The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You, by Dina Nayeri

It is perhaps a bit ungenerous to say that a book called The Ungrateful Refugee would have been far better had it not been written by an ungrateful refugee. This particular volume is a strange mixture of a memoir and an attempt to expose the not-so-hidden resentments and hostility that many refugees feel towards the hoops that must be jumped through in order to find a place of refuge in the West. To the extent that the author wishes to convey the feelings of entitlement on the part of a refugee that the West should be willing to accept the broken and disadvantaged of the world with open arms and plenty of responsibly provided aid that neither shames the recipient nor leaves them in want, the book presents the wide gulf that exists between those who flee their intolerable situations in their native homelands and the barriers they face to entry into a new land in the increasingly nativist West. Yet this goal of providing the unfiltered horrors and frustrations of would-be refugees is in tension with the other goal of the author in appealing to the kindness and nobility of the intended reader in pushing for political change in order to open up Western countries to refugees and other immigrants, despite the fact that the author deliberately makes herself unappealing by attacking the privilege of winning the lottery of being born in a good country and (understandably) desiring to enjoy those advantages without being threatened by greedy and desperate outsiders who are aren’t even grateful for the opportunities they are given, but assume them to be some sort of inalienable human right.

This book is about 350 pages long, and the lack of interest that the author has in organizing her works in a manner appealing to the writer can be explained by the fact that the book begins with blurbs praising the book but lacks a table of contents. The book is divided into five unequal sections. The first, “Escape,” talks about the stories of how refugees escape from the intolerable situations that they find themselves in when dealing with countries like Iran. The author chooses to talk about her own story, which involves a plane flight to the UAE and then getting refugee status there before going to a camp in Italy, as well as the stories of others. The second part of the book is called “Camp” and it discusses the many indignities and struggles of waiting to get one’s chance to enter into a country in the West while being discouraged from education and forbidden from work. Here we see the problem of giving that focuses on the sender and not the recipient, a problem the author should be sensitive to as a writer. The third part of the book, “Asylum,” focuses on what happens when someone receives (or doesn’t receive) entry into a country in the West, and how it is that refugees navigate the process by which nations choose to accept their stories and give them a place of refuge. This can be a very painful and difficult process, full of pitfalls for the unwary. The fourth part, “Assimilation,” is shorter than the first three parts and discusses how it is that immigrants become at home (or not) with their new land, with the young having an advantage in being able to adapt quicker. The fifth part, shortest of all, discusses “Cultural Repatriation,” on being claimed and on returning home in some fashion. After that there is a brief author’s note and information about the author.

This feeling that the author has two goals that exist at cross-purposes with each other intensifies when you consider that the author herself is a divorcee who regularly points out her making the wrong choice when it comes to building intimacy with others. Over and over again, when placed with the choice between making herself vulnerable and defending herself by distancing herself from others, she chooses to distance herself and to look with criticism at a situation, even as she calls out others (like her immigrant maternal grandmother) for doing the same. The author’s hypocrisy, even as she spills out the way that she exploits the stories of her own family and other immigrants she encounters for her own fiction or trumpets her own unlikeable and strident feminism, which only decreases the chance that the reader will support the cause of the writer that motivates her to whinge about the difficulties refugees find. Perhaps she should be more understanding of the unwillingness that ordinary people of the West find in opening their nations to those whose unpredictable anger and intense traumatic experiences may lead them to commit violent acts in the West, or that it might be undesirable to have people in one’s country to any large amount who are willing and able to move chameleon-like between various identities in order to get what they want and whose response to the laws and customs of their new country is to try to remake their new home into the disastrous state of the nations that they left behind, for good reason. Perhaps if the author sought to understand the people of the West as much as she seeks to understand her own fellow refugees from Iran and other places, she might be better equipped to appeal to them successfully. In our own corrupt days, though, people only think of themselves and not think of their audiences.