Volume 12 - Issue 68
/ August 2023
67
http:// www.amazoniainvestiga.info ISSN 2322- 6307
DOI: https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2023.68.08.6
How to Cite:
Chernyshova, S. (2023). Dimensions of refugee identity in Dina Nayeri’s Refuge. Amazonia Investiga, 12(68), 67-77.
https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2023.68.08.6
Dimensions of refugee identity in Dina Nayeri’s Refuge
Виміри ідентичності біженки у романі Діни Найєрі «Притулок»
Received: May 10, 2023 Accepted: August 5, 2023
Written by:
Svitlana Chernyshova1
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0284-2001
Abstract
The article concentrates on Dina Nayeri’s novel
“Refuge”. The focus of this article is on the
processes of formation of refugee’s identity of
the main character, Niloo. It has been argued that
the construction of her agency is based on the
continual dialogue between her and her father as
well as between her and the exiled Iranians in
Amsterdam. The main character’s initial
reluctance to support connections with her father
and, in a broader sense, with her native country
is transformed during the novel’s diegesis. In the
end, Niloo admits that she needs to embrace her
Iranian self and establish a dialogue with her
past. The second part of the article deals with the
notion of the refugee community and the idea
that exiled collective identity is constructed on
the primal injury of oppression and exclusion.
Niloo’s meetings with her people stimulate her to
reconsider that part of herself she was trying to
suppress. Moreover, the reconciliation with her
former neglected self becomes possible after
meeting the Iranian immigrants. The diegetic
narrator tries to make sense of her life and
construct her agency through negotiations with
others. It is concluded that the refugee’s past
experience cannot be forgotten or refused during
the formation of an exiled identity. Instead, it
must be integrated and acknowledged by a forced
migrant.
Key words: refugees, identity, Dina Nayeri, the
novel ‘Refuge’, fictions of migration.
Introduction
We live in an age when different conflicts,
economic problems, and catastrophes force
people to leave their homes and search for a
secure life. According to “The Oxford Handbook
1 Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Doctorate Student, Department of Theory and History of World Literature Kyiv National Linguistic
University (Ukraine). WoS Researcher ID: JFS-5577-2023
of Refugee”, in 2012 alone “7.6 million people
[were] newly displaced due to conflict or
persecution” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al., 2014,
p. 29). What is more dramatic is that two-thirds
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of refugees and displaced persons “continue to
wait in exile for over five years, in some cases for
generations, with no solutions in sight for
millions of Palestinians, Somalis, Afghans, or
Colombians among others” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh
et al., 2014, p. 29). During the unjustified
Russian invasion and war against peaceful
people in Ukraine, more than 7 million
Ukrainians became refugees. It has become the
largest surge of refugees in Europe since World
War II. To them we can add the countless
“invisible” displaced people, not officially
declared as such.
The aim of this article is to explore the processes
of the formation of the refugee identity of the
main character, Niloo, in Dina Nayeri's novel
'Refuge.' The research seeks to analyze how
Niloo's agency is constructed through ongoing
dialogues with her father and the exiled Iranians
in Amsterdam. It delves into the concept of the
refugee community and the idea that a collective
exiled identity is shaped by the primal injury of
oppression and exclusion. It ultimately argues
that a refugee's past experiences cannot be
ignored but should be integrated and
acknowledged in the formation of their exiled
identity.
Theoretical Framework and Literature
Review
Although migration has always been a part of
history and a cause for historical changes, only
during the period of nation-state formation did
migrants and refugees become distinctively
visible. Giorgio Agamben (2000) observes that
“the first appearance of refugees as a mass
phenomenon took place at the end of World War
I, when the fall of Russian, Austro-Hungarian,
and Ottoman empires, along with the new order
created by the peace treaties upset profoundly the
demographic and territorial constitution of
Central Eastern Europe” (Agamben, 2000,
p. 16-17). On the other side, Rina Benmayor and
Andor Skotnes (1994) conclude that “massive
migration has been a constant to the last five
centuries of world history and has frequently
been a key determinant of global developments”
(Benmayor & Skotnes ,1994, p. 9).
Attention to migration and immigrants, and
sensitivity to their “otherness” are the results of
nation-state ideology and rhetoric. As Hanna
Arendt (2007) and later Giorgio Agamben (2000)
and Donatella Di Cesare (2020) point out, in the
system of the nation-state there is no place for
something like the pure human in itself. That is
why “the status of the refugee has always been
considered a temporary condition that ought to
lead either to naturalization or repatriation”
(Agamben, 2000, p. 20).
