#dina nayeri

[antifainternational]

"It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks." - Dina Nayeri

[eggwhiteswithspinach]

We drift from the safe places of our childhood. There is no going back. Like stories, villages and cities are always growing or fading or melding into each other. We are all immigrants from the past, and home lives inside the memory, where we lock it up and pretend it is unchanged.

#Dina Nayeri (The Ungrateful Refugee)

[ramyeongif]

And here is the biggest lie in the refugee crisis. It isn’t the faulty individual stories. It is the language of disaster often used to describe incoming refugees-deluge or flood or swarm. These words are lies.

#Dina Nayeri (The Ungrateful Refugee)

[ramyeonpng]

We drift from the safe places of our childhood. There is no going back. Like stories, villages and cities are always growing or fading or melding into each other. We are all immigrants from the past, and home lives inside the memory, where we lock it up and pretend it is unchanged.

#Dina Nayeri (The Ungrateful Refugee)

[camernes]

You don't need hundreds of friends, or adventures, or any substance to fill your bones with life. You need some good lamb stew with kidney beans and fenugreek, basmati rice, romance sometimes, community always. You need a deep well of kindness for old lovers.

[usofj]

[outragedtortilla]

the ungrateful refugee

[shesey]

Excerpts from Refuge by Dina Nayeri

But you can't make someone love you, as they say, and shouldn't try, unless you're twenty and have a muscular heart, a heart itching to be broken in. Sometimes, in calmer years, failing isn't such a curse. And then he had come through for her, this man she had chosen to love for exactly this reason: he could understand much more than his experience should allow. But Niloo didn't say any of that because it's important not to care what men think. In truth she had never tried to live without Gui. And that's the only way you know for real, isn't it? The child cried openly, no one bothering to protect her future psyche from the memory of this day. We had our love. No sense to be missing each other all this time, haunting each other's nights this way. It's not healthy. It happens because the world is a sweaty cave crowded with bodies clamoring and fighting to capture every good thing for themselves. Niloo is finished with the visits - they are draining and painful and she's bad at them... These disconnects rouse her at night. The memory of them traps her breath so that it fails halfway up her chest.

Now Zakhmeh has made her curious, and curiosity is one instinct Niloo rarely ignores. The thing she has is stamina; and if she calmed down, as everyone advises her to do, she would be nothing. Dokhtare kharab, a broken girl, which is the Iranian way of describing a sexually free person who happens to be female. This sleepy flatland was no home to me, and it would be worth any hard work and indignity now if I could just find my own. I was afraid they'd find out I was afraid. My only antidote to the fear was math and science, concrete pursuits Baba had taught me to trust. There are creatures a person can see at thirty to which she has no access at fourteen. I'd rather you grow up to be this useless to the universe than to become a religion pusher. If this disaster is absolute zero in value, then Jesus and Allah pushers are deep in the negatives. Live where you fear to live, says Rumi, be notorious. It seemed to Bahman that Rumi respected the pleasure seekers, the ones who hunted for the next tumbling of the heart in the cracks between minutes. Those wakeful ones, sucking joy from the bone-dry day. He had loved his wives, but never lingered, sedated and eroding, in a comatose marriage. What a good feeling, he thought, to be so well loved in one's community -- or if not loved, needed in more than a peripheral way. Well, Bahman was too old and tired to care about the bile that spewed from an old mullah's mouth. I tell you one rule of love. Don't trap. Don't be trapped. How is the atmosphere of her heart? I tore something precious from the clenched fist of the universe. It's a curse to be a bad fit. It's like spending every day trying to force a hundred mixed-up lids onto the wrong jars. People think that's not enough reason, but it's the one thing that's unfixable. It poisons everything. They were stray sparks from a fire too far away to offer warmth. How sad it is when someone who has left your orbit, whose memory has receded, holds such intimate knowledge. Meeting them again feels like a renewed loss, and it's full of tremors and watery eyes and involuntary responses much like a bout of opium withdrawal, not only because every familiar detail - their blue eyes or their yellowing laugh or a charming turn of their hand - is like a coil of skin peeled from the heart, but because they took away that knowledge of you with them, that snapshot of you, out into the world. And as they changed, everything that they knew changed too. And so you are unwittingly altered. Now you're in love with you. The original you.

If old love is opium, then it must be more dangerous than the new. Withdrawal from it drives the addict to the edge of a roof... It makes him moan and beg and collapse and rave for release. Nothing compares to knowing there is no more. Over the years, she has learned to adapt, to start over in each new place and live as if she belongs there. She craves a night of solitary cooking. People change. Everyone. And all love ends. She knows this now. When you stop carrying it all on your back -- maybe that's when the refugee years end. She recalls that the best part of her day used to be hearing a key turn in the door. She would wait behind the door and peek out at him as he came in. His slow smile would bloom, and the wrinkles around his eyes would appear, and he would lift her up, kiss her mouth, and say, you bring the joy.

