How Author Dina Nayeri's Refugee Experience Shaped the Way She Travels

Women Who Travel | Condé Nast Traveler

Condé Nast Traveler

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.4 • 636 Ratings

🗓️ 5 November 2019

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When we caught up with Dina Nayeri over the phone last week, she was, quite aptly, rushing through the streets of Paris. If she had her way, the writer and author would probably never stop moving, she tells us, thanks to a constant itch for travel that has taken her all over the world. But that urgency to cross borders is deeply rooted in her personal history as a refugee: At the age of eight, she fled Iran with her mother and brother to Dubai, and then on to a refugee camp in Italy, before eventually settling in the U.S. "My formative years were about getting out of a place, and so the feeling of being stuck to a land, to a country, is one of my most deeply instilled fears," she says. "I have a French passport and an American one, and I carry them everywhere I go."

We chat to Dina about how she chronicled her refugee journey in her most recent book, Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You. Plus, we learn about the present-day refugees she met while researching it, the travels that have shifted her perspective, and how she stays connected to Iranian culture decades after leaving her home.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone, it's Meredith Carey, and you're listening to Women Who Travel, a podcast from
0:08.0	Connie Nass Traveler. My co-host, Sally Eric Koglu, and I have some big news. We're going on a break.
0:13.7	Not forever, but just for the holidays. Our last episode of the year will be November 19th,
0:18.4	and we'll be back with some great new episodes in 2020.
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0:25.1	to Women Who Travel on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Women
0:30.1	Who Travel for more updates to Lale, do you want to kick off the intro today's chat?
0:36.1	Today we're chatting with author Dina Nayari, whose most recent book, Ungrateful Refugee, What
0:41.4	Immigrants Never Tell You, Chronicles both her own experiences as a refugee leaving Iran with her
0:46.5	mother and brother in the 1980s and the stories of refugees in the present day and asks us
0:51.8	to question the ways we talk about the ongoing refugee crisis
0:54.6	and the narratives we choose to listen to or not listen to. Thanks so much for joining us, Dina.
1:00.0	Thank you for having me. So you left Iran when you were eight years old. When did you first
1:06.5	discover that writing and storytelling was a way for you to make sense of your own experience?
1:12.9	Well, I think intuitively I discovered this very, very early on. I mean, I come from a storytelling
1:17.9	culture, as you know, Lale. I, you know, we, Iranians are very, you know, we're storytellers.
1:25.4	We love, you know, weaving together tales. We love trying to find,
1:29.6	you know, ancient reasons for things. We love watching other people. And my family was very much
1:34.8	like this. My grandfather was, you know, very well-known storyteller in our village, and everyone
1:40.5	would gather around him and tell stories. So I was drawn to that early on. And when I
1:45.3	lived in the refugee camp in Italy, in Hotel Barba, which I talk about in the book, I just started
1:51.4	to watch, you know, other people much more actively than I ever had before, mostly because I didn't
	...

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