Until the 19th century, refugees did not attract so
much attention as they were not a threat to the
idea of the nation-state. Agamben (2000) has
argued that refugees are a destabilizing element
in the order of the nation-state as they bring the
originary fiction of sovereignty to a crisis.
Writing about the crisis of today’s nation-states,
Agamben (2000) has emphasized that “Nation-
state means a state that makes nativity or birth
[nascita] (that is, naked human life) the
foundation of its own sovereignty” (Agamben,
2000, p. 21). According to Agamben, birth comes
into being immediately as nation. This idea is
shared by Guy S. Goodwin-Gill
(Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al., 2014) who rightly
underlines: “The movement of people between
states, whether refugees or migrants, takes place
in a context in which sovereignty remains
important, and specifically that aspect of
sovereign competence which entitles the state to
exercise prima facie exclusive jurisdiction over
its territory, and to decide who among non-
citizens shall be allowed to enter and remain, and
who shall be refused admission and required or
compelled to leave” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al.,
2014, p. 51). Thus, refugees are intertwined with
the nation-states and border control. Moreover,
their status and existential position are
predetermined by the ideology of nation-states
and the mythologizing of space, its idealization,
and even sacralization. Mariya Shymchyshyn has
summarized that “The history of perception of
space and place in different historical periods and
different cultures shows fundamental changes in
the ways people have imagined the world”
(Shymchyshyn, 2021, p. 14). To this we can add
that during the emergence and consolidation of
nation-states, the concept of space took on a
central role, influencing not only their territorial
boundaries but also shaping their cultural
identities, legal frameworks, and socio-political
structures.
Michael N. Barnett (2014) has claimed that
refugees were not taken into consideration until
the beginning of the 20th century because “states
did not exert strict legal, political, and physical
controls over their borders and hence for the most
part people who were forced to flee their
homeland had somewhere to go” (Barnett, 2014,
p. 202). He writes that the legal category of
refugee was formulated “only with the rise of
nationalism and the consolidation of national
states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries that governments began to introduce
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immigration laws, passports, and other legal and
administrative barriers to entry” (Barnett, 2014,
p. 203). These new realities assigned new
meaning to the category of refugee.
Just as the number of people who are forced to
leave their country of origin continues to grow
every year so are the fictional writings about
them. Among many recent fictions of migration,
the following bear mentioning:
Kamila Shamsie’s Salt and Saffron (2001);
Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003);
Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003);
Caryl Phillips’ Foreigners: Three English Lives
(2008); Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic
(2011); Jean Kwok’s Girl in Translation (2011);
Evelyn Conlon’s Not the Same Sky (2013);
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
(2013); Chrisitina Henriquez’ The Book of the
Unknown Americans (2014); A. (Alec)
S. Patric’s Black Rock White City (2016);
Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2018);
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees (2019);
Luis Alberto Urrea’s The House of Broken
Angels (2019); Valeria Luiselli’s The Lost
Children Archive (2020); and Alberto Manguel’s
A Return (2023). They all confirm that the
experience of immigrants are of ontological and
existential importance nowadays. Within this
context, Michel Agier (2008) in his astute study
of refugees has insisted that we need to write and
talk about those who are left on “the margins of
the world” and “excluded from the distribution of
goods, spaces and powers” (Agier, 2008, p. viii)
to challenge the stereotypes about them.
Methodology
Using both textual analysis and discourse
analysis methods in the process of reading Dina
Nayeri’s ‘Refuge’, I will examine the novel's
language and narrative structure to understand
how it constructs the identities of migrant
characters, as well as how those identities are
shaped by broader social and political discourses.
I will also look at how the novel's language and
narrative structure reflect or challenge dominant
discourses about migrants and migration, and
how those discourses relate to issues of power
and inequality.
As previously explored in our co-authored article “Between
Remembering and Confession: A Refugee Narrative in Dina
Nayeri’s Refuge” (2022) written together with Mariya
Shymchyshyn, I delved into certain aspects of this topic,
providing a foundational framework for the analysis
presented here.
Results and Discussion
Refugees’ Individual Memory
One of the main issues in migratory fictional
works is the formation of a migrant’s identity
under new social and cultural circumstances as
well as the processes of negotiation between
multiple identities. Writing about the various
significations of migration, Carmen Zamorano
Llena (2020) asserts that “the thematic analysis
of how contemporary transnational migration
redefines collective and individual identities as
articulated in contemporary fiction is one of the
most salient approaches to the study of
contemporary literature in the age of
globalization” (Llena, 2020, p. 7).
