I listened to this on audio, and I just didn't connect with it. I liked it. I could almost see the failure to connect as being intentional, just like the narrator keeps herself apart, trapped by her sense of herself as a refugee.
The novel is told in two voices, that of Niloo, who left Iran with her mother and brother as a girl and settled first in Oklahoma then later in Amsterdam, and Bahman, the father and opium addict that she left behind.
As a child Niloo walked bare-toed on that warm soil, on the tired backs of those who loved her, and she sank down until her feet planted. Here the ice-hard ground doesn't yield to strangers' feet, and her friends wander, a scattered village of poets and pleasure-seekers, burning to be seen. "I am here!" Mam'mad cried out in his final act. We (in italics) are all here, still waiting, addicts clustered together in a squat, broken from the earth like turmeric root, staining everything.
Dina Nayeri first came to my attention through her non-fiction book The Ungrateful Refugee. In Refuge, she lays some of the groundwork regarding the expectation of asylum officials in western countries expecting to hear traumatic stories in lurid full technicolour but the asylum seekers are too traumatized or don't have the level of expression and framing of their story to satisfy. One of the climatic scenes in Refuge is about an aged Iranian professor knowledge worker/refugee in the Netherlands who self-immolates after years of frustrated failed claims to get status. It's loosely based on a real person Iranian asylum seeker Kambiz Roustayi who set himself on fire and perished in 2011 in Holland, in the author's note.
Refuge is fictional but it aims to give a human face and dignity to Iranian exiles who've been forced to leave. At the heart is Niloo, an academic anthropologist who left Iran when she was eight due to prosecution of her mother's Christian beliefs. She with her younger brother transited through Rome, the Middle East before landing in the United States. Although successful professionally and married to a somewhat clueless Dutch white man in the present timeline, she is ever vigilant and insecure, always working hard and being hard on herself due to her fear of losing everything from her past experience as a child refugee. By all accounts, hers is supposed to be a lucky refugee success story. Her journey shares some similarities with the author's. Niloo feels both attracted and compelled to help when she discovers an enclave of Iranian exiles in Amsterdam, many of them asylum seekers.
The story also concentrates on the father-daughter relationship, which becomes increasingly fraught and distant as Niloo's father stayed behind in Iran with his dentistry practice at their village. Bahman Hamidi, Niloo's father, is quite the larger than life character. Indeed, it's his chapter at the beginning of the book that lured me in. When we encounter him in the present, he is in court attempting to secure a divorce from his third wife. Dr Hamidi is a man of contradictions, a complex character that I think arises from the author's skill and desire to have a fully fleshed out Iranian out man in his environs. Indeed, through the years of separation from his family for which there were family get-togethers in different countries like Spain and Dubai, Niloo comes to the realization his father won't be coming to join them and would be much reduced if he leaves Iran and is forced to grovel as a refugee in hostile foreign lands. Bahman is fun-loving, spontaneous and recites Persian poetry. He feels acute sympathy for the women at the law courts who are getting unfair judgments from the mullah judge and even surreptitiously gives money to one desperate to leave her marriage. Yet he is also an opium addict (according to the text, this is a common affliction in Iran) and sees his second wife who voluntarily comes to serve him while he's undergoing withdrawal as "dependable as his father's guard dog."
Niloo's observations: Persian men belittle and abuse their wives, demanding total subservience. They insist on delectable suppers, sparkling floors, and clothes that smell of jasmine, all without fuss or complaint. Their mothers served them after all, and they need it to survive, but they suffer an unconcious guilt over it. So when chance gives them daughters, fear sets in. What if someone treats their hatchling the same way they've treated their wives?......They teach their girls to be aggressive, and cunning, and to rule over them,....., never to tell their husbands "I love you" because that's giving up too much power.
Forced to witness this spectacle, frustrated wives (having once been someone's muse and Machiavelli), spoil their sons, lavishing them with all the attention they lack from their husbands, teaching the next generation that a woman's love is delivered never through words, only in service. The result of this is generation after generation of entitled boy-men and brick-fisted manipulative women, a dynamic that may offend the civilized, but is sustainable and self-propagating.
Niloo's razor sharp observations on gender dynamics and the different types of Persian exiles (Money Persians, Academic Persians, Fresh-of-the-boat Persians and Artist and Activist Persians) are a hoot. There are many organic moments of awkwardness and embarrassment when the family has their international gatherings, with Bahman being the fish out of water. I also love moments like when Niloo forgets to tarof (refuse three times out of politeness according to Persian custom) from excitement of being invited to Mam'mad's dwelling. Beneath the levity though is an undercurrent of loss and urgent appeal for host countries to be more compassionate and understanding of these flesh and blood asylum seekers and refugees. To stay or to leave is a wretched choice.
I am always moved by stories of those who leave everything behind and begin anew, creating a home out of nothing in a new country and culture. This book is about Niloo, an Iranian girl who leaves her beloved and larger-than-life father to live in America with her mother and brother. Niloo struggles to find her place but eventually finds peace in academia. Eventually she moves to Amsterdam with her French husband who struggles to understand her rootlessness. She is continually drawn to and yet repulsed by her former culture and her father. When she finds an Iranian community, she bristles at their neediness (they want her help as they seek political asylum), but then she begins to reconnect with her Iranian self. Meanwhile, her poet/dentist father finds himself under house arrest with his current wife and his ex-wife who care for him as he withdraws from his daily opium habit. His country is in turmoil and he must make choices that will determine the fate of his relationship with Niloo. // I enjoyed this book because it gave great insight into the heart and soul of an immigrant; how the loss of the original home must be grieved and yet set aside in order to create a new home. And it ponders the question of whether home is a physical place or a person or a piece of art or a jar of familiar spices. The characters were complex and not always likeable. The writing was lovely.
What does it mean to be a borderless citizen? What is the privilege of safe passage from country to country knowing you have a place to go home to and be accepted? Niloo's story is familiar to many immigrant children. Ready to exemplify and validate her parent's struggle, she decides to depart from her parents identity in order to do so. At times, it is a sore reminder of her difference. Others, it is a comfort in knowing she has something so precious and hers.
Now firmly planted in Amsterdam, Niloo recalls the years and sparse visits leading up to her father's passing. The disappointment and miscommunication. The embarrassment of failing to meet each other's expectations. Yet, there's something painfully true about her memories. Her father did care about her in his own way. And although she may be far from the young, lost girl she was, she's still fearful of calling any place home. There's something to be said when she opens her closet pantry in search of olives with the taste of her childhood. That maybe these small differences are indicative of who she is and not who she shouldn't be.
I recommend this book for realistic fiction telling stories that are being told enough.
Honestly one of my favorite covers with the beautiful painting and the way the sans serif/serif on the I's interact with the fruit. The use of white space is tastefully done and there's such a calmness that comes from the placement.
This story conveyed an understanding and a compassion for each of its characters. The transition from the recent past to the family's previous visits together felt smooth and unforced. The book is full of nuanced characters enmeshed in complicated, loving relationships. Nayeri offers nuance and context to the current conversation regarding immigration and what it means to be a refugee; she has a good understanding of what pushes us apart and brings us back together.
Didn't get far enough to give it a rating. I may have grown to like it more if I stuck with it, but there was something plodding about the writing that turned me off.
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. The prose was beautiful, and several quotes throughout made me stop and think, which is rare sometimes and something I think should be applauded. The story is about immigrants fleeing Iran, something the author has experienced. I didn't know very much about the turmoil that happened in Iran, so it was eye-opening for me. But, I thought the characters were prone to being a little too stereotypical at times - almost came off as caricatures, which isn't easy to overlook.
