CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: A Conversation between Dina Nayeri and Emily Collins

March 24, 2021

by Emily Collins

In her latest book, The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You, author Dina Nayeri shares her story and that of other asylum seekers in ways that confront Western notions of what it means to be a refugee. Her novels A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea and Refuge are revelatory works that explore familial relationships, independence, and the profound experiences of young refugees. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Nayeri’s work reveals the complicated truths of this world through compassionate and unsentimental forms of storytelling. 

The following interview was conducted via Voxer audio. 

Emily Collins:  In your stunning book, The Ungrateful Refugee, you weave together stories of refugee life while confronting Western notions of mandatory gratitude and what makes a “good” immigrant. The book opens with your own story then takes us into the journeys of other refugees and asylum seekers, all of which reveal the dangers of assigning simplistic ideas of morality to a refugee. What were some of the challenges of writing these stories in a way that both honors complexity and gets to the heart of someone’s experience in unflinching prose?

Dina Nayeri: The stories I write in the book came out of particular types of traumas. Stuck in refugee camps, these people were emotionally wrecked, and that's not the best time to share your story with the world. At Iowa we learned that we should give a story some time before attempting to write it, because we tend to be overly sentimental with stories we just experienced. So, I had to coax these very traumatized people to give me physical, visceral, and sensory details -- sometimes it took hours to muddle through the pain. Another challenge was the language. I was speaking Farsi, my native language. But there are so many different dialects and accents. At first I'd stop them to ask for the meaning of a word, but then I told myself that the recording would clarify things later. I thought, “You know what? I’m just going to sit back and listen now.”

Once I had the stories and I was writing them, I had to be very careful. I had to double check names, places, the order of events. It involved a lot of research. But the process helped put things in a larger context. I also found I had to make narrative choices, because these stories were complex and happened over many, many years. What I brought to their stories, in the end, was that I could apply Western storytelling rules to these raw, uncut, unprocessed stories. I felt an obligation and duty to do it right, to do the stories justice. 

EC: You write about trauma and escape in clear and unsentimental ways. When writing the truth of your or another’s experience, how do you balance emotional realities such as vulnerability and anger while staying true to the original story or point of view?

DN:  So this comes back to avoiding sentimentality. The sad reason so many of these stories aren’t heard is that they’re long, sentimental, and very alike. People tire of hearing them, and I think that’s just tragic. It’s tragic that the stories aren’t heard just because of the way survivors tell them. I felt it my job to sift through these stories with a narrative sieve. And to dig out the singular details that bring memorable stories to life.

EC: Your fiction explores the contemporary refugee experience in ways that feel incredibly intimate but also beyond the limits of personal experience. I’ve heard fiction writers say the best way to tell the truth is through a lie. I know that personally I’ve been moved by lives I’ve never lived, especially those that have been made up! Do you also bring this mindset to your fiction, and do you see your novels as opportunities for those who’ve shut down their hearts?

DN:  I don’t think that the truth in a larger sense is always perfectly correlated with facts. I think facts can shed light on a larger truth. When we look at all the facts of a situation, we begin to understand what has really happened, but it’s also very possible to use those same facts to perpetuate a lie. Meanwhile, a fictional story can reveal something that's true in the world: If the storyteller is committed to the truth, they can dramatize it using facts or imagination. And they can do the same if they're committed to spreading a lie.   

EC: I’d imagine The Ungrateful Refugee will resonate or has resonated with many different types of readers. Your audience is multifaceted, and everyone can glean invaluable information from these stories. Perhaps the most dangerous reader is the one who’s chosen to remain indifferent toward the refugee crisis. What do you hope that type of reader gets from this book?

DN: Some readers are too closed off. Unfortunately, you can’t win them over through stories or rhetoric. I think a reader has to come part of the way to you. The readers who are committed to hating refugees won’t ever pick up my book anyway. I’m not interested in reaching them. I’m interested in beating them at the polls, alongside readers whose hearts are open and want to understand these kinds of stories.  Readers who might read my book and say, “No, we are not going to vote for policies that are restrictive, that close borders and turn a blind eye to human suffering.” It’s important to me to reach the kind of people who are on the fence, who are compassionate, and understand that they are beneficiaries of an accident of birth—people who want to do right by their fellow man. Maybe they’re not sure what that is, maybe they've been fed the wrong information about refugees, or they're just scared. I want to reach them. I want to provide the right information, and help them understand that much of what they’re hearing is not the truth, that they have nothing to fear from humanitarian policies. With these stories, I want to show a more visceral and more powerful narrative truth than the one they've been getting. I hope this book and others like it can help us elect people and create policies that will protect the displaced.