The present article will make an attempt to
analyze the role of individual memory and
remembering during the process of a refugee’s
identity formation in Dina Nayeri’s
novel “Refuge” (2017). Tabea Linhard and
Timothy H. Parsons (2019) have noted that
“Identities, and more specifically the identities of
migrants, are not mere fusions of different
nationalities or ethnicities; they are fractured and
contradictory constructions” (Linhard &
Parsons, 2019, p. 9). In Nayeri’s novel, the
identity of Niloo, one of the main characters, is
constructed partially through the revision of her
childhood as well as her adult experience as a
refugee. The realities of her life as a refugee
produce a particular mode of narrative which
contains fragments of traumatic moments,
remnants of important memories, and feelings of
loss and betrayal. They are all contextualized by
her immigrant identity. These acts of memory are
verbalized through her first-person narrative.
What is important in this process of remembering
is the gap between the narrator’s perception of
the same events in the narrative past and
narrative present. Here we are dealing with the
gap between the narrating I and the narrated I that
was described by the narratologists
Gérard Genette (Genett, 1983); Franz Stanzel
(Stanzel, 1984); Paul Ricoeur (Ricoeur, 1986);
Mark Currie (Currie, 2007). In the context of the
novel due to this distance between the narrated
episodic memory and its re-interpretation by the
autodiegetic narrator, it is possible to follow the
dynamics of Niloo’s identity formation. Changes
More about the retrospective narrative in Dina Nayeri’s
Refuge in Shymchyshyn, M. & Chernyshova, S., 2022.
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in her attitude to the narrated past signal the
transformations she experiences in her life. The
difference between her past self and present self
shows the dynamics of her identity process,
which moves from the resentment of Iranian
belonging to its complete acceptance. On a
broader scale, it is a movement from the ‘other’
she was to the self she has become.
The novel’s plot concentrates on the
relationships between Bahman Hamidi, a dentist
in Isfahan, and his daughter Niloo. In 1987, his
wife and children left Bahman in Iran and
immigrated to the U.S. Using multiple
focalizations, the novel tells the story of
traumatic personal and political events. After
some years of separation, Bahman and his family
meet in Oklahoma, London, Madrid, and
Istanbul. Family members bring personal
tragedies as well as new expectations to these
meetings. They suffer as they cannot unite the
reality they left behind and the reality that has
been transformed during their absence. With the
passage of time everything changes: places,
people, buildings, and everyday life. Apart from
that, their relationship is burdened by
Dr. Hamidi’s addiction to opium.
The diegesis of the novel features the meetings
between a father and a daughter that are
described mostly through her first-person
narrative. As was mentioned above, the
important moment is when Niloo does not just
remember or re-live those encounters, but when
she begins reconsidering the emotional reactions,
she had during them. Through external analepsis,
Niloo selects those events from her past life
experience that she regards as significant for her
with the perspective and distance of time.
Writing about narrative and memory, Astrid Erll
observes, “While reconstructing the past we
never proceed chronologically but jump from
here to there, creating ‘prolepses’ and
‘analepses’. Important events, and especially
those which have a traumatic quality, tend to be
remembered in a ‘repeating’ way” (Erll, 2009,
p. 214). Therefore, first-person literary narrative
is a fiction of episodic remembering, continues
Erll.
To grasp Niloo’s identity it is necessary to figure
out what precise moments she personally
considers the most important, how she connects
them within the narrative, what the degree of
their significance is, how often they repeat in the
narrative, what their relation to each other is, and
what the narrator’s feelings about them are. The
integration of this or that event into the plot and
the omission of others give the reader the
understanding of what was important, traumatic,
or pleasant for Niloo. In this context, Margaret
Somers and Gloria Gibson (1993) have
suggested that the primacy of the narrative theme
or competing themes “determines how events are
processed and what criteria will be used to
prioritize events and render meaning to them”
(Somers & Gibson, 1993, p. 29). The novel’s
theme of refugee agency defines the evaluation
principle of selecting events, experiences, and
characters.
Ontological Narrative as a Mode of
Verbalizing Refugee Identity
To analyze Niloo’s narrative identity, we will use
the notion of ontological narrative developed by
Margaret Somers and Gloria Gibson (1993).
While writing about social identity and narrative,
they differentiate between ontological, public,
conceptual, and “meta” narratives. Whereas
ontological narratives are used to define who we
are, public narratives “are attached to cultural
and institutional formations larger than the single
individual” (Somers & Gibson, 1993, p. 31).
