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A review by nini23
Refuge by Dina Nayeri
4.25
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/dina-nayeri-ungrateful-refugee
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.
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.