The Ungrateful Refugee

by Dina Nayeri

We had created our life’s great story; next would come the waiting time, camp, where we would tell it. Then struggle for asylum, when we would craft it. Then assimilation into new lives, when we would perform it for the entertainment of the native-born, and finally, maybe in our old age, we would return to it, face it without frenzy: a repatriation.

Once in an Oklahoma church, a woman said, “Well, I sure do get it. You came for a better life.” I thought I’d pass out—a better life? In Isfahan, we had yellow spray roses, a pool. A glass enclosure shot up through our living room, and inside that was a tree. I had a tree inside my house; I had the papery hands of Morvarid, my friend and nanny, a ninety-year-old village woman; I had my grandmother’s fruit leather and Hotel Koorosh schnitzels and sour cherries and orchards and a farm—life in Iran was a fairytale. In Oklahoma, we lived in an apartment complex for the destitute and disenfranchised. Life was a big gray parking lot with cigarette butts baking in oil puddles, slick children idling in the beating sun, teachers who couldn’t do math. I dedicated my youth and every ounce of my magic to get out of there. A better life? The words lodged in my ear like grit.

Why do the native-born perpetuate this distinction? Why harm the vulnerable with the threat of this stigma? It took me decades to know: the instinct to protect against competition from a talented horde. To draw a line around a birthright, a privilege. Unlike economic migrants, refugees have no agency; they are no threat. Often, they are so broken, they beg to be remade into the image of the native. As recipients of magnanimity, they can be pitied. I was a palatable immigrant because I programmed myself with chants: I am rescued cargo. I will prove, repay, transform. But if you are born in the Third World, and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, your dreams are suspicious. You are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief. You are reaching above your station.

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.”

Someone told me (perhaps they read it somewhere) that refugees are forced into cement shoes and told, “Now you have roots.” But being held down isn’t roots. They are told not to move, to build a life for a year, two years, to learn a culture they may soon leave behind. But the knowledge that you haven’t been accepted hardens the soil. This in-between country hopes you will leave, and so do you. In the meantime, they keep you in holding pens. You aren’t meant to mingle with locals, to get by too skillfully in this land. You aren’t meant to take root through your cement shoes.

This was a common complaint among refugees: the future brings anxiety because you don’t belong, and can’t move forward. The past brings depression, because you can’t go home, your memories fade, and everything you know is gone. “I’m standing on a thin border between the past and future, waiting for madness to come.”

Every true story has strangeness, things that can only happen to those people at that time—the unbiased listen for it, trying to imagine an unknown world. But the biased look only for familiar oddities, the ones that match and validate their own story.

To satisfy an asylum officer takes the same narrative sophistication it takes to please book critics. At once logical and judgmental of demeanor, both are on guard for manipulation and emotional trickery. Stick to the concrete, the five senses, they say. Sound natural, human, but also dazzle with your prose. Make me cry, but a whiff of sentimentality and you’re done. Stay in scene, but also give compelling evidence of internal change. Go ahead. Try it. It’s not so hard, you penniless, traumatized fugitive from a ravaged village, just write a story worthy of The New Yorker.

“Life is like a film,” says one man. “You can choose not to focus on any one thing, just float above it. Or you could zoom in somewhere, and keep your focus there. If there’s pain, you’ll feel it more. If there’s joy, you’ll feel that more too. But if you stay high above everything, I guess you could avoid every sharp feeling.”

UNHCR data show 68 million displaced people in the world. Of these, 40 million are internally displaced, 25 million are refugees, and 3 million are asylum seekers. But, these numbers don’t specify that most refugees go to neighboring countries. Only a few million try for Europe, and yet, everyone thinks that Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq are emptying into the West. In 2017, the twenty-eight European Union countries had 650,000 first-time asylum seekers. That’s 1,270 per million people in the population, or one refugee per thousand natives. Europe turned away more than half of those. The other half became EU refugees—adding one refugee per roughly two thousand in population for that year. Put another way, you’d need to go to four massive weddings or two graduations or a small concert to encounter a single new refugee. That is not a deluge. Looking down from high above, an honest image isn’t a flood or swarm. It’s a small stream, or a thin, dying herd, finding its way onto a vast, fertile land. The world isn’t pouring into Europe. What few broken and wretched lives the richest nations take in, they should do so graciously, as the chief consumers of the world’s bounty. In many cases, the pursuit of that bounty is the very thing that has impoverished and war-ravaged the East. Maybe we should just pay our dues. Maybe we shouldn’t lose our minds if we see four Muslims walking down the street, one time. Nativist fury, not an exile’s pleas for rescue, is the irrational spectacle,...

But whatever their place on the spectrum, assimilation begins in unseen places. To enforce it is to demand performance. There are things we crave from each other whose value we diminish by asking for them: love, gratitude, understanding. To have these things, we must first offer something of ourselves. In refugee communities, volunteers often ask each other, “What can I do to make it easier for them?” They offer their homes, run errands, set up language tables, soccer games, meals. Again and again, I’ve met neighbors like these. The question, though, isn’t one of generosity but of shame, dignity, and belonging. Permission for the stranger to show his true face. In every small interaction, one ego shines, while the other fades. To the native-born who want to open their arms, I would say: let yourself fade away, ever briefly. Don’t shine in your good deeds, because people keep their dignity quite near the core of their identity. Show your humblest face (at first). See what happens to the question of assimilation in a year, in two years. No one wants to transform. And yet no one can avoid it—we alter with every breath. Other people transform us with their love, their kindness, and also with their indifference. We change by being seen or unseen. We badly want to show ourselves to each other. Those who have suffered stumble in the attempt. In trying to connect without succumbing to harm, they behave clumsily, their words tense, cautious, sometimes hurtful.

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.

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.