Dina Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee: A migrant’s “hyphenated” identity in between traditions and narratives

Abstract

The article discusses The ungrateful refugee: What immigrants never tell you (2019) by Dina Nayeri, an Iranian-American writer. Nayeri narrates her “hyphenated” identity as developing in between countries, religions, Iranian and American myths, and within transnational and liminal spaces. Even though Nayeri initially views her refugee experience as disrupting her temporality and rupturing her sense of continuity, she can transform it into an opportunity to refigure her narrative identity and construct new, reparative self-constancy, as in the Ricœurian type of ipse identity (Ricœur 1988: 246–247, 1992: 114–116). As she weaves together her personal narrative with her family memoir and several other stories of refugees, she comments on non-Western narrative patterns and Iranian storytelling customs, which are inequitably considered non-standard and incoherent by Western immigration officials. Nayeri uses several techniques that distinguish her narrative, such as straying into digressions and incorporating fragments of reportage and storytelling. The title of Nayeri’s book provokes a discussion on who is considered a “good immigrant” and what attitude “the ungrateful refugee” can take to protect their integrity and identity in the refugee camp and in the “host” society. Nayeri employs a rebellious, persistent voice and a sarcastic style to defy the social discourse that almost inconspicuously racialises refugees and migrants, and shapes expectations of immigrant “gratitude”. Although she struggles to come to terms with her refugeehood in Italy and migration to the United States, she recognises national and ethnic differences and celebrates them as an element of a hybrid, transnational life that does not have to divide people.