Roya Hakakian - A Beginners Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious

In August 1984, I fled my beloved homeland, Iran. After many months of wandering through Europe as a refugee, I was finally admitted into the United States. What I say in this book is what no one told me when I first arrived, when all I heard was about practicalities, and nothing about how to understand or cope with the whirlwind of emotions that had swept me up and in whose eye I remained for a long time. Everyone was trying to help me get on with my new life, all the while I was under the sad spell of the old.

No two immigrants are the same, therefore no two arrival experiences are the same. Yet even as immigrant groups are divided based on their strengths or shortcomings, successes or failures in America, they have far more in common as members of an uprooted community, trying to make their way in the unfamiliar land. This book is, in part, about all that bonds them. Immigrants are not interchangeable. And yet, just as there are common human experiences, there are also common immigrant experiences. Scholars, for their own scientific purposes, and politicians, for their own partisan purposes, often focus on immigrants as distinctly separate groups to measure their value to, or their burden on, the nation, to debate which one should be allowed in and which should be banned altogether. In truth, all that separates one group from another often pales against the common drama of displacement and the ordeal of resettlement. Speaking of that drama is one way of warding off those who wish to reduce the shared narrative of that odyssey to a series of disjointed entries in the encyclopedia of arrival.

In offering the newcomers perspective, this book will inevitably cast a fresh look at America, rethinking and presenting her to all readers through the weathered perspective of a naturalized citizen. Perhaps those who have been born and raised here, and assume that their mere birth either endows them with the knowledge of America or exempts them from exploring and discovering her, can see her anew, through the eyes of others who dream of becoming Americans.

Much of what follows is the story of my own life, and the lives of people I love or have tried to help in a personal or professional capacity. If there is an attempt, it is at inclusivity, at trying to weave in as many immigrant experiences as would fit the confines of these pages. In the end, I was left with an unusual composition made up of my own recollections and those of my fellow immigrants as told in memoirs, autobiographies, personal testimonies, and other thoughtful and provocative writings on the subject, which I have listed in my sources. The result is part memoir, part reportage, and part a work of imagination. True to the nature of displacement, this book has elements of all these genres, but ultimately belongs to none of them. My greatest hope has been to give an unmediated access to a narrative that has become disfigured by overzealous emissaries on both sides of the political debate.

I have lived through war and a violent revolution. I have been persecuted for my religion, gender, and beliefs, too. What I hope all these experiences bring to this book is a measure of authenticity. Authenticity is not all an immigrant needs, but it is a good place to begin a new conversation, or a new book.

Roya Hakakian

October 2020