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The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants…
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The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You (edició 2020)

de Dina Nayeri (Autor)

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2318115,575 (3.67)29
hoopla Book Club Hub - Spotlight Selection! Visit theclub.hoopladigital.com for discussion guide, exclusive author interview, and more. 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 twenty-five million refugees in the world. 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 University. 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 this book, a couple falls in love over the phone, women gather to prepare 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. Nayeri confronts notions like "the swarm," and, on the other hand, "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 challenges us to rethink how we talk about the refugee crisis.… (més)
Membre:Stephenandkaty
Títol:The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You
Autors:Dina Nayeri (Autor)
Informació:Catapult (2020), Edition: Reprint, 368 pages
Col·leccions:La teva biblioteca
Valoració:
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The Ungrateful Refugee de Dina Nayeri

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Es mostren 1-5 de 7 (següent | mostra-les totes)
I would have love to give it four stars, because Dina's personal story must be heard. I especially find the parts in which she speaks about her father ("Baba") very compelling. Unfortunately, some parts are disjointed - this book could've done with about 25 pages less.

It's also not very clear why she moved from Oklahoma to Iowa, and why her father didn't seem to have any problems with the regime, as he stayed in Iran. She should have elaborated on the possible consequences of this fact. Maybe next time Dina should find more people who can proof read for her, because the writing talent is absolutely there. ( )
  PhilipMertens | Jun 19, 2021 |
Nayeri shares her own refugee story (she fled with her mother and younger brother from Iran after the revolution, when she was ten and spent over a year in refugee camps before arriving in Oklahoma), and she also examines the current refugee experience, thirty years later, as most European countries, the U.S., and the U.K. have become much less welcoming to refugees and asylum seekers (let alone immigrants in general). Why do asylum officers look for reasons to reject, rather than reasons to rescue? Why do host countries insist on a performance of gratitude? Above all, why is it so difficult to believe that people who have fled their homes, often leaving everything behind and braving a dangerous route, are truly in need of sanctuary, and that Western countries are well-placed to provide it?

See also: When Stars Are Scattered (MG/YA/graphic), Other Words for Home (MG), Almost American Girl (YA), The Septembers of Shiraz (fiction), All You Can Ever Know (memoir), The Line Becomes A River (memoir), Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri (YA)

Quotes

In a refugee camp, stories are everything. (6)

There is nothing worse than waiting for someone else to act. (65)

Perhaps that's the purpose of prayer: that it reaches human ears. (99)

Even when first-order needs were in question, love was all for us, the only thing more basic than home or country. (107)

Sometimes invented stories are true in more important ways... (113)

As for volunteers, even the most good-hearted want to feel thanked. They have come for that silent look of admiration that's free to most, but so costly if you're tapped for gratitude by everyone you meet. (116)

"The complicated thing is that dignity changes as different needs are met." (Paul Hutchings, 128)

To some, help must always come with a slap on the wrist. (re: Trump changes to SNAP, 140)

...shouldn't wanting a better life be enough on its own? ...Isn't a wasted life also a life that is in danger?
...There is no logical or just reason for a mediocre few, shielded from competition, propped up by inherited riches and passports, to feast on the world's resources under the guise of meritocracy. (161)

But charity and welcome are different things. Why do we ask the desperate to strip off their dignity as the price of help? (175)

We started to understand that in America, you choose your story and make it true. (192)

This was a common complaint among refugees: the future brings anxiety because you don't belong, and can't move forward. The past brings depression, because you can't go home, your memories fade, and everything you know is gone. (207-208)

...there's the sense of entitlement and heroism that follows escape... (220)

...they're not looking to rescue. They're looking to reject. (re: asylum interviewers, 224)

[My mother] thinks that, if something is true, we should all remember it the same way.....truth requires point of view, as well [as facts]. (227)

"They apply the logic of a democratic nation to brutal dictatorships." (Pouri, 234)

"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. (cousin Pooyan, 249)

"Who would spend eleven years in jail if they could go back? At some point, is it so hard to believe that home isn't an option?" (Pouri, 255)

