illustration from the cover of Daniel Nayeri's Everything Sad is Untrue

Scheherezade and the King: A Modern Narrative Diversion Addressing an Ancient Problem

April 6, 2021

by Missy Andrews

When five-year-old Khosrou’s Shiite Muslim mother converts to Christianity, his life changes forever. Soon he finds himself hurried onto a plane, leaving behind his father and the familiar landscape of Iran to live as a refugee in the United States. Rural Oklahoma’s flat and dusty landscape isn’t the only thing unfamiliar to him; his very self seems strange in his transplanted condition. Everything is new: new home, new father, new school, new language. He even has a new, American name: Daniel. Who is he now? Will he ever feel at home in this new place? Will he ever belong in this new life?

Meanwhile his memories of home are fading into a “patchwork story,” what he calls “the shame of the refugee.” In fact, this shame is common to anyone who has tried to remember. Memories are slippery, more like water than matter. Sometimes they lie fathoms deep in cold, murky darkness. Sometimes they sparkle on the surface, radiant as diamonds. Always they elude our capture and run sieve-like through our fingers when we, thirsty for them, scoop them up to drink. Maybe the only real way to keep them is by sharing them.

Telling another person about a memory is like photocopying it. Writing a book of memories and publishing it is like uploading that memory to the iCloud. It lasts forever, up there in that communal space. Whichever way we share, words, like water, pour from us into our listeners — waiting vessels. And just like that, our memory is transferred, multiplied, objectified in the Other.

Nayeri’s story, Everything Sad is Untrue, opens like this: his twelve-year-old self, Daniel, pouring out his patchwork memories to his sixth-grade class. But this is merely the beginning, because the art of narration creates of his patchwork colorful patterns—emerging themes that leap beyond the life of the individual to enjoin the Universals: the question of courage, the nature of origins, the problem of identity, the nature of reality, the question of God, the nature of truth, the significance of fatherhood. Daniel’s story participates in each of these conversations, revealing through his turbulent and bloody memories a meaningful sacrifice that spans the violent disjunctions and sad interruptions of his personal history to form a bridge, a joyful invitation and celebrant welcome to a love and hope that transcends place and time.

Nayeri’s winning narrative voice makes this welcome complete, with its childlike innocence and retrospective, adult wisdom, like in kind to Harper Lee’s young heroine Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. And this likeness doesn’t stop with voice. Like Scout, Daniel speaks with arresting vulnerability and authenticity, singing the plight of the mockingbird refugee with poignant intonations that evoke an empathy no news brief could ever accomplish. With allusions to Scheherezade, the narrator of 1001 Arabian Nights, Nayeri appeals to his readers, as if to the king, for an empathetic hearing and a merciful reception. But, he suggests, don’t think he’s “sucking up”: “The king was evil and made a bloody massacre of thousands of lives before he got to Scheherezade. It’s a responsibility to be the king. You’ve got my whole life in your hands,” he declares. With this modern homage to the Arabian Nights narrative, Nayeri, a modern Scheherezade and a skillful artist, seeks not only to divert, but also to humanize his reader-kings.

The scope of Nayeri’s apology surpasses the refugee crisis, however, to contextualize what C.S. Lewis termed his trilemma regarding the person of God: Who was this man called Jesus? Was he a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord of the whole earth? Nayeri borrows Lewis’s argument to address his own question: Why would his mother leave a profitable medical practice, a loving marriage and family, wealth, status, and everything familiar to live in poverty and shame as a refugee and outsider in rural Oklahoma? Her refusal to recant the faith that causes her circumstances suggests that she isn’t lying. Maybe she’s crazy? Khosrou says no; she’s the most intelligent and respectable person he’s ever known. What’s left, then? Could it be that she is compelled by the Truth? And if so, what of the resulting sadness in her family? Nayeri’s answers to these Primary Questions leave readers asking another hopeful question: What if everything sad is untrue?