The Ungrateful Refugee Quotes

“Home is never the same for anyone not just refugees. You go back and find that you have grown and so has your country. Home is gone. It lives in the mind. Time exiles us all from our childhood.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“And here is the biggest lie in the refugee crisis. It isn’t the faulty individual stories. It is the language of disaster often used to describe incoming refugees—deluge or flood or swarm. These words are lies.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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. (...) 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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“I am standing on a thin border between past and future. Waiting for madness to come.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“They don't like the damaged, I wanted to say, especially if they think the disease is in your mind. Trust me, the Americans and the English, they like triumphant stories. They want to be a part of the stories. They want to find excellent people, luminaires, pluck them out of hell, knead them flawless. They want to congratulate themselves for something remarkable. Keep yourself undamaged.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“In war, villainy and good change hands all the time, like a football.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“If I were to write a model refugee narrative, it wouldn’t be the Good Immigrant, but the exile who, having endured many changes, now fears no risk. It is the immigrant who kept her agency, who has no shame, who believes in herself. The Good Immigrant would become The Capable Immigrant. Capable differs from good, because the choice to act isn’t taken for granted. And from whose point of view is “good” defined, anyway?”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“When women are powerless, the first thing the world exploits from them is what men perceive as the assets of their gender: sex, motherhood, homemaking.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“Europeans are always debating how much refugees will contribute; they claim to want the economically beneficial kind, the “good” immigrants. And yet, they welcome only those with a foot in the grave. Show any agency or savvy or industry before you left your home, and you’re done. People begin imagining you scheming to get out just to get rich off an idea (or a surgery or an atelier). They consider the surgery or atelier that doesn’t yet exist as property stolen from them. The minute you arrive, though, even if you did have a foot in the grave, god help you if you need social services for a while.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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 a 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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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 forever. 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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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 color cannot have their attention on home. They must belong to white culture.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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 civilized people don’t ask for résumés from the edge of the grave.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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 realize 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 neighbor to trust him, to know that he is adaptable. Change is coming, but it will take years—in that time, his neighbors, 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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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 colonizers) 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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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 theater. 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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“And yet, changing identity is a wallowing, self-loathing business. I know this, not because I’ve been a refugee, but because I’ve been a new mother. I’ve never been more wretched and unpalatable than in those first days of motherhood when my brain ached from the change, when every flavor seemed new and people watched me for mistakes. I was instructed to take classes, to learn a new language, a new culture, and rules. I lost my strength, my personal power. I kept making schedules, to-do lists, goals. Every breath was impossible, and yet it happened. The body knows how to change. That doesn’t stop it from resisting. The former me, the one who wasn’t a mother, fought annihilation, though she had no chance. For weeks, I sat in cafés with my new baby, staring into space, unable to write, knowing that people found me useless.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“And yet, changing identity is a wallowing, self-loathing business. I know this, not because I’ve been a refugee, but because I’ve been a new mother. I’ve never been more wretched and unpalatable than in those first days of motherhood when my brain ached from the change, when every flavor seemed new and people watched me for mistakes. I was instructed to take classes, to learn a new language, a new culture, and rules. I lost my strength, my personal power. I kept making schedules, to-do lists, goals. Every breath was impossible, and yet it happened. The body knows how to change. That doesn’t stop it from resisting. The former me, the one who wasn’t a mother, fought annihilation, though she had no chance.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“these labors men want to extract from us are female joys belonging only to us. And that they are most certainly not the entirety of our worth.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“Didn’t they see that he was faking? And for the worst reason, to avoid social discomfort! And yet, maybe, that is where cultural change begins. We fake new habits, we commit to the task, until the habits come without forethought. Maman’s first prayer to Jesus can’t have sounded all that natural. My first American spelling test was a mess of backward letters. But we were already the thing we were pretending to be, because we were devoted.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“In asylum interviews, no one believes an instant conversion. And yet, the moment the refugee is welcomed in, he is expected to make just such a quick transformation, to shed his past, to walk through the gates clean, unencumbered by a past self. Can a person’s heart and mind change in an instant? Can the habits of his hands, the words on his tongue?”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“Integration, not multiculturalism. To crave transformation from each other—to want others to change into us—seems a natural survival instinct of the ego. That sign reeked of the ego’s fear of extinction. But in forcing assimilation, are we asking for performance?”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“Nativist fury, not an exile’s pleas for rescue, is the irrational spectacle, the unearned reaction, in today’s refugee narrative.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee

“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.”
― Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee