The Ungrateful Refugee

 

“Dina Nayeri’s powerful writing confronts issues that are key to the refugee experience.”
―Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees

What is it like to be a refugee? It is a question many of us do not give much thought to, 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. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement. In these pages, a couple falls 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.

Nothing here is flattened; nothing is simplistic. Nayeri offers a new understanding of refugee life, confronting dangers from the metaphor of the swarm to the notion of “good” immigrants. She calls attention to the harmful way in which Western governments privilege certain dangers over others. 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.

Praise & Reviews

Winner 2020 Geschwister-Scholl-Preis
Winner 2020 Clara Johnson Award
Finalist 2021 Elle Grand Prix des Lectrices
Finalist 2019 Kirkus Prize
Finalist 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
#3 in the Oct. 2020 Die Zeit Best Nonfiction List
One of New York Post‘s Best Books of the Week
One of Literary Hub’s Best Reviewed Books
One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019
The Ungrateful Refugee has made the September 2019 ABA Indie Next List!
Named 1 of 48 Books by Women and Nonbinary Authors of Color to Read in 2019 by Electric Literature
One of Bustle’s 15 books about asylum and immigration every person in the U.S. needs to read

“Nayeri uses her first work of nonfiction to remind readers of the pain and horrors refugees face before and long after their settlement. It is timely, as President Trump has made barring refugees from the United States a priority, and the Western world is plagued with a surge in nativism. Nayeri combines her own experience with those of refugees she meets as an adult, telling their stories with tenderness and reverence.”
—The New York Times

“The Ungrateful Refugee is a thoughtful investigation combining a memoir of her former life… and a collection of case studies interrogating what it means to have been, or to be, a refugee. It is a provocative work…. richly expressed… This wide-ranging, reasoned book is no polemic: its observations are self-reflective, contemplative and significant.”
—The Financial Times

“Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee is a work of astonishing, insistent importance… This is a book full of revelatory truths, moments where we are plunged deeply and painfully into the quotidian experience of the refugee. ”
—The Observer

“Nayeri weaves her empowering personal story with those of the ‘feared swarms,’ asylum-seekers in Greece and the Netherlands . . . Using energetic prose, Nayeri is an excellent conduit for these heart-rending stories, eschewing judgment and employing care in threading the stories in with her own . . . This is a memoir laced with stimulus and plenty of heart at a time when the latter has grown elusive.”
— Minnesota Star Tribune

“Ultimately, The Ungrateful Refugee is an instruction book in how to be humane.”
— Michigan Quarterly Review 

“A gifted weaver of stories…. Dina Nayeri’s book is one of those that must be read by all who care about the survival of human solidarity.”
—The Irish Times

“This is not comfortable reading, but it is compelling. In moving, poetic prose Nayeri unravels this difficult subject, never dodging troubling questions.”
—Glasgow Review of Books

“The tendency to speak in statistics is a failing of even the most sympathetic Europeans. That’s where Dina Nayeri comes in. Her book, The Ungrateful Refugee, is a memoir-cum-dispatch from the front lines of displacement. She works hard to put names, faces, quirks and favourite recipes to the anonymous numbers we read about—or switch off from . . . Dina Nayeri has found her place. In the lives and living quarters of refugees, using their ‘orphan details’ to humanise a crisis so often portrayed as a footnote in geopolitical upheaval.”
—New Statesman

“This book’s combination of personal narrative and collective refugee story is compelling, necessary, and deeply thought and felt. Writing with truth and beauty, Nayeri reckons with her own past as a refugee. . . . This valuable account of refugee lives will grip readers’ attention.”
—Booklist, (Starred Review)

“With inventive, powerful prose, Nayeri demonstrates what should be obvious: that refugees give up everything in their native lands only when absolutely necessary—if they remain, they may face poverty, physical torture, or even death . . . A unique, deeply thought-out refugee saga perfect for our moment.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review and Finalist for Kirkus Prize)

“Blistering in its unequivocal critiques of the legal systems that keep refugees in limbo, yet strikingly layered and nuanced in its storytelling…timely, unsettling, compassionate and deeply compelling.”
—Shelf Awareness (Starred Review)

Personal, powerful, and impassioned, The Ungrateful Refugee has the potential to open eyes.”
—Kirkus (profile)

“Evocative…Nayeri deftly explores the balance between truth and storytelling when it comes to the expectations of both the telling and the hearing of these accounts. She helps us see beyond a person’s citizenship status to recognize their humanity, most affectingly questioning whether it’s necessary to remove a person’s dignity in order to help them. A much-needed exploration of the refugee experience; Nayeri’s writing will be welcomed by a wide audience.”
—Library Journal

“Filled with evocative prose, Nayeri reveals the indignities exiles suffer as they dodge danger and shed their identities and souls while attempting to find safety. This thought-provoking narrative is a moving look at the current immigrant experience.”
—Publishers Weekly

“The Ungrateful Refugee is the work of an author at the top of her game, blending the personal and the political into what Carolyn Forché terms “the social,” both “a place of resistance and struggle,” and “the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice.””
— Guernica 

“Nayeri offers a searing, nuanced and complex account of her life as a refugee and of the experiences of other more recent refugees from Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. The stories are terrifying, disheartening, sometimes uplifting and definitely worth reading and meditating on…Nayeri is neither a journalist nor a polemicist. She’s a storyteller who invites our moral engagement.”
—Bookpage

“The Ungrateful Refugee is one the most urgently needed works of nonfiction of 2019. … Don’t speak about the refugee crisis before you know the refugee experience, which Nayeri renders so powerfully here.”
—Refinery 29, Best Books of September 2019

“Nayeri’s book is compelling and powerfully told, a must-read for anyone who needs an insight into the common threads we all share, and a reminder of how important it is to keep them unbroken.”
—NYLON, 1 of the 34 Books You’ll Want to Read This Fall

 “What Nayeri has done so well within this book is demonstrate the ways in which immigrants must constantly negotiate the most ordinary aspects of life, and prove over and over again that they deserve to have the same basic rights that so many of us take for granted. She does it in lucid, resonant prose that has been echoing around in my head for weeks now, allowing me to see the global problems we face through an intimate lens, reminding me the cost of neglecting the plights of so many other people. It’s a powerful and important book.”
—NYLON

“There has never been a better time to read The Ungrateful Refugee. Dina Nayeri writes of her own experiences as a refugee and of the experiences of a number of others to craft a nuanced portrait of immigration that steps beyond the rhetoric of “invasion” and challenges the notion of the “good” immigrant.” —Bustle

“Nayeri’s masterful storytelling in The Ungrateful Refugee cuts into the marrow of a profoundly human experience. She brings readers past the boundary of personal space and safe distance into uncomfortably close proximity. Through personal stories, including her own, Nayeri invites us to sit in the despair, anxiety, restlessness, and—contemptuously enough, the pride—of people whose lives are separated from ours not by worth or merit but simply by circumstance.”
—Electric Literature

“Nayeri is a reminder that people, actual human beings, are constantly faced with their entire existences being reduced to political anecdotes. The Ungrateful Refugee also reminds us that we should stop treating immigrants, or any group of people, as though their humanity is something they must earn.”
—Shondaland, 1 of 9 Reads You Won’t Be Able to Put Down

“An account of not only [Nayeri’s] own story, going from the privileged daughter of educated professionals to a refugee living in an Italian camp to a fiction writer in Iowa City, but of other desperate asylum-seekers who are expected to perform gratefulness for every act of basic human decency. Why must refugees be good? What does “good” or “deserving” mean, anyway?”
—Buzzfeed, Most Exciting Books Coming Out This Fall

“Everyone not chased out of their homes must read Dina Nayeri’s searing book ‘The Ungrateful Refugee’… A compelling personal and community biography.”
—Scroll India

“In spare and delightfully direct prose, Nayeri interrogates how and why we allow ourselves to demand proof of fear and gratitude from those seeking the most basic human dignity; why we persist in the fantasy that their dignity comes at the expense of our own. Long after closing the book, I’m haunted by the question she threads carefully underneath all the others: what keeps us from believing in each other?”
—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk

“Dina Nayeri’s powerful writing confronts issues that are key to the refugee experience.”
―Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees

“Dina Nayeri has written a vital book for our times. The Ungrateful Refugee gives voice to those whose stories are too often lost or suppressed. Braiding memoir, reportage and essayism, Nayeri allows those fortunate enough never to have been stateless or displaced to glimpse something of the hardships and subtleties of refugee experience. Written with compassion, tenderness and a burning anger, her book appears at the end of a decade in which division and dislocation have risen to a terrible pitch. It speaks powerfully from – and to – the heart. Please read it.”
—Robert Macfarlane, Underland, Landmarks

“This is a humane and compelling book that seeks to make human those demonised by the media and governing bodies for so long. Nayeri is never sentimental and her accounts of refugee lives, including her own, are unflinching, complex, provocative and important.”
—Nikesh Shukla, The Good Immigrant 

“A remarkable book, whose evocative stories are deftly woven into a powerful tapestry, with lessons for us all. Anybody interested in the refugee experience will learn from Dina Nayeri’s book. As for policymakers: The Ungrateful Refugee should be compulsory reading if they are to regain or retain a sense of humanity.”
—Steve Crawshaw, Small Acts of Resistance, and Goodby to the USSR. Policy Director, Freedom from Torture, former London Director, Human Rights Watch, former Germany bureau chief for the Independent

“Ms. Nayeri’s personal account is sure to be a powerful statement in the current political climate.”
–  US Representative Rashida Tlaib  

“The Ungrateful Refugee is glorious, and so beautifully written. The emotion is palpable off the page. I couldn’t put it down. I found so much that was not only moving, but relatable on a very deep level.”
– Padma Lakshmi (in conversation at Strand)

“She tells – empathetically and insistently – of people who are fleeing from prosecution… With moral and intellectual bravery…. The ungrateful refugee/Der undankbare Flüchtling is a plea to recognize every human being’s dignity. In the leaflets by the Weiße Rose there can be found the important request that every person has a right to a ‘useful and just’ state and to the ‘goods of the world’. Dina Nayeris book is written in this deeply humanist belief.” 
– Judge’s Statement, Geschwister-Scholl Preis (Germany)

“Dina Nayeri knows what it means to be a refugee and build a whole new life for oneself. In her complex book, the Iranian-American essayist interweaves her personal story of flight with the story of other migrants and shows what has to change in world policies. A dazzling and sad report.”
–Ranked #3 on best of nonfiction list, selected by jury of journalists from Deutschlandfunk Kultur, ZDF & Die ZEIT, Sachbuchbestenliste Oktober (Germany)

“Dina Nayeri signs a book of tremendous delicacy, and enlightens in a singular and gentle way the condition of refugees. At the crossroads of literature and life, Faiseurs d’histoires (The Ungrateful Refugee) is a pure success.”
–Elle Grand Prix des Lectrices (France)

“Dina Nayeri’s book is dazzling, torn, sad.”
–Deutschlandfunk Kultur (Germany)

“Dina Nayeri writes very honestly, very directly and yet empathically…. The Ungrateful Refugee could well become compulsory reading. For all those who think that people come here to take their jobs or money away from them and also for all asylum decision makers.”
–Bremen zwei (Germany)

“Provokes and shakes.”
–3sat Kulturzeit  (Germany)

“I have not yet come across a book that reflects or deals with escape in such depth on the one hand and so widely on the other.”
–Die Presse (Austria)

“a moving testimony… Dina Nayeri tells, with relevance and without pathos, fear, shame, humiliation.”
–Elle Magazine (France)

“A sharp and raging style… A sincere appeal for respect for refugees, their history and their culture”
–La Croix L’Hebdo (France)

“Dina Nayeri’s book opens our hearts and minds to how we can still make it.”
–ARD titel thesen temperamente (Germany)

“A beautiful testimony”
–Le Soir (France)

“The special feature of this book, however, is that it is so many things at once, as poetic as it is factual. It is not only a memoir, but also research on the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, for which she visited camps and spoke with many of those affected. Above all, The Ungrateful Refugee is a treatise on the nature of flight and what it does to people who have to leave their homes.”
–Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany

International Editions