The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You – Dina Nayeri

The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You

Author: Dina Nayeri

Publisher: Canongate Books

Print Length: 384 pages

Genre: Non-Fiction / Autobiography or Memoir

Topic: Asylum & Asylum Seekers, Refugees & Forced Migration, Asylum & Refugee System, Deserving & Undeserving, Ethics & Morality, Host Community, Lived Experience, Migrants, Survival, Resilience, Resistance, Limbo, Transit, Assimilation, Patience & Gratitude/Thankfulness, The Notion of Home

A timely, provocative and personal examination of the refugee experience.

What is it like to be a refugee? It is a question many of us do not give much thought, and yet there are more than 25 million refugees in the world. To be a refugee is to grapple with your place in society, attempting to reconcile the life you have known with a new, unfamiliar home. All this while bearing the burden of gratitude in your host nation: the expectation that you should be forever thankful for the space you have been allowed.

Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother, and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually she was granted asylum in America. Now, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with those of other asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement. In these pages, a couple fall in love over the phone, and women gather to prepare the noodles that remind them of home. A closeted queer man tries to make his case truthfully as he seeks asylum, and a translator attempts to help new arrivals present their stories to officials.

With surprising and provocative questions, The Ungrateful Refugee recalibrates the conversation around the refugee experience. Here are the real human stories of what it is like to be forced to flee your home, and to journey across borders in the hope of starting afresh.

Author’s Note

PART ONE. ESCAPE

(On good faith, credible risk and opportunism)

I  /  II. Darius  /  III  /  IV. Kaweh and Kambiz 

PART TWO. CAMP

(On waiting and in-between places)

I  /  II  /  III  /  IV  /  V. Majid and Farzaneh  /  VI  /  VII. Valid and Taraa

PART THREE. ASYLUM

(On stories and the alchemy of truth)

I  /  II. Kaweh  /  III. Kambiz  /  IV  /  V  /  VI  /  VII  /  VIII

PART FOUR. ASSIMILATION

(On shame, past shelves and chameleon life)

I  /  II  /  III

PART FIVE. CULTURAL REPATRIATION

(On being claimed, gratitude and the return home)

Acknowledgements

Dina Nayeri is the author of two novels and two books of creative nonfiction, Who Gets Believed? (2023) and The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), winner of the Geschwister Scholl Preis and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Kirkus Prize, and Elle Grand Prix des Lectrices, and called by The Guardian “a work of astonishing, insistent importance.” Her essay of the same name was one of The Guardian’s most widely read long reads in 2017, and is taught in schools and anthologized around the world. A 2019-2020 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and winner of the 2018 UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize, Dina has won a National Endowment for the Arts literature grant, the O. Henry Prize, and Best American Short Stories, among other honors. Her short dramas have been produced by the English Touring Theatre and The Old Vic in London. She is a graduate of Princeton, Harvard, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. She is currently working on plays, screenplays, and her upcoming publications include The Waiting Place, a nonfiction children’s book about refugee camp, Who Gets Believed, a creative nonfiction book, and Sitting Bird, a novel. She has recently joined the faculty at the University of St. Andrews. 

Source: https://www.dinanayeri.com/about-dina/

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