Capturing Truths: A Conversation with Dina Nayeri

By Zoe Engels

Photo by: Anna Leader

“It will be truer after you believe. After you do the long, slow work of believing.” 

— Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee 

I was first introduced to Dina Nayeri’s writing in 2018 as an undergraduate student when “The Ungrateful Refugee,” a piece published in The Guardian, was assigned in a literature class. Her prose was so rich and vulnerable that I read it multiple times. The piece was one of The Guardian’s most popular long reads of 2017. Her award-winning book of the same name details the refugee experience in five parts: Escape, Camp, Asylum, Assimilation, and Cultural Repatriation. 

Born in Isfahan, Iran, Nayeri fled with her mother and brother at the age of eight. They were forced to flee because the Islamic Republic threatened to execute her mother who had openly converted to Christianity. The three spent two years in Dubai and Rome as asylum seekers before arriving in Oklahoma as refugees. 

Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn’t Enough is her second and latest nonfiction book, released in March. The book balances powerful case studies with the deeply personal as Nayeri analyzes why those who are most vulnerable are often dismissed and disbelieved. It’s a large topic, but she doesn’t stray away from complex ideas and questions such as truth and facts. Instead, she makes them digestible for the reader and expands our worldviews while folding us into that long, slow work of believing. 

Columbia Journal spoke with Nayeri via Zoom about the interconnected relationships between belief, truth, and the power of storytelling.

Zoe Engels: How did your own perspective on the question of “who gets believed?” and why, evolve over the course of writing your new book?

Dina Nayeri: The two biggest things I realized that surprised me were, first, that our systems are so broken and the world is not fair. One of the lawyers I was speaking with early on said to me, “Do you think there’s any kind of real justice in this world or in America?” That is something that was driven home for me over the course of the research. The second thing I realized was how flawed my own instincts were and how biased and hypocritical I could be. Every one of us has these instinctive responses to things—our biases, our triggers—and that’s mostly how we make decisions, so the realization that this kind of analysis included me was a bit difficult.

ZE: Do we see you working through those two aspects on the pages as well?

DN: Yeah, I hope so. I think I had to include it. I wanted the book to be mostly reflective and a meditation on something. Like my previous book, I didn’t want it to be just journalistic, and I didn’t want it to be just memoir. So, the fact that I’d been reflecting on things and writing as this happened—as someone took their own life who I had not believed—I realized I had to include this particular incident because I failed so very, very badly, and my entire perspective changed. It was part of a complex process of making sense of this.

ZE: One of my favorite aspects of The Ungrateful Refugee is the fact that you balance memoir with reporting through case studies, and Who Gets Believed? seems to be engaging in a similar project. What’s your prewriting process? 

DN: I think you have to leave some room for the work to develop into what it wants to develop into. I always go in search of three threads: I look backward into my own life; I go looking for other people’s stories; and I read and reflect and try to think of what it all means. I do them simultaneously but leave room for the threads to take shape. I did start off wanting to write a book in a similar vein to The Ungrateful Refugee with those three threads, but the personal took over when in the middle of writing Who Gets Believed? we had this incredible loss in the family, and that became a really important part of the book.

ZE: It sounds like an organic process and speaks to the fact that books are alive and in-motion in their own ways.

DN: Exactly. You’re creating, but you’re also exploring a series of dark rooms. You’re never going to find your way through the entire building, but you shed light on different parts of it and make your way through. That is the joy of writing—discovering what parts will reveal themselves.

ZE: Do you find that that discovery process varies when you’re writing nonfiction versus fiction?

DN: That’s hard to tell for me because I’ve written the fiction and nonfiction in such different forms. The last couple years, I’ve been writing short fiction and long nonfiction. I think when you’re writing a longer work, whether it be a novel or memoir, you have more room to explore, find your way through, and have all the complexity of the different parts of the story layered on. With short fiction, you’re working your way through one question as a straight line through, so it brings a different kind of pleasure. I get the pleasure of having crafted a story—a sense of artistic achievement—much more with short fiction, and I feel like I’ve created something, whittled a bird out of a stone. With a book like Who Gets Believed? I don’t come out of it feeling as though I’ve created something. Actually, I come out of it feeling exhausted as if I’ve been through something. It’s like the husk of a cocoon, like you’ve been through a chrysalis, and this thing has fallen off and here's the evidence for readers to explore, but all I’ve done is just make it through. 

ZE: It’s a nice balance. You have the fiction to journey through, and once you’re exhausted after the nonfiction, you can return to fiction again.

DN: I think the posture that fiction and nonfiction take toward other people is different. With nonfiction, I have other people’s stories in front of me with documents and facts, and there’s only so much I can do to shape them. I have a duty to those stories to tell them as they happened and in a way that is compelling to a Western reader. For The Ungrateful Refugee, it was all about showing the West, the Western reader, what refugees go through; Who Gets Believed? is for less of a specific group, but in general it’s the Western readers, the reader who’s lived a life like I’ve lived, minus the refugee part, maybe. That’s my purpose in this process—and to shape the book so that each story plays a role. But with fiction, my relationship to other people is that I’m creating them, and in many ways everyone that you create is a little bit in your own image, so you feel like you’re taking pieces of yourself and folding them into the recipe. Although, even in nonfiction you get to craft people because you can’t show a full human being on the page. That’s the part that feels a little scary because the choices I make craft a character out of the raw material of the person. That’s daunting. Creatively, fiction feels a lot more freeing. 

