Dina Nayeri (MBA 2006) was born in Iran in 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution, and grew up amid the sirens and rations of war. Her mother was a doctor, but also a Christian—a crime for which the Islamic Republic threatened to execute her. In 1988, they escaped. After a two-year journey through the purgatory of refugee status, they found asylum in Oklahoma. Nayeri went on to earn a BA at Princeton, an MBA and MEd at Harvard, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The author of two previous novels (Refuge and A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea), Nayeri has turned to nonfiction. The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You recounts her own family’s story, but also those of other refugees she met at camps in Greece, or at other points along their path to escape. Nayeri says that, having experienced life as a refugee, a Muslim, a Christian, an Iranian, and an American, she felt a duty to reveal the unspoken truth of the experience. Gratitude, for example, is an essential and private part of the refugee experience, she says. “But native-born people don’t really understand all that we keep hidden, like the obligation to posture gratitude for someone else.”

What’s been the role of stories in your own life?

I come from a storytelling culture. My great-grandmother’s village in Iran had almost no modern amenities, so people told stories as entertainment and to keep up with news. Then, as a refugee you have a particular relationship with your story, because on the one hand it’s your identity, but it might also be your ticket to freedom. It can be very psychologically damaging for your story to be both of those things.

Eventually I landed in America and my story became a way to show people that I belonged; that despite the gaps in my education and in my life, I was someone who could be trusted, I suppose, to be special. It took decades for me to understand that listening made me a better observer of others and a happier human.

Did writing become your escape? Is it your safety?

It’s all of those things, but it’s also who I am. When I was accepted to Iowa, it meant two things to me: One, it was permission be a writer, which was really the beginning of it all for me. Second, it was something I had also found with HBS: immigrant security. For my entire life I had looked to institutions to define me. First the UNHCR defined us as refugees. Then the American immigration office told us that we could be Americans. Then I got into Princeton. I just kept looking to these big institutions to justify my time, and without them I felt like I was flailing. So Iowa was another father figure of sorts telling me that I could have two years to figure myself out. Only later, after I developed a real practice, did writing become what it is for me now, which is essential.

What’s ahead for you?

The way we casually misuse language is something that I want to change. I think the biggest way that people lie about the refugee crisis is in the misuse of words like deluge, or flood, or swarm—these terribly inaccurate, dehumanizing metaphors. If we started to think in individual stories, we might get much more imaginative about how we reshape the world.

That’s something that I actually learned when Warren Buffett came to HBS. He talked about what we would do if we didn’t know what body we would be born into, an idea from A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. If that were true, we would create a society that was best for the worst-off people. I admired Buffett for being someone who has so much and yet gets into the imaginative, philosophical questions of what we owe to each other.

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