Hello, Radio Readers. I’m Jane Holwerda. We’re engaging with the second book of our Fall 2024 series Through the Eyes of a Child. An autobiographical novel, Everything Sad is Untrue recounts a life of exile, refuge and asylum as an immigrant family struggles to adjust to life in Edmond, Oklahoma. From the perspective of his twelve-year old self, author Daniel Nayeri weaves his memories with ancient Persian tales in ways that provide his young self tools to endure and make meaning.
At school, in Edmund, where Daniel’s family is finally sponsored, he acknowledges the validity of his classmates’ unsavory perception of him even as he tells stories to establish a royal lineage dating thousands of years. In doing so, he aims to direct others to see him “not as the refugee kid in the back of [the] class. [But] as a prince in disguise.” His classmates remain skeptical and Daniel gets that, in Oklahoma, his family appears to be the opposite of kings. His mother, a physician in Iran, is a hospital custodian in Edmund. His classmates are cruel, mean, as only middle-schoolers can be. They are unaware, they have little knowledge of his homeland, of ancient Persia, or little of all he—not yet even a teenager-- has experienced. His telling of his stories are also a way to resist accepting and assuming the perceptions others have of him and also to make sense of all the events of his life—dislocation from his homeland, refugee camps, loss of family and friends, being bullied at school, and an expectation from others that he is less-than and so should behave that way.
At the novel’s start, Daniel opens, as he says all stories do, “With a promise. If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies anymore.” Towards the novel’s end, Daniel’s naivete and innocence less intact, his classmates do seem more accepting of him. He has gained insight on how to be in the world but he’s unsure how to be and become. It’s his mother’s example, finally, that he turns to for wisdom. His mother is “unstoppable” – persistent, convicted in her beliefs, determined to protect and provide and always be present for her children. The source of being unstoppable, Daniel speculates, is to “hope that some final fantasy will come to pass that will make everything sad untrue. Unpainful.”
The rivers of waste and blood of one’s life become a field of yellow flowers in bloom, he imagines, a place that “no one will chase you off of” because “it’s yours. A father who loved you planted it for you. A mother who loves you watered it. And maybe there are other people there, but they are all kind. Or better than that they are right with each other. They treat each other right.” His mother clarifies for him that “to step over the river of blood, to accept the sacrifice and be thankful” is to understand the cost of joy and to understand that is how to live.
It may take 1000 days and nights or more, as in the classic Arabian tale, but we can get there. This novel can be a great aid – a profoundly told tale of transcending the events of a hard, hard life.
For HPPR Radio Readers, I’m Jane Holwerda in Dodge City, Kansas.
