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Abstract
I approach life writing as one of the most prominent forms of microhistory narratives which questions the grand narratives of history produced internationally and locally. Focusing on a transnational Iranian background woman writer, I argue that lived-experience narratives, despite their contradictions and the politics of publication, which has placed them into the category of “misery narratives”, are still epistemically value-laden and they need to be carefully and empathetically read. I draw on feminist phenomenology and use an intersectional methodology to study Dina Nayeri’s Refuge (2017) and her autobiographical article “The Ungrateful Refugee”, which mostly reflect on the experiences of border crossing and home making in relation to asylum seekers as marginalized identities. Focusing on multiple voices in this memoir, I show how asylum seekers coming from different social locations practise homemaking and create a sense of belonging to “home” in a host country that is not very hospitable towards them. I study the intersections of homeland, identity and politics, using life writing as an epistemology which sheds light on the questions of belonging.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Amongst the literature on belonging and gratitude, Tabatabai (Citation2021) engages with Nayeri’s The Ungrateful Refugee (the book published in 2019 after the Guardian article of the same title) as an example of cultural and individual narrative that questions the neoliberal expectation of “doing gratitude” as an exchange for “inclusion”. They address “worthiness”, “success” and “the individual quest for betterment” as values shaping belonging for immigrants and all arising from neoliberalism, which in itself is an extension of settler-colonial values.
2 National identity is “defined in terms of knowledge and a commitment to the political principles and laws that define the nation’s political system of governance” (Barvosa Citation2008, 31).
3 He considers that immigrants’ multiple identities are detrimental to American democracy (cited in Barvosa Citation2008, 18).
4 When I interviewed Sepideh Farsi, an exilic Iranian filmmaker based in France, she told me she prefers Athens as a location for her films because the light is very similar to the light of Tehran and it does affect the story line. Hometactics is not only practised for residence aspects of homemaking but also for creative art, because creativity is also affectively inspired by a sense of belonging to a space.
5 I use the term hyper-marginalized because I intend to highlight that the marginality and dehumanization refugee identities go through is not just mere marginalization. Marginality for these identities could cost their lives.
6 Ahmed et al. (Citation2020) suggest a framework which is proposed to “rethink home and migration in ways that open out the discussion beyond oppositions such as stasis versus transformation, or presence versus absence. Uprootngs/regroundings make it possible to consider home and migration in terms of a plurality of experiences, histories and constituencies and of the workings of institutional structures”. While recognizing the effect of the transnational movements of bodies, objects and images on concepts and experiences of home and belonging, they question that rootless mobility is “the defining feature of contemporary experience and that it stands against any form of ‘rooted belonging’” (Citation2020, 1–3).
7 Ahmed et al. (Citation2020) acknowledge postcolonial feminist theorists who “have led the way in theorizing ‘border- zones’ and mestizo identities in relation to the work of migration and inhabitance … They have made us aware that the greatest movements often occur within the self, within the home or within the family, while the phantasm of limitless mobility often rests on the power of border controls and policing of who does and does not belong” (5).
8 The controversial Daily Mail cartoon, depicting refugees as rats, running amongst Muslims who are also represented as terrorists is one example. This cartoon is said to have been inspired by the anti-semitic Nazi cartoon representing Jews as rats in 1939. For cartoon images, see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3321431/MAC-Europe-s-open-borders.html; https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/daily-mail-nazi-refugee-rat-cartoon_us_564b526ee4b06037734ae115.
9 Like V.S. Naipaul’s (Citation2002) mimic men.
10 Sealey (Citation2018, 175) uses Bhabha’s mimicry, Ortega’ hometactics, and Lugones’ plurality and playfulness, to theorize the Sartrian concept of bad faith as a subversive anticolonial practice. As she argues: “For bodies made invisible, ‘at the edges’ of community, a demand for grounding is both legitimate and, quite frankly, subversive”. For Sealey, it takes freedom and strategicness to practise a little bad faith in line with hometactics to achieve a more stable position and build homes.
11 This adaptability comes through “the freedom to encounter the fact of [her] body (race, gender, nationality, its formation for others) with meaning that fits into [her] fundamental project”. Sealey (Citation2018) concludes that racialized others must navigate the political space, especially when that space is shaped by the practice of colonial violence, and the racialized bodies experience fetishism through fear and desire of the colonial agents. It is only through subversively daring to make a home in an unhomely space that bad faith becomes a constructive practice. In my study, “self-orientalizing” is a “liberatory practice” through “bad faith” functioning as a survival strategy.
12 A derogatory/pejorative term used to refer to a non-white migrant, especially from southern Europe.
13 Mention should be made that the asylum seeking for Christian converts turned out to be the easiest category of refugeeness and in recent years there has been a wave of migration from Iran fitting that category. The asylum seekers should show a genuine practice of the religion and after landing in the US they should engage in a lot of community practice and promoting of Christianity to other communities. Many YouTube videos exist of these promoting and disseminating practices of religion by Iranian asylum seekers.