Book Highlight: The Ungrateful Refugee
But charity and welcome are different things. Why do we ask the desperate to strip off their dignity as the price of help?
Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You
In our next book highlight, we want to share about The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You by Dina Nayeri. Nayeri is originally from Iran, but at the age of 8 she fled with her mother and brother to a refugee camp in Italy. There, they were granted passage to the United States and settled in Edmond, Oklahoma. Nayeri attended Princeton and Harvard, and she’s written novels, creative nonfiction, essays, short stories, dramas, and screenplays. She published The Ungrateful Refugee in 2019 which tells her own story along with stories of other refugees and asylum seekers on journeys to safety and resettlement. What we learn from Nayeri is the nuances and complexities of the refugee experience, particularly as we think about the difference between charity and welcome.
The title of the book comes from the pressure Nayeri felt to be grateful all the time once in Edmond, Oklahoma. However, Nayeri says she struggled with this expectation of gratitude when what she wanted was to be safe in Iran with her father, friends, and the culture she knew. She recalled a specific experience where a well-meaning woman at an Edmond church told Nayeri and her family, “You must be so grateful for a better life here in America.” Nayeri disagreed - a better life would be safety in Iran. In America, she had to learn a new language and culture, endure separation from many loved ones, and create an entirely new life. She didn’t feel grateful – she felt angry and tired. What Nayeri and her family wanted wasn’t charity in which they always were expected to be grateful, but welcome where they could be their full selves.
In charity there is a giver and receiver, and the receiver must always be grateful so they can continue receiving needed resources and support. And, in the opening line of this post, Nayeri tells us that in charity, people are asked to give up their dignity to perform the role of a person in need. In welcome, there is relationship where we hold space for each other to grieve, be angry, and be sad without offering solutions. In welcome, we hold space for each other to be our whole selves. Nayeri writes:
[Refugees] need friendship, not salvation. They need the dignity of becoming an essential part of a society. They have been so often on the receiving end of charity that when faced with someone else’s need, their generosity and skill shines. Now and then, they will fall short, their wounds will open, they will have too many needs. You might misstep and cause harm. That is better than drawing a thick line around them. In life, people disappoint each other. Messes are made. The only way to avoid pain is to distance yourself, to look down at them from the rescuer’s perch. But that denies them what they most urgently need: to be useful. To belong to a place. This, I believe, is the way to help the displaced. It is what we owe each other, to love, to bring in outsiders.
By choosing to practice welcome rather than charity, we are not saving individuals but rather entering into relationships. Welcome, as Nayeri articulates, can also be messy. In relationships we can hurt each other, but we can also do the work to repair. We can choose to belong to each other over and again, and we can believe the stories people tell us about their experiences. We do not have to demand gratitude, but rather offer our presence.
With Welcome Experiences, we continue to be interested in how we practice welcome, how our new neighbors teach us about practicing welcome, and how we cultivate Oklahoma City to be a place of welcome for all people.