"Showing someone the truth of your past is so complicated." Memories are full of inconsistencies. (Pouri, 256)

Refugees will spend the rest of their lives battling to be believed. Not because they are liars but because they're forced to make their facts fit narrow conceptions of truth. (260)

"No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark." (poet Warsan Shire, 262)

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.
Many news outlets report total asylum requests as a proxy for asylum seekers [but some are second requests]... (262)

What few broken and wretched lives the richest nations take in, they should do so graciously, as the chief consumers of the world's bounty. In many cases, the pursuit of that bounty is the very thing that has impoverished and war-ravaged the East. (263)

There are things we crave from each other whose value we diminish by asking for them: love, gratitude, understanding. (300)

When you have no rights, everyone has power over you. (305)

We are constantly assimilating to each other, all of us, because we want to love and be loved. (324)

We are all immigrants from the past, and home lives inside the memory, where we lock it up and pretend it is unchanged. (final sentence, 346) ( )
  JennyArch | Jan 4, 2021 |
When Dina Nayeri was a child, she, her mother and younger brother fled Iran. Her mother had become a Christian and it was no longer safe for her to remain in the Muslim country. Her father, chose to remain in Iran and soon remarried.

The family passed through several refugee camps, and eventually were sponsored by an evangelical family in Oklahoma – a state whose culture was so unlike upper class Iran, that Dina could not relate.

She alternates her family’s story with those of other refugees in other camps. Some wait for years and years trying to prove their worthiness for asylum to the host country. Some get caught in the in-between spaces where they have not found asylum but cannot go home.

She often feels judged by her host country. There are ‘good refugees’ and ‘bad refugees’; political refugees and economic refugees. She is disturbed by the attitude that western nations feel that all refugees should be grateful to be admitted – although she also does not believe that refugees should be expected to be admitted to a country to help improve that country.

This is an intensely told story, sometimes quite angry. At times I found it compelling; other times it bogged down for me. Nevertheless, I am glad to have read it and to hopefully understand a bit more of the refugees’ plight as they leave their beloved homelands behind into an unknown culture and future. Also, it made me look at the variety of refugees’ experiences both before and after they fled their homeland. It will help the reader see each refugee as a unique person with a unique story, rather than a faceless mass, all fleeing for the same reasons. ( )
  streamsong | Nov 24, 2020 |
I was drawn to Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You primarily because it advertises itself as a book that “defies stereotypes and raises surprising questions about the immigrant experience.” I had to believe that the stereotype of the “ungrateful refugee” would be one of the ones most strongly refuted by Nayeri. The last thing I expected was to come away from the book feeling that Nayeri had shot herself in the foot by exposing her own blatant hypocrisy when it comes to international refugees and their obligations to their host countries. But sadly, that’s exactly what happened.

Dina Nayeri fled Iran with her mother and her younger brother when she was just eight years old. Her father, a successful dentist, elected to remain in the country – where he remarried and began a new family. Dina’s mother, an activist convert to Christianity, was in danger of arrest and imprisonment, and her husband decided to help her and his children escape the country, in effect abandoning them to them to their fate. The author was ultimately granted asylum in the United States and educated at Princeton University, and has carved out quite a successful career for herself. Despite her success, however, Nayeri seems to resent still each of the countries she passed through as a refugee, including the one she eventually settled in.

Nayeri tells the stories of other refugees like her, people more or less forced to flee their own countries because of political or religious pressure, pressure strong enough to make them fear for their lives. Surprisingly, the stories, touching as they are, add little new to the conversation regarding the obligations of the West to take in as many political refugees as possible and the obligations of the refugees themselves not to become long-term burdens on the countries taking them in.

More surprising is the disdainful attitude of superiority used by Nayeri to reprimand Western governments for even requiring refugees to prove that they are political refugees and not economic refugees. Nayeri argues that the distinction should not matter – that all the “mediocre” native-workers being replaced by refugees willing to work for lower wages don’t really deserve the jobs they do so poorly anyway.

