Book Review of The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri
What Immigrants Never Tell You
Editor’s note: even as libraries may be closed, at least to physical print, many North Americans find themselves with extra time and a slowed pace of life. Stories in film and print offer a worthwhile expansion to our worldview. While the blog has already been calling attention to refugee-focused film, this serves as our first guest post written by an RHPNA network member, Cindy Wu (an author herself), who is based in Houston TX and operates as Program Manager for Houston Welcomes Refugees. Contact us if you would like to participate in featured guest posts.
Author Dina Nayeri
“It’s complicated.” That’s how I would describe author Dina Nayeri’s relationship with her life in the West and her personal identification as a refugee. An Iranian-born woman who by many standards would be considered a refugee “success story,” Nayeri’s compelling memoir reveals that being considered a success is not the badge of honor native-borns might think it ought to be.
I was drawn to this book by its provocative title. Anyone who dared, in this political climate, to challenge our romantic notions of our magnanimity toward immigrants must have something important to say—or rather, that I need to hear. I listened to the audio version, narrated by the author, before I purchased the Kindle version. You can hear the pain and at times rage in her voice as she walks us through her personal story, as well as the tragic and heroic stories of refugees she has met along the way.
Nayeri grew up in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980’s. During her childhood, while in London on an extended visit with her maternal grandmother, Nayeri’s own mother converted to Christianity. She was later jailed and threatened because of her faith after their return to Iran. This forced them to flee, without Nayeri’s father, and for the next two years they lived in hostels in the UAE and Italy as asylum seekers before being resettled in Oklahoma as refugees. The author was 10 years old.
Thus begins a long personal journey of assimilation and resistance against assimilation. It was a “chameleon life” in which learning how to adapt to new circumstances (a generally valued skill) also made her feel like a liar and a stranger. What is often overlooked in the logistical steps of starting a new life is the importance of dignity in producing a truly “successful” refugee. She states,
“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 offer [many things]. The question, though, isn’t one of generosity but of shame, dignity and belonging.”
It’s too easy to simply pity refugees.
Nayeri is not just a gifted storyteller, she is a philosopher. Interwoven with Nayeri’s personal stories are reflections on the refugee experience: How do refugees show sufficient gratitude for a place that has offered them opportunity but has also made them feel like a perpetual outsider, that has caused them to feel shame for their cultural identity? Are refugees to be forever grateful for their new lives and not allowed to feel spite and disappointment for their past and continual losses? Gratitude to society is demonstrated by her family members in disparate ways. For her grandmother, it’s about having nothing to do with refugees. For her mother, it’s about not returning home—you settle, you keep living, you don’t cry about hardships, and most of all, you adapt. For her brother, Daniel, it’s about assimilation and gaining acceptance.
For Nayeri, however, there is this burden of an idea of refugees as an investment, and wouldn’t it be a shame to not be able to offer or receive a return on that investment. That is a burden no refugee should have to bear. She writes,
“[Refugees] need friendship, not salvation. They need the dignity of becoming an essential part of a society… The only way to avoid pain is to distance yourself, to look down at them from the rescuer’s perch. But that denies them what they most urgently need: to be useful. To belong to a place. This, I believe, is the way to help the displaced. It is what we owe each other, to love, to bring in outsiders.”
We need to ask ourselves what aspects of charity actually continue to oppress rather than empower refugees. We need to give them the dignity to contribute, create, and even complain.
While reading the book, I was confronted with a subtle paternalism regarding my own expectations of refugees. It was humbling. As a nation, and especially as believers, we need to decolonize the resettlement process and consider how our current attitudes and systems strip refugees of their dignity and the right to the same agency native-borns have. How wearying it must be to belong to a group whose presence must be constantly justified. Do we accept and invest in refugees so they will repay us in economic growth for our communities, or worse, in gratitude to make us feel like humanitarian heroes? Or is it part of our basic duty as humans? Do refugees even have a debt to repay? Read The Ungrateful Refugee and let Nayeri’s perspective challenge your own.