The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 368

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 5: “Cultural Repatriation”

Part 5 Summary

While Nayeri travels with Daniel at an airport in 2009, he jokes with a security guard who doesn’t select them for a random screening. Daniel is the type of immigrant the West likes—an affable, hardworking man who was a star athlete in high school. At one point, Daniel calls her an untrustworthy “chameleon” who regularly changes personas (330). Nayeri accepts the accusation: Since she has lighter skin and a nose job, she can indulge in White privilege while still claiming Iranian ancestry when it suits her. This advantage is unavailable to the darker-skinned Daniel.

Immigrants often discuss the possibility of returning to their homelands. Maman sees the speculation as pointless, while Nayeri feels that such speculations are easier for pre-revolutionary Iranians who didn’t experience the caliphate. However, Nayeri does not feel that immigrants must contribute to their home countries and believes it is a colonialist argument that immigrants benefit the host country. She highlights Chinua Achebe’s 1998 essay “Spelling Our Proper Name”, wherein he criticizes James Baldwin’s claims that there is cultural underachievement in Africa. Meanwhile, TV host Trever Noah received condemnation from the French government for using France’s World Cup victory to take credit for the success of its players of African heritage.

One day, Nayeri receives a call from Baba asking to help her half-sister get into an English school as an immigrant without documentation. Nayeri admonishes him for the half-baked plan, telling him that the refugee process is for people in real danger and that the bureaucracy would break her half-sister’s spirit and throw her to the streets.

Nayeri considers her writing and her daughter her “repatriation” (346), a way to return home. She wonders what raising Elena in the age of Brexit and Trump will be like. She somehow created a home in England, but one day she and her daughter will inevitably split as Elena chooses her own path in life. Everyone is an immigrant from the past, where their home is a “memory” (346). But the future is always a dark, foreign place.

Part 5 Analysis

Nayeri concludes her work by discussing repatriation, the concept of returning to a home country that many refugees either deny or are unable to physically experience. This includes subtopics “on being claimed, gratitude, and the return home” (327). In discussing Daniel’s experience at the airport, Nayeri notes that, while Daniel better fits the mold of the good immigrant who appeals to the West, he still suffers more racism and prejudice than she does because of his skin color and features. In contrast, Nayeri can adopt the racial identity that suits her at any given time; she can consider herself Persian in admissions essays but White for taxis and dating sites.

The concepts of claiming and gratitude are complementary; host nations claim credit for their most-successful immigrants, who must then express gratitude. This ideological nativist dynamic is rooted in colonialism. Trevor Noah, a South African immigrant, responds to the French ministry, and says their claim to the Black players’ success is self-serving. French officials and commentators are quick to boast about opportunities for Black people when they win games or save a child, but the same leaders label them Africans when criticizing crime levels or other negative press.

Nayeri follows this concept to the book’s climax: her call with Baba about her half-sister. Denying aid to her half-sister makes her feel hypocritical, but assisting her would betray Naser, Darius, and others whose struggles haunt her. Nayeri sees her half-sister as a version of herself who stayed in Iran and could help modernize the country. Nayeri also suspects that the girl isn’t serious about studying because enrolling in a British college as an international student would be easy. Finally, Nayeri has an existential conflict with helping her half-sister: It would be proof that Nayeri is only where she’s at because of Western civilization and not her own abilities.

Nayeri concludes The Ungrateful Refugee by discussing her hopes and uncertainty about the future. Her renewed interest in Iranian culture comes from the hollowness she feels after achieving her goals as an American, and while she still considers returning to Iran as a possibility, she knows nostalgia may taint her memories. She instead identifies two things as her repatriation to home. One is her writing, which allows her to reexperience her childhood—those of Baba and Hotel Barba—that she cannot recreate in the present. The other is her daughter Elena, who is experiencing the world for the first time and has a social network like that of Nayeri’s youth. But the future remains uncertain not only for refugees, but for any person—which is what makes memories such a powerful force.