According to Somers and Gibson (1993), “the
aim of conceptual narratives is to devise a
conceptual vocabulary that we can use to
reconstruct and plot over time and space the
ontological narratives and relationships of
historical actors, the public and cultural
narratives that inform their lives, and the crucial
intersection of these narratives with the other
relevant social forces” (Somers & Gibson, 1993,
p. 32). The last dimension of narrativity,
metanarratives, overlaps with the grand
narratives of Lyotard (1984) and Foucault
(1972).
Extrapolating this typology on the fictional
narrative discourse, we can argue that the
narrative in Dina Nayeri’s novel is ontological as
the diegetic narrator tries to make sense of her
life and formulate her agency through
negotiations with others. Margaret Somers and
Gloria Gibson (1993) have written: “To have
some sense of social being in the world requires
that lives be more than different series of isolated
events or combined variables and attributes;
ontological narratives thus process events into
episodes. People act, or do not act, in part
according to how they understand their place in
any number of given narratives – however
fragmented, contradictory, or partial” (Somers &
Gibson, 1993, p. 30). Nehamas (1985), who has
insisted that ontological narratives make identity
and the self something that one becomes, echoes
Somers and Gibson. In the novel Niloo makes
sense of the past events in her life mostly through
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the revision of meetings with her father. These
meetings define the narrative trajectory of the
novel as well as the dynamic of Niloo’s inner
self. Writing about a foreigner, Julia Kristeva
underlines the role of meetings: “He [the
foreigner] does not long for meetings, they draw
him in. He experiences them as in a fit of
dizziness, when distraught, he no longer knows
whom he has seen nor who he is” (Kristeva,
1991, p. 11).
The first encounter with Bahman in Oklahoma
City after many years of living apart is a kind of
torture for his daughter. “What I didn’t tell him
is that I don’t want to see him. My real Baba is a
thirty-three-year-old storybook hero:
untouchable, unquenchable, a star” (Nayeri,
2017, p. 27). During that meeting she is ashamed
of her father, of his Iranian manners. She
remembers the episode in the water park:
Many of my middle school classmates hung out
at this water park. And here I was, after years of
trying to seem American, arriving with my
mustachioed father, his great cask of a belly
blanketed in ginger fur, his neon Persian script
trunks, a cigarette barely hanging on to his lips.
He was a spectacle just stepping out of the car,
even before he bellowed in the ticket line, in
broken English, ‘This! Oh watery paradise! Let
us find proper verse for this day!’ (Nayeri, 2017,
p. 115)
Following not only the description of their first
meeting but also Niloo’s reflections about it, the
reader witnesses through the medium of narrative
the transformations of her identity. The narrator
finishes this episode of her memory with the
acknowledgment that she had been insensitive
and even rude to her father. “I was too young then
to see the sadness in his eyes when I crossed my
arms and looked away, when I didn’t help him
off that bathroom floor, and on our final day,
when I hardly said goodbye” (Nayeri, 2017, p.
120). This duality between the narrator and the
experiencer allows the storyteller to feature the
changes in her attitude to the past.
As the narrative evolves, the initially negative
dynamic of the relationship between the daughter
and her father becomes positive. The
reconciliation between them at the end of the
novel is achieved through the long process of
negotiations. Niloo makes sense of what has
happened or is happening to her by integrating
meetings with her father into a coherent narrative
of her life. Considering the role of narrative for
the self, Charles Taylor (1989) has emphasized
that “because we cannot but orient ourselves to
the good, and thus determine our place relative to
it ..., we must inescapably understand our lives in
narrative form...” (Taylor, 1989, p. 51-52). In the
context of the novel, Niloo makes sense of her
life only after re-visioning and narrating her
relationship with her father.
Remembering meetings with her father, the
narrator revisions her past, her worldviews, and
her attitudes towards her people. On the other
hand, the figure of the father is a metaphor for
Iran, Niloo’s native country. She compares, “My
Baba at thirty-three was Iran from a time. And
now… his decline and Iran’s are the same for me.
On the rare occasions when he phones, he
complains that I never visit: Come and see your
grandmother, Niloo joon. But I ask him to meet
me in other cities in foreign countries, whenever
he can get a visa” (Nayeri, 2017, p. 27). Niloo is
uneager to return as she doesn’t want to face the
changes that had taken place after she had left.
Moreover, she was rejecting her Iranian identity;
she did not want to be associated with Iran ever
since she had arrived in the U.S. “At fourteen,
most of my nightmares involved my classmates
exposing me for this or that. I was afraid they
would find out that I had missed an entire decade
of American music, that I was from that country
that forces women into drabness, that I knew only
about a quarter of their slang” (Nayeri, 2017,
p. 97). Later, the changes she feels toward her
father are also symptomatic of her attitude
towards Iran.
