Scheherazade in Oklahoma

Hello, Radio Readers. I’m Julie A. Sellers for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club. Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri explores story, memory, identity and flaws through the eyes of the author as a twelve-year-old Iranian refugee in Oklahoma.

Daniel was six when he escaped Iran with his Christian mother and older sister, his father remaining behind. In that moment, Daniel leaves a life of privilege, family, security, and the known for one of poverty, brokenness, insecurity, and the unknown. Even his name is different, his mother deeming his birthname too difficult for foreigners to pronounce. Name changing may seem such a simple act, and yet, it has a profound impact on one’s identity.

When Daniel and his family are granted asylum in Oklahoma, he begins to repeat family stories from before his time, his memories of home and exile, and legends and myths from his culture as a way of securing his identity in the sea of difference around him. The problem is his classmates think he’s lying. His stories and memories are so distant and different from their own, even in the way of their telling, that his classmates immediately discredit them.

But Daniel understands the stuff of stories and storytelling. Throughout the telling of his memories, he refers to the great storyteller, Scheherazade, and The Thousand and One Nights. Just as Scheherazade’s life depends on her ability to hold the king’s interest night after night, Daniel understands that “every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.” To that end, Daniel tells his stories, piecing them together and providing explanatory cultural and contextual information. As he tells us, “the shame of the refugees is that we have to constantly explain ourselves. It makes the stories patchworks, not beautiful rugs.” Even the structure of the book, which has no chapters, but rather, flows from one story or thought to the next, reflects this patchwork telling.

Daniel’s cultural reference of Persian rugs reiterates how he views himself in his new setting. He explains the rug-making process, down to the intentional inclusion of one flaw to reiterate how only God is perfect. And in Mrs. Miller’s Oklahoma classroom, Daniel sees himself as the outsider: “I’ll never belong to either place or even have memories I can count on,” he tells us. “I’m the flaw in the story, the exception in her classroom.”

But Daniel perseveres, confident in the value and power of story and that maybe, in the telling, “all the sad parts of the adventure will come untrue.” “Dear reader,” he says, “you have to understand the point of all these stories. What they add up to. Scheherazade was trying to make the king human again […] Little by little, he began to feel the joy and sadness of others. He became less immune, less numb, because of the stories.”

This, dear reader, is the ultimate goal of storytelling: human connection and the cultivation of empathy.

I’m Julie A. Sellers for HPPR Radio Reader’s Book Club.