These quotes from the book demonstrate why I find Nayeri’s points about stereotyping a whole people to be so hypocritical on her part:

“Every day her bosses questioned her (Nayeri’s mother’s) intelligence, though they had a quarter of her education. They pretended not to understand her accent. If she took too long to articulate a thought, they stopped listening and wrote her off as stupid.” Page 187 (making the same assumptions about her mother’s “bosses” that she accuses them of making about her mother.

“I began looking forward again. Oklahoma wasn’t a promised land. It was hot and mediocre and lazy. And I could never satisfy these people.” Page 192 (writing off a whole population and region as being “mediocre and lazy”)

“Daniel (the author’s brother) is a good immigrant – hardworking and talented and grateful, the kind who makes America better. He thanks his new country with his every move. And yes, the United States and England and Holland and Germany would be better if all immigrant were like him. I wonder, though, how many are just keeping their mouths shut and their ideas trapped in for fear of seeming defiant to the mediocre white man scrutinizing their papers.” Page 330 (fighting racism with racism of her own)

“In conversations about the refugee crisis, educated people continue to make the barbaric argument that open doors will benefit the host nation. The time for this outdated colonialist argument has run out; migrants don’t derive their value from their benefit to the Western-born, and civilized people don’t ask for résumés from the edge of the grave. Page 334 (her legitimate argument cheapened by words like “barbaric” and “civilized”)

“…I imagine what they (refugees) might become if they had, say, the same opportunities as the Trump children. My mind conjures Pulitzers, heart surgeries, books of poetry and philosophy and history. There is no logical reason for a mediocre few, shielded from competition, propped up by inherited riches and passports, to feast on the world’s resources under the guise of meritocracy.” Page 161 (assuming that only one of the groups is capable of mediocrity)

“Maybe I’m a hypocrite. I believe in open borders, but Europe is no paradise. The notion that the rest of the world is without beauty or joy, that everyone is clamoring to break down Europe’s doors, is nonsense. For many, the West would be unequivocally worse…” Page 341 (very true argument that calls for mutual respect, something Nayeri seem to grant to the West only very reluctantly)

Bottom Line: While The Ungrateful Refugee is interesting and thought-provoking, it weakens its own argument that refugees deserve more sympathy and respect than they get by basing that argument on the assumption that the average refugee is smarter, and has more potential, than the average Westerner helping to decide whether or not the refugee will be granted asylum. The author is quick to call out the hypocrisy of the West while failing to recognize her own. This book could, and should, have made a much stronger argument in favor of refugees than it does, and that is Nayeri’s fault. ( )
  SamSattler | Jan 10, 2020 |
Dina was right years old when she, her brother and mother fled Iran. As a Christian convert, her mother was spreading pamphlets around the country, an act that brought death threats from the morality authorities. They became refugees.

Told in alternating chapters, Dina chronicles her family's struggles as refugees, with interviews taken later at a camp in Greece. She writes honestly, and with unflinching candor. Highlighting government bureaucracies, stories refugees must tell to be granted asylum. Life in the camps where many spend years, not allowed to work, slowly stagnating while trying to keep hope alive. How it feels to know one is a burden, unwanted, expected to be eternally grateful. The lack of understanding about the refugees own loss of family, culture, country. Being seen as less than, dirty, germ ridden, all of the prejudices many have of refugees.

Some stories are less grim, uplifting, hopeful, but all are worth reading, maybe providing more understanding in this time of refugees coming from so many different places. The book is read by the author and her narration, telling her own story made this more personal, memorable. ( )
  Beamis12 | Sep 26, 2019 |
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hoopla Book Club Hub - Spotlight Selection! Visit theclub.hoopladigital.com for discussion guide, exclusive author interview, and more. 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 twenty-five million refugees in the world. 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 University. 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 this book, a couple falls in love over the phone, women gather to prepare 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. Nayeri confronts notions like "the swarm," and, on the other hand, "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 challenges us to rethink how we talk about the refugee crisis.

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