The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You

The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You is a 2019 memoir by novelist Dina Nayeri. It is her first nonfiction book and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature. While Nayeri chronicles her childhood escape from post-revolution Iran and her struggle to build an identity, she interweaves modern tales of refugees mired in uncaring asylum systems.

Summary

The author and first-person narrator of her memoir, Dina Nayeri is referred to as “Dina” by her friends and family throughout the book. For the sake of this guide’s continuity, the author’s name—in both summaries and analyses—will simply be Nayeri.

Born in 1979, Dina Nayeri grew up in a well-educated family in Isfahan, Iran just after its takeover by Islamic fundamentalists. Growing up, Nayeri focuses on appeasing her strict teachers. Meanwhile, she copes with physical ticks and questions women’s submissive role in Iranian society. Her Maman, or mother, converts to Christianity after visiting England and becomes a target for Iranian authorities for distributing tracts. When the Sepâh (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) threaten to execute Maman, she escapes with the children to the United Arab Emirates with strokes of fortune that Nayeri calls Maman’s Three Miracles. The family overstays its visa and transfers to Italy’s Hotel Barba refugee camp in 1989 after authorities catch Maman distributing Christian materials. There, Nayeri endures 16 months of waiting with little to do besides learning and gossip.

The family eventually obtains asylum in the United States and sponsorship with a missionary family in Oklahoma. Nayeri resolves to excel academically, but her conservative town discourages education and opportunities for women. Despite her doctorate, Maman can only obtain menial work, and the sponsor family evicts them after she marries an Iranian man. Believing that America is a meritocracy, Nayeri fixates on enrolling in Harvard University, participates in Tae Kwon Do, and does volunteer work mainly to boost her application. Nayeri goes to Princeton University and Harvard Business School, but she becomes disillusioned with pervasive patriarchal attitudes and a tepid marriage. She now sees the assimilation process as performative, wherein refugees mimic their hosts to appease them.

Living in the Netherlands, Nayeri investigates the death of Kambiz Roustayi, who fled Iran following falsified adultery claims. An aspiring electrical engineer, Kambiz failed the Dutch asylum interview and spent 10 years as an immigrant living in the country illegally. After limited opportunities and a yearlong detention crush Kambiz’s spirit, he burns himself alive near his lawyer’s office. Dutch officials deny that governmental failings contributed to his death.

Nayeri enrolls in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she recognizes that many of the storytelling techniques she learns are what refugees must master to pass today’s crushing asylum interviews. She befriends a group of Iranian exchange students to reconnect with her heritage, but she realizes that she is intruding on their own immigrant experience. Nayeri revisits the Hotel Barba to find that it is now an upscale hotel.

Nayeri moves to London, where she remarries and falls into emotional distress after giving birth to her daughter, Elena. She meets Kaweh Beheshtizadeh, a Kurdish activist who escaped from Iran and is now a successful asylum lawyer. He notes that officials look for discrepancies and excuses to deny claims. Nayeri contrasts his achievements with the tragedy of Kambiz, and she doubts that her family could obtain asylum today.

With both rising anti-refugee sentiment and her daughter on her mind, Nayeri visits refugee camps in Greece. While these camps are reform-minded in comparison to the squalor of other sites, many refugees still struggle with present despair and uncertain futures. Nayeri visits refugees to listen to their stories, learning about brutal attacks and failed attempts to cross the Aegean Sea. Nayeri breaks after meeting a mother who suffered horrific injuries in Afghanistan and refusing to take the woman’s son with her.

As she writes her memoir, Nayeri now sees the refugee process as a five-part process: escape from danger, waiting in camps, the asylum process, assimilation into society, and a cultural repatriation wherein the refugee reconnects with their abandoned past. She believes that an ideal refugee is not bound by a sense of obligation to their host nation (and is therefore an “ungrateful refugee”), but rather is self-actualized and capable. She nevertheless struggles with this herself, even decades after her escape. She feels that she shifts her identity when it suits her, has nightmares about friends deporting her back to Iran, and admonishes her father’s suggestion to sneak her half-sister into England. Nayeri sees her writing and her daughter as her cultural repatriation, but she accepts that they will drift apart and that everyone’s home truly exists only in their memory.