Dina Nayeri on Writing The Ungrateful Refugee

Photo: Anna Leader

Dina Nayeri’s first two books, the novels A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea and Refuge, pulled in threads from her life; her Iranian childhood, her time as a refugee in Italy, her settling in America. The second book in particular flowed from mind to pen, from pen to page. “It just fell out of me,” Nayeri said. Only when she arrived at her latest book and first work of nonfiction, The Ungrateful Refugee, did Nayeri really grapple with what to say, and how. 

The book tells not only pieces of Nayeri’s own story, but also the stories of several other refugees and the people and systems that helped and hindered along their journeys. Nayeri also takes time to step back and consider, in an essayistic vein, a variety of realities that feed into the experiences of refugees, from what people from a specific country deem “believable” to cultural modes of storytelling.

Creating such a complex work was a struggle, and one that Nayeri sought from the beginning. “I no longer wanted to go to that place where the stories flow naturally out of me because they are my stories. I wanted to look and to think and to strain to shape a story because it’s not familiar to me, and to use all the creative resources and tools I picked up from my MFA and through years of storytelling, and to do some reporting, and to overlay my memoir.”

“It was a much more deliberate process. There was much more learning involved.”

Structure

In structuring the book, Nayeri thought first about moving chronologically through her own story, and then moving to stories she gathered. But “that would put a big break between my story and other people’s stories,” she said. “I didn’t like that.” She thought about what she wanted her readers to learn, to know at book’s end, and she arrived at two big-picture points.

“One thing that I want people to know is that the refugee’s narrative, the entire arc of their story … goes from escaping to waiting in the camps to seeking asylum to assimilation and then decades later, a repatriation of sorts. People don’t always cover these. The other thing … every single one of these pieces has some universal element to it that we have all lived, but refugees live in a more extreme way. For example, camp. It’s about waiting … and we have all suffered the degradation and abjection of having to wait for someone, or some more powerful entity.”

To express these steps along the refugee’s arc as well as the universal elements experienced in each, Nayeri organized her book with section names representing steps paired with subtitles representing general concepts. “Camp” is subtitled “on waiting and in-between places,” while “Asylum” carries the subtitle “on stories and the alchemy of truth.” 

The act of seeking asylum requires a person from one place, who needs refuge, to tell their story again and again to people from other places, who are granting refuge and who might have different ideas of how to tell stories, and what “believable” means. “Asylum is about storytelling, it’s about persuasion and convincing someone who has power over you. So much of this is about power. Asylum is about transforming ourselves for many reasons–to find a new home, for love, for acceptance, for welcome. These things are universal.”

Support

When it comes to her own storytelling, Nayeri credits her agent Kathleen Anderson for her constant support. “I’ve been with her for over ten years, she’s the constant in my life. In many ways, she’s behaved like a mother to me. I talk to her on the phone all the time.” When it came to The Ungrateful Refugee, Nayeri’s first nonfiction work, Anderson helped her brainstorm. Anderson sent her samples of nonfiction proposals, Nayeri wrote one up, and they shaped it together.

Once the book arrived at its UK and US editors, Simon Thorogood and Megha Majumdar, Nayeri discovered she’d landed with a yin-and-yang pairing. “My Brit editor Simon was more big picture so he would tell me if something broadly wasn’t working, or he would cut out entire paragraphs or say, ‘move this entire chunk over here.’ My editor Megha in the US had such a razor eye, she would say every sentence that didn’t work or every image that was problematic. There were so many comments in her Word document that my MS Word kept crashing.

“They didn’t talk to each other, but unknowingly they made this perfect editorial team. Reading their edits side by side gave me a full and complete picture of how to make my book work. I was so lucky to have them.”

Find Dina Nayeri online at dinanayeri.com and on Twitter @DinaNayeri.

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