When she hears I can't do this anymore, it takes a second to realize that these dreaded words have tumbled from her own mouth. It's not enough just to laugh at the same twisted jokes and to say we love each other enough to live under a bridge. We have no roots. Great god, oh god, I want to stay in love. Then she goes back to mispronouncing words and reciting from rote memory. Staying in love, this girl seems to know, is the true challenge. Did Europeans realize how lucky they were, to be part of so much order and care through an accident of birth? I had spent years nursing the wrong fears. It's not easy, to build a village. The road, it travels too. But if I was afraid of anything, it was the possibility of stagnating. All good things end, and I no longer believe that reduces their worth. Lying in this wreck, something important feels finished. It is as if in her fingers and toes she knows that the life she has built is gone and that the passing decades will find her gone from here, inside a different future. What constant breathlessness in uprooting; it's the unbearable stretching on of life. How relentlessly it endures for you - a comfort. Once when he was a boy, Bahman's father told him that you only need a handful of people to make a village that bustles and endures. Turning back was useless, because the road is walking too. Sorrow isn't a devil's contract that you forge in the dark. Sometimes you trip and fall in. Most everything we claim to want is the empty shell of something more essential; we're afraid to face the hard road to obtaining the thing itself. And marriages, houses, what were these but waiting containers for love? He wanted to say, everything ends. Everything. All love and truth.

But sometimes the wind forces you a different way. Niloo Hamidi had woken from a coma much like his own... How would she greet the work that comes after waking? The hurt was spreading inward. His daughter was in detox. We're all strangers to ourselves. More so as we age. So, it's good to remember what you loved as a child. He too had always gravitated toward the natural, toward the roots of things, and yet here was something inexplicable: the human capacity for good, baffling quantities of good. What was the mysterious ingredient that mixed with flesh and instinct to spark love?

[grouchydairy]

Unlike economic migrants, refugees have no agency; they are no threat. Often, they are so broken, they beg to be remade into the image of the native. As recipients of magnanimity, they can be pitied. (...) But if you are born in the Third World and you dare to make a move before you are shattered, your dreams are suspicious. You are a carpetbagger, an opportunist, a thief. You are reaching above your station.

#Dina Nayeri (The Ungrateful Refugee)

[kindledspiritsbooks]

My Month in Books: May and June 2023

The Heroine’s Journey: Women’s Quest for Wholeness by Maureen Murdock If, like me, you picked this book up thinking that it is a feminist response to Joseph Campbell’s idea of the Hero’s Journey, you’ll find yourself disappointed. Less literary theory and more self-help, Murdock posits that women have been defined according to masculine values and successes and that a heroine must reconnect with…

[eggwhiteswithspinach]

And while we grumble over what we are owed and how much we get to keep, the displaced wait at the door. They are painters and surgeons and craftsmen and students. Children. Mothers. The neighbor who made a good sauce. The funny girl from science class. The boy who can really dance. The great-uncle who always turns down the wrong street. They endure painful transformation, rising from death, discarding their faces and bodies, their identities, without guarantee of new ones.

#Dina Nayeri (The Ungrateful Refugee)

[ramyeongif]

We drift from the safe places of our childhood. There is no going back. Like stories, villages and cities are always growing or fading or melding into each other. We are all immigrants from the past, and home lives inside the memory, where we lock it up and pretend it is unchanged.

#Dina Nayeri (The Ungrateful Refugee)

[ramyeonpng]

We drift from the safe places of our childhood. There is no going back. Like stories, villages and cities are always growing or fading or melding into each other. We are all immigrants from the past, and home lives inside the memory, where we lock it up and pretend it is unchanged.

#Dina Nayeri (The Ungrateful Refugee)

[callmewinged]

" 'Everyone chooses something that's most essential to their identity... we're willing to lie around it, but not about it.'

We can lie in service of our formative story, but not in opposition to it. Even the most open-minded struggle to accept a point of view that goes against their center of identity. 'It's like recent critiques of Cartesian foundationalism. Scholars argue that you have a set of certainties that determine the place from which you head out. Those certainties cannot be touched. They form your worldview. Changing those means radically changing how you think. For example, my worldview is partly based on Darwinism. That functions as certainty. To change that means to restructure my entire web, and that would cost too much. I'd be a different person. The core of the web cannot be touched. The further out from the core, the easier to change a thought without unraveling the whole thing.'

The core of the web is existential.

... as I ride the tram home, I think of honesty and my writing life. What is my story? Am I loudly defending a wedge that fails to represent my life?"

~ "The Ungrateful Refugee", by Dina Nayeri