With every meeting, father and daughter become
closer to each other. Niloo realizes that she could
not hide under the mask of a successful American
scholar and ignore her Iranian past. Step by step
she recovers her Iranian self as an essential part
of her identity. At the end of the novel, the
acceptance of her father, his Iranian behavior as
well as his philosophical parables explicate her
own reclaiming of an Iranian identity. In this
context it is worth quoting Amin Maalouf (2001),
who in his work In the Name of Identity: Violence
and the Need to Belong, writes: “In the age of
globalization and of the ever-accelerating
intermingling of elements in which we are all
caught up, a new concept of identity is needed,
and needed urgently. We cannot be satisfied with
forcing billions of bewildered human beings to
choose between excessive assertion of their
identity and the loss of their identity altogether,
between fundamentalism and disintegration”
(Maalouf 2001: 35). Niloo’s ambivalence toward
her Iranian identity, her moral sufferance as a
part of her migratory and refugee experience is
resolved by the end of the novel.
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Places of Refugee Belonging
In the context of migration and mobility, sense of
place gains new perspectives and perceptions.
Place is important for the identity of migrants as
they settle not only in a new geographical space
but in a place that has been assigned meaning
before they arrived. Here we have the
differentiation between space as the abstract
container of human activity and a place that is
full of memory, experience, everyday practice,
and history. The notion of home gains new
meaning in forced migration, which has been
conceptualized in scholarship (Allan & Crow,
1989; Chapman & Hockey, 1999; Cresswell,
1996; Rapport and Dawson, 1998; Webster,
1998). For an immigrant, home is not “a static”
place, but rather an assemblage of things,
belongings, and fragments of material culture
from a distant homeland put together in a new
place. In the introductory part of the book
“Uprootings/Regroundings”, which provides a
framework for rethinking home and migration,
the editors underline that “The affectivity of
home is bound up with the temporality of home,
with the past, the present and the future. It takes
time to feel at home. For those who have left their
homes, a nostalgic relation to both the past and
home might become part of the lived reality in
the present” (Ahmed et al., 2003, p. 9). Home is
not only a place left behind, but it is also a future
destination. Niloo’s experience of dislocation
provides the conditions for her
reconceptualization of herself as well as the
notion of home.
The novel features the concept of home as a locus
of individual private space that differs from a
patriarchal semiotics of home as a family space.
Niloo has lived in different places, but she does
not connect her identity with them. She moves
from one place to another and tries to experience
the same intimate links with the locus she lost in
Iran. It can be argued that she is yearning for a
private physical place as she doesn’t belong to
any communal space after leaving her homeland.
Later, she would arrange her own private space,
which her husband Guillaume called the
Perimeter: “...in one corner of their bedroom,
apart from the clutter, Niloo had arranged a neat
little rectangle of items – two long umbrellas and
two walls forming a border around Niloo’s
backpack; her mother-of-pearl jewelry box; a
small folder containing her passport,
naturalization papers, and diplomas; and a box of
sentimental books, her father’s photos, some
rocks and trinkets from Iran” (Nayeri, 2017,
p. 38). She needs her own place not only to keep
the most valuable belongings but to signify her
identity, her desire to preserve some distance
between the world and herself. Even her partner
Guillaume cannot enter her private zone.
Migrants are deprived of their private spaces as
they always share their rooms with someone else.
Niloo’s idea of the Perimeter came during her
years in Oklahoma City. “Our apartment was
nothing remarkable as immigrant situations go,
but to me, it was a nightmare. Some time spent in
typical pass-through countries, Italy and the
United Arab Emirates, had depleted the funds.
We had Mama’s small income and dark, two-
bedroom apartment on the first floor of a two-
story complex” (Nayeri 2017: 98). Even in the
tiny rooms of their apartment, she managed to
crave out the smallest privacy.
From time to time Niloo sits in the Perimeter and
looks through “nine documents that entitle her to
life” (Nayeri, 2017, p. 47). This square meter of
space that she takes with her from country to
country gives her a sense of belonging. “For
decades she’s tried to make homes for herself,
but she is always a foreigner, always a guest –
that forever refugee feeling, that constant need
for a meter of space, the Perimeter she carries on
her back” (Nayeri, 2017, p. 47). Thus, the only
place to belong is the Perimeter. Later, when
Niloo finds a group of Iranian refugees in
Amsterdam she agrees with Gui that they had
become her new Perimeter. She includes them in
her private space, while she denies this to Gui. In
a broader sense, it can be argued that Niloo’s
sense of belonging has been fulfilled after finding
a diaspora community. Home is made and
remade based on the process of her identification.
The desire to isolate herself from the diaspora
was later substituted by her eagerness to unite
with the Iranians. As a result, the closed
Perimeter opens to the world.
Meeting the Forgotten Self
Developing the concept of liquid modernity,
Zygmunt Bauman (2000) has claimed that
“Becoming ‘a refugee’ means to lose the media
on which social existence rests, that is a set of
ordinary things and persons that carry meanings
– land, house, village, city, parents, possessions,
jobs, and other daily landmarks. These creatures
in drift and waiting have nothing but their ‘naked
life’, whose continuation depends on
humanitarian assistance” (Bauman, 2000, p. 40).
Michel Agier (2008) echoes Baumann:
“…displaced people and refugees find
themselves for a time placed outside the nomos,
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outside the ordinary human law. Their existence
is based on the loss of a geographical place, to
which were attached attributes of identity,
relationship and memory, and likewise on the
absence of any new social place” (Agier, 2008,
p. 29). In new countries foreigners establish their
places of belonging where they meet. Usually,
they gather in abandoned loci, cheap street cafes,
and public spaces.
Niloo’s experiences of being a refugee come to
life in her memory after she encounters the
Iranian immigrants in Amsterdam. One day she
found the Persian squat and arts space in a former
factory in Amsterdam where the Iranian people
meet. First, Niloo is intrigued and excited to see
those “who have familiar names and might be
distant cousins” (Nayeri, 2017, p. 75). Niloo
studies them as “she has studied people and
objects her entire life” (Nayeri, 2017, 75).
Initially, she comes to the gatherings out of pure
interest and her inner crisis, but as the narrative
evolves, these meetings become the beginning of
her identity reconsideration as well as the
revision of her relationship with her father. The
meetings of immigrants are unlike any other
meeting as they are strongly connected with the
lost country. Immigrants enjoy shared
recollections about places and practices they left
behind.
Listening to the refugees’ confessions, Niloo
recalls the moments of her suffering. On the first
night in America, she along with her mother and
brother, slept at Jesus House, a homeless shelter
in Oklahoma City. This night and two years of
being a refugee divides her life into two parts:
“the years of idling among mulberry trees in her
village, sitting barefoot with Baba on the cool
stone floor of his childhood home, of sated calm,
followed by the years of academic rise and
financial gain, American prosperity” (Nayeri,
2017, p. 37). That one night staying in the shelter
was as traumatic as two years of miserable
refugee life. The memory of that night is so
painful for Niloo that “it returns every time she
wastes an hour, a dollar, an opportunity” (Nayeri,
2017, p. 37). Her successful career, her marriage,
her desire to distance herself from the migrant
communities can be explained through that
traumatic night, through her fear to return to the
shelter. In this context, it can be argued that the
Perimeter is a kind of spatial opposition to that
Jesus House in Oklahoma City. It guarantees her
no return to that miserable locus.
Although Niloo was not apolitical, she had never
considered the situation her people face abroad.
After getting to know about the lives of Iranians
in Amsterdam, she sympathizes with them and
tries to help them with petitions. In return they
give her emotional support as she is trying to
mend the distorted dialogue between her Iranian
identity and her American self. This long process
of negotiation between different identities is
reinforced by encountering people with broken
fates. The identity of a refugee is constructed on
the primal trauma of oppression and exclusion.
Niloo builds an imaginary bond with others who
share in the suffering.
One of them is Mam’mad, a scholar and a
university professor, who was arrested and
harassed in Iran. His works “were torn apart by
people without even a first degree” (Nayeri,
2017, p. 151). Living in Amsterdam, he still fears
political persecution. Mam’mad confesses: “I
came with Scholars at Risk. They invite you to
give lectures, and if it's too dangerous to go
home, they help you with asylum petitions”
(Nayeri, 2017, p. 146). The other young Iranian
Karim left his wife in Iran and lives illegally in
Amsterdam. After meetings with the Iranians and
listening to their confessions, Niloo realizes that
they are left to themselves, and nobody cares
about their lives. “She has watched the news
from Iran every day since June. She wonders if
people like Gui and his colleagues are aware of
what the Iranian exiles suffer here in the
Netherlands, without homes, always under threat
of deportation, some living in squats, others on
the streets” (Nayeri, 2017, p. 76). The continual
focus on injury binds those who suffered from
humiliation and discrimination. Focusing on the
politics of suffering and on a fetishization of
victimization gives rise to a refugee’s identity.
On the other side, state bureaucracy and
authorities do not pay enough attention to
refugees’ wretched living conditions and
humiliation. Very often the decisions are unjust:
“The embassies and the agencies are run by
poorly educated Western bureaucrats. If your
translator has an American or Dutch accent, like
yours or Siavash’s, your story gets believed. If
not, then not” (Nayeri, 2017, p. 147). The Iranian
refugees disclose before Niloo the harsh reality
of bureaucratic mechanisms that do not deal with
the real situations but with the narratives that
often are well-rendered lies written for those who
are well-connected. Meanwhile, the real victims
are “too traumatized to relive anything, and don’t
know any good translators” (Nayeri, 2017,
p. 147). All these meetings provoke Niloo to
recall her situation in Rome, where her mother
with two children petitioned for refuge because
of religious beliefs. The reason why the officer
believed her was because he interviewed Niloo
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about some facts from the Bible. A naïve child’s
answers persuaded the bureaucrat and the United
States granted asylum to the Hamidis. After
remembering that moment, Niloo agrees to
translate for Karim who is trapped in the
bureaucratic system of petitions.
The Iranians in Amsterdam are not as lucky as
she had been. They struggle every day, but with
no hope. Karim admits, “as far as I see it, every
immigration office is the same. They are all like
the dehati fiancé who takes you ring shopping
again and again and never buys you one”
(Nayeri, 2017, p. 153). Karim has spent ten years
in Holland and still, he does not hope to be
legalized. He has not seen his wife and children,
but nobody cares about it: “… no Westerner has
ever wanted to be involved in Karim’s life. The
state provided shelter for a time, bureaucrats
gave legal advice, charities gave clothes, but the
hands that delivered these institutional offerings
kept a cold distance. Maybe they know that, once
invited in, refugees need a lot of favors” (Nayeri,
2017, p. 160). The negative dynamic of a
refugee’s life is based on the reliving of
oppression and suffering.
Taking into consideration the harsh realities of a
refugee’s life, Niloo cannot imagine her father
surviving in Amsterdam. Not belonging to this
culture, he wouldn’t cope with the humiliation
and misery that refugees encounter. His dignity
would be ruined by the circumstances refugees
are forced to face. Niloo remembers how proud
her father becomes when he tells the story of their
great-great-grandfather, a skilled doctor, who
one day healed a sultan or shah and they paid him
his weight in gold. The doctor later purchased
Ardestoon, the village where the Hamidis live.
Joining the Iranian community in Amsterdam
has become crucial for Niloo’s identity. There
she finds not only people who feel and think as
she does but also she realizes that her life has
gained sense and meaning. “She is part of an
important movement, she has friends linked to
her by blood, culture, and native words, she feels
something like purpose. It seems that for years
she has lived under a mild, teetering sedation,
waiting for a spell to break, for something to
puncture her skin, releasing the weariness and
bringing her back to the waking world” (Nayeri,
2017, p. 211). Therefore, the connection with the
exiled Iranians leads to the resignification of
Niloo’s identity.
The novel covers the historical moment when
Ahmadinejad was inaugurated for a second term
as the president of Iran. Protests against his
dictatorship were organized in different
European countries and the U.S. This crucial
situation evokes emotions of belonging in
Niloo’s soul. She starts to identify herself with
the misfortunes and difficulties of her people.
After a long period of her distancing from
politics, she takes an active part in opposing the
Iranian dictator. “Niloo dresses in green and joins
the protestors, holding the sign over her face as a
small array of local magazine writers photograph
them and ask for quotes” (Nayeri, 2017, p. 209).
The fate of her people who suffer from
humiliation abroad and terror at home force
Niloo to reconsider her identity. The political
domain becomes the space of her self-recreation.
She places herself in the situation of exodus and
refuses the comfort zone of being just an
American scholar. As Michel Agier (2008) has
observed, the forging of identity in the context of
forced migration is burdened with different
crises: “every human being, placed in this
situation of exodus, waiting and non-definition
must recompose themselves from a basis of
destitution. By grasping human identity at the
sites of its denial, we inquire more directly into
its foundations: this is the revolt of life in contact
with death” (Agier, 2008, p. 5).