ZE: How do you find your sources in your nonfiction?

DN: When I wrote The Ungrateful Refugee, I did so much research about asylum. One story really captured my attention, and I couldn’t use it mostly because it was too big. I couldn’t half tell the story. When I started to write Who Gets Believed? I came back to that story first and then I went to all the places I always go when I start writing: charities that help survivors like Freedom From Torture, lawyers, doctors, The Innocence Project, and so on. I read a lot of court transcripts; there’s a very strange pleasure in reading them. There were some stories for which I had about a thousand pages of material to go through. It was very sad when a story got dropped from the final manuscript because I’m like, I know exactly what month that was—whoop, there goes April 2019!

ZE: What you said about the creation of Who Gets Believed? reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from The Ungrateful Refugee: “I wonder what our world would look like if refugees were asked, instead of reciting facts, to write a story that shows their truth in another way.”

DN: Exactly. I did see people doing a lot of different kinds of arts—drawings, paintings, music. Refugees have so many ways of expressing what happened, and in such a beautiful variety of ways that feel extremely truthful, like they contained a truth that you couldn’t get from asking them to make a list of dates and places. I’m reminded of a new song by Shervin Hajipour called “Baraye,” which literally means “for,” that became famous amid everything happening in Iran. It won a Grammy. It’s this simple, beautiful, and lovely song. It’s in Farsi, so you won’t even get the words directly, and yet there is something about it that is so excruciatingly true and perfectly clear, and it’s touched people across the world for that reason. I think, if you sat down this person and said, “Explain to us what is happening in Iran or what you want and make a list of it or say it in this way,” he wouldn’t do nearly as good a job. There would be nothing memorable that would come of it because you’re forcing someone to tell their singular story in a way that’s different from how they’re driven to tell it. 

ZE: Speaking of truth, in an interview with the American Library in Paris, you said you will often imagine your ways into the “holes” of a story. How do you determine how much liberty to take or conjecture to include in your nonfiction?

DN: This is the beautiful thing about nonfiction. It gives us the tools of fiction and prose to make a story come alive even though it retains all its truth. With that comes a lot of responsibility, and you have to toe a fine line. I disclose everything I’ve changed or imagined at the very beginning of the book. You can imagine the details that were around even if a person didn’t say specifically that inconsequential object was there. If you can research it and know it was, then you can imagine it into the story. Creative nonfiction allows you to unlock and show and transfer over the underlying truth in a way that the strictures of journalism don’t really allow.

ZE: Who are your literary inspirations? 

DN: In fiction, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, and all those old, wonderful storytellers. I read a lot of stories written by my classmates from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Tony Tulathimutte writes wonderful short stories. Danielle Evans wasn’t in my program, but she’s someone whose writing I read a lot. I love Zadie Smith and Rachel Cusk. In nonfiction, I love essayists who look at the world in a very different way and can turn my entire point of view around—that’s what I love about Jeff Sharlet, Leslie Jamison, and Charles D’Ambrosio. I recently read When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labtatut. Now, I’m reading The Guest Lecture by Martin Riker. I love that there’s no plot, yet it is so well structured, and the protagonist is someone I identify with who is just a ball of anxiety and insecurity and has particular expertise but has such a hard time shaping it and presenting it for the world.

ZE: You worked in consulting and did your MBA at Harvard before pursuing the MFA at Iowa. What was that transition like?

DN: For me, this was such an incredible contrast. And I had some years in between. I knew that I wasn’t going back into the business world after my MBA, and I also picked up a Master’s in Education at Harvard because I wasn’t sure what I’d do next. I went to Europe for a couple of years, and that’s when I started to write, read heavily, and think about the craft of writing as something I might be able to do. So, I think that transition was fundamental. Looking back, I could see that it was jarring to be in two places that have such different relationships with the truth. In the MBA program, so much was about presenting yourself the right way, protecting yourself, not saying too much, etc., and we were crafting facts to present an image of ourselves that wasn’t always truthful. When I was at Iowa, it was all about making sure you do capture a truth. Even if you’re having to invent details, you’re really going for something fundamental, and that self-protective instinct will only make your work worse, so you have no choice but to be honest and lay bare all the things that I was trying to hide before. I always jokingly say, in my MBA I learned to lie with the facts, at Iowa I learned to tell the truth with lies. 

ZE: What’s your next book project? 

DN: I’m going back to writing a novel. I’m seventy pages into it. It’s exciting to hole up with your unfinished work after you get the engine started. The engine is on, it’s roaring, now you just have to put your foot on the gas. Getting started is always the hardest part. That first moment of joy is when you have enough out that you know you can finish the draft, and that’s where I am. But the best, best, best is when you have that finished, messy draft, and you put it aside for a while, and you come back fresh, and you can just cut. Cut, cut, cut. 

About the author

Zoe Engels

Zoe Engels is an MFA candidate in nonfiction and literary translation at Columbia University. She is working on a book about her family history, dynamics, and the superstitions and beliefs she inherited.