not native-born. I didn’t realize it then, because escape is euphoric. It is a plunge into fog, a burning of an old life, a murder of a previous self.
Escape creates a chameleon, an alert creature always in disguise. What does that first blush feel like? An itch. For me, it was a daily, unrelenting discomfort in my mind and skin. It inflamed my OCD. I developed a tic in my neck. Changing color soothed those pains for a time.
Now, thirty years have passed; I have so much to say. The world no longer speaks of refugees as it did in my time. The talk has grown hostile, even unhinged, and I have a hard time spotting, amid the angry hordes, the kind souls we knew, the Americans and the English and the Italians who helped us, who held our hands. I know they’re still out there.
What has changed in three decades? A reframing is in order. I want to make sense of the world’s reaction to us, of a political and historical crisis that our misfortunes have caused. I feel a duty: I’ve lived as an American for years, read Western books. I’ve been both Muslim and Christian. There are secrets I can show the native-born that new arrivals don’t dare reveal. I’ve wished to say them for thirty years and found it terrifying till now.
In 2016, I began a journey to understand my own chaotic past. I was a new mother and confused about my purpose. I had changed my face and hair, my friends, my education, my country and job, so often that my skin felt raw. My memories had grown foggy, and I had combed them ragged for fiction. I had prided myself on being a chameleon, as many immigrant children do, but now I felt muddied by it—I felt like a liar.
I spent months traveling. I went to refugee camps in Greece, to communities of undocumented Dutch. I visited immigration lawyers and homes of new arrivals. I drank tea with refugees and asylum seekers and naturalized citizens. I spoke with mothers, lone travelers, schoolchildren. I was looking for stories, for whispers of stories hidden by shame or trauma, and for lies too. I searched for people from my own refugee hostel, Hotel Barba. I spoke to my parents, who reminded me of the many complications of point of view. During my travels, I came across dozens of stories; I have chosen a few to follow in these pages, tales all the more harrowing because they are commonplace now and, in the asylum office, often disbelieved.
And so, I’ve left out the story of the Syrian man I met in Berlin who floated with a child for seven hours then found himself cleaning a slave ship, or the jailed scholars or activists who are hit with public fatwas—even your everyday Trumpian admits that those guys deserve rescue. I’m interested in doubt, in the feared “swarms.” These are stories of uprooting and transformation without guarantees, of remaking the face and the body, those first murderous refugee steps—the annihilation of the self, then an ascent from the grave. Though their first lives were starkly different, these men and women were tossed onto the same road and judged together. Some of their stories are far from over, but they have already repeated them so often, practiced and recited them so much, that these dramatic few months (or years) have become their entire identity. Nothing else matters to their listeners, and all suffering seems petty after the miracle of escape. But did the miracle happen? Now their struggle isn’t to hang on to life, but to preserve their history, to rescue that life from the fiction pile.
Though the truth of these stories struck me hard, I know that I, a writer, was peeking in different corners than the authorities. I wasn’t looking for discrepancies. I abhor cynical traps that favor better translators and catch out trauma victims for their memory lapses. I don’t have accent-verifying software. I saw the truth of these stories in corroborating scars, in distinct lenses on a single event, one seeing