Another aspect of Niloo’s identity crisis is the
revision of her relationship with Gui. Suddenly
she feels his otherness, his strangeness. An acute
understanding of the gap between Niloo’s Iranian
self and his French identity leads to distancing
herself from him. Apart from that, she realizes
that for a long time she suffered from an
inferiority complex because she is a non-
Westerner. Niloo wishes that her husband were
from Iran. “She imagines being stronger than she
was then, poor but independent, about having a
young lover who speaks her native tongue, who
eats the same dishes and understands Maman’s
jokes, a man to whom her parents will sound as
educated as they are” (Nayeri, 2017, p. 211). One
Iranian immigrant notices these changes in
Niloo, the acknowledgment of her core identity,
“Now you’re in love with you. The original you.
Not this boring American lady who makes lists”
(Nayeri, 2017, p. 219).
The climax of the novel is Mam’mad’s suicide
after long years of having fought in vain with
Dutch bureaucracy. Having suffered and
witnessed acts of dehumanization in a tolerant
Western society where nobody cares about his
desperate situation, he decides to end his
suffering. For him, it was the only way to become
visible as he constituted an invisible part of the
collective identity of refugees, imposed on them
by the dominant host society. They are perceived
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as unwanted victims, social burdens.
Michel Agier (2008) has reflected on the
existential situation of refugees: “The states of
apathy and depression, expressions of
aggressiveness or intolerance, that are noted by
psychologists in displaced persons, come back to
this lack of definition, and ultimately to a more
or less lasting space-time of anomie: a life
without nomos, with no stable law to integrate
their fate into that of humanity in general”
(Nayeri, 2017, p. 30). Stigmatization of refugees
reproduce the terms of segregation. Segregation
aims to protect refugees from the superiority of
the surrounding society “as well as to protect the
dominant society from possible contamination by
different groups, weak or abnormal” (Agier,
2008, p. 32).
The description of media coverage of
Mam’mad’s suicide illustrates the attitudes of
political forces toward refugees. The narrator
underlines that the Dutch outlets sound different
from the Persian ones. According to the Dutch
media, Mam’mad argued with a group of
strangers, while the Persian Payvand
News reports that his motive for “the self-
immolation was the Dutch government’s denial
of his plea for asylum” (Nayeri, 2017, p. 221).
The novel’s exegesis of Mam’mad’s suicide
demonstrates different news outlets’ framing of
immigration coverage. According to research
done by several scholars (e.g. Aalberg et
al., 2012; Costello & Hodson, 2011; Florack,
Piontkowski, Rohmann, Balzer, & Perzig, 2003;
van der Linden & Jacobs, 2016), media coverage
of migration in Europe focuses mostly on cultural
and economic threats that lead to negative
attitudes toward immigrants. It causes
stigmatization of immigrant groups and their
alienation. Niloo’s sincere attitude toward the
events in Iran and her support of the exiled
Iranians in Amsterdam contrast with journalists’
sheer interests and lack of principles. Their real
concerns are guided by political provocations
and the absence of sympathy.
It is not a coincidence that after Mam’mad’s
suicide Niloo decides to move into her new
apartment although it has not been finished yet.
The real and symbolic gesture of relocation
signifies overcoming her inferiority complex as
well as the masochistic logic of suffering. The
broken trajectory of her life has led her to a
solitary place, where she re-thinks her past, her
neglected father, her feelings toward Gui, and
“the new Niloo” (Nayeri, 2017, p. 263) she was
trying to create. It is the place to mourn her friend
Mam’mad and to heal her wounds.
Conclusions
It can be argued that Dina Nayeri’s
novel Refuge contributes to the fiction of
migration and exemplifies the increased
awareness of the weight of migration in
contemporary fictional discourse. The novel
focuses on the Iranian family and their lives after
leaving Iran. One of the main characters, Niloo,
builds her identity through the ontological
narrative that is concentrated on the revision of
her relationship with her father and her meetings
with the exiled Iranians in Amsterdam.
Her reluctance to uphold connections with her
father is transformed through the novel’s
dynamics. In the end, Niloo recognizes that she
needs to embrace her Iranian self and establish a
dialogue with her father.
The other important issue for a refugee identity
discussed in the article is place and home. A
refugee’s sense of home and place is configured
differently to that of those who were never forced
to leave their country. A migrant’s homemaking
starts with a private isolated locus that as time
flows opens itself to the world and merges with
it.
The last part of the article deals with the notion
of the refugee community and the idea that exiled
collective identity is constructed on the primal
trauma of oppression and exclusion. Niloo’s
meetings with her people stimulate her to
reconsider that part of herself she was trying to
suppress. Moreover, the reconciliation with her
former neglected self became possible after her
meeting the Iranian immigrants. The
negotiations of Niloo’s personal socio-cultural
position end with her acknowledgement of her
transnational identity.
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