From the archive: Foreign mothers, foreign tongues: ‘In another universe, she could have been my friend’
Dina Nayeri's personal essay explores the widening cultural and emotional distance between herself and her Iranian mother after their displacement as refugees. The narrative is mirrored by Nayeri watching her own daughter assimilate into French culture and begin to distance herself from her mother's American identity. The essay grapples with intergenerational trauma, the performance of daughterhood, and the impossible negotiation between cultural loyalty and personal autonomy.
Summary
Dina Nayeri's essay 'Foreign Mothers, Foreign Tongues' is a deeply personal exploration of immigrant motherhood, cultural displacement, and the generational inheritance of trauma. Nayeri and her mother fled Iran when Nayeri was eight years old, her mother being a Christian convert facing persecution. The experience of living as undocumented refugees in Dubai and then resettling in the American South created a shared survival bond between mother, daughter, and son — one defined by physical closeness, shared language, and mutual dependence.
Over time, however, as Nayeri rapidly assimilated into American culture, a cultural chasm opened between them. She grew ashamed of her mother's Iranian-ness, her accent, her expectations rooted in a culture that demanded daughters remain close, deferential, and self-sacrificing. This dynamic was thrown into sharp relief when Nayeri moved to France in 2019 and watched her own young daughter Elena quickly assimilate into French culture — mimicking perfect French pronunciation, correcting Nayeri in front of peers, and subtly marking Nayeri as the foreign mother. The reversal forced Nayeri to confront her own past behavior toward her mother.
The essay digs into the structure of the mother-daughter relationship in Iranian culture, where daughters are expected never to leave the symbolic 'imaginary room' of family closeness, never to reveal shameful truths or assert independent values. Nayeri describes her mother's ongoing violations of her boundaries — including calling her a 'concubine' during a reconciliation attempt — and their eventual recourse to sessions with an English therapist, whose presence Nayeri notes ironically makes both women behave because they don't want to embarrass themselves in front of a Westerner.
A significant thread in the essay concerns Nayeri's grandmother, who was a child bride at 13 in pre-revolutionary Tehran and who Nayeri believes was raped. After her grandmother's death, Nayeri's mother and aunt broke into the grandmother's home and destroyed her papers and devices to prevent this history from being told. Nayeri frames this act as emblematic of how Iranian family culture erases uncomfortable truths, particularly those surrounding women's suffering, in favor of preserving a sanitized collective narrative.
Nayeri also explores the tension between her writing and her mother's desire to control their shared refugee story. Her mother wants their story told as one of resilience and dignity; Nayeri insists that honest, flawed storytelling is more redemptive and more human. She argues that concealing cracks does not protect dignity — it destroys the full humanity of the people involved.
The essay closes on a note of complicated tenderness. Nayeri begins to understand that her mother's cultural programming, like her own stumbling with student pronouns, is the product of a different generation's formation. She imagines her future self needing the same patience from Elena that she is being asked to extend to her mother. The essay ultimately asks whether love can be separated from performance, whether the 'fake' loyalty that grown children offer aging parents has its own validity, and whether accepting that performance might be the most honest thing left to do.
Key Insights
- Nayeri argues that watching her daughter Elena assimilate into French culture and subtly shame her American-ness was a direct mirror of her own childhood behavior toward her Iranian mother, forcing her to reassess her judgment of her mother.
- Nayeri claims that the Iranian daughter is culturally expected never to leave the symbolic 'imaginary room' of family closeness, and that a daughter who asserts independent values or seeks privacy is seen as having betrayed the family rather than having grown.
- Nayeri contends that her mother's most damaging behaviors — including dismissing her expertise and calