The Ungrateful Refugee by Dina Nayeri

Author:Dina Nayeri [Dina Nayeri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2019-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

ASYLUM

(on stories and the alchemy of truth)

I.

We landed in Will Rogers World Airport on a stifling July day in 1989. Jim, the American writer Maman had met in Maman Moti’s church in London years before, came for us at the airport. We loaded into the car, jetlagged and confused, unable to take in the details of our new life. The Oklahoma landscape seemed like miles and miles of nothing, like we had landed on Mars. It was the barest, flattest land I had seen. Jim took us to his house. We met his wife, Mary-Jean. They gave us their loft, a wood-panelled space decorated in russets and browns, and left us to rest in a big bed.

The day we arrived in the United States, Baba sent Maman a letter demanding the return of his children. It was as if he hadn’t believed we were gone until some asylum office took us in. Maybe he hadn’t mourned us yet.

We rose early the next morning and lined up to see a parade – it was the Fourth of July, but it seemed that all those families on beach chairs waving American flags and eating watermelon were celebrating our arrival. The parade weaved down residential streets, house after house of actual white picket fences. Some had porch swings, American flags. We were in a film.

Jim and Jean were right-wing Evangelical Christians – I marvel now that they agreed to sponsor a family of strangers from a place they knew from a hostage crisis and a war. They spoke to Maman about her plans, making clear that she wouldn’t take advantage of any of the resources available to refugees (‘We’re hardworking Republicans,’ Jim chuckled; he wasn’t joking.) He would instruct her how to hunt for a job, a car, a driver’s licence, an apartment. In the meantime, we would live in their attic.

Jean wore tube tops far above her shorts, sprayed her hair with Aqua-Net and made bologna-mayonnaise sandwiches on plastic plates with stacks of Pringles on the side. She took Daniel and me to Toys R Us and to an ice cream shop with an unfathomable array. There is nothing, nothing, like ice cream on an Oklahoma summer night, cicadas and twangy music tickling your ear, beside a mouthy grandmother with a bare midriff and no moral police to witness it. No hijabi teachers shouting. No bullhorns thrust in your face. We drove to the Edmond Public Library where she got us library cards and we checked out thirty books each – stories about rebellious sisters and bodies in puberty and Indian ghosts and shameful history like slavery and the Trail of Tears – that would have been banned at home. I spent the next year consuming stories. I was voracious and the huge gaps in my English closed like a shallow wound. I learned to put myself in another’s skin: a kid with freckles, a girl called Blubber. I thought of Khadijeh, who had given up and sprung many leaks, and I wished I had sat beside her and said that we were all afraid, even me and Pooneh.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.