Dina Nayeri
Dina Nayeri was born in Iran during the revolution and arrived in America when she was ten years old. She is the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the UNESCO City of Literature Paul Engle Prize. The author of two novels – Refuge and A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea – and contributor to The Displaced, her work has been published in over twenty countries. Her stories and essays have been published in The O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, the New York Times, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Granta and many other publications. She lives in London.
@DinaNayeri | dinanayeri.com
“In a refugee camp, stories are everything. Everyone has one, having just slipped out from the grip of a nightmare.”
Why They Fear Ilhan Omar
“This isn’t about America’s welfare or Omar’s qualifications. Quite the opposite: Trump and Carlson see Omar’s potential and are desperate to clip her wings—and the wings of every immigrant who may come into her gifts on American soil. These men understand that the most powerful immigrants—those they see as threats—are the ones who actually took their vile instructions to heart and did everything we were asked to do. We became American, and highly educated ones too. In so changing, we found our voices. We saw that, though we were born in far unluckier places, we have all the same talents as our Western-born peers. We saw that we can compete and win. We learned that in America, if you see injustice or hypocrisy, you don’t bow lower, always afraid of being tossed back to the hell you once knew. You fight for every hard-earned belief.”
Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee, gives the perfect respone to Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, “mediocre men raised at the trough of extreme Western privilege”.
Dina Nayeri
Slate