Refugees are modern Scheherazades. They trade their story for another chance at life. The sultan is an indifferent asylum officer behind her desk, a well-meaning charity worker or a hostile native citizen. But so much truth goes untold. 

The exhausting expectations of gratitude, the long wait that douses your inner fire, the battle for dignity and the big impact of small acts… Iranian American novelist Dina Nayeri lifts the veil in The Ungrateful Refugee, her first memoir, weaving her personal story with reporting in Greek refugee camps. 

02:18 Why she made the move from fiction to nonfiction

05:07 How the refugee experience has changed from the 80s

07:30 A culture of disbelief in immigration offices

09:54 When refugees become storytellers to security guards

14:18 How culture changes storytelling

17:21 What you lose when you wait

21:51 How womanhood and refuge interplay

24:19 Why do we make a difference between political refugees and economic migrants?

26:46 Stop asking what refugees can do for us

28:45 Why dignity matters

31:21 What are we entitled to as human beings? Why aren't others?

33:16 Rawls' original position and American exceptionalism

36:54 The US president changed, not the system

38:53 What individuals can do to help

40:19 Gratitude is private

44:09 Political engagement is assimilation

46:17 Outro

📚 The Ungrateful Refugee, by Dina Nayeri. Canongate, 2020. Find it here.

👀 The ungrateful refugee: ‘We have no debt to repay.’ By Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. 2017.

📸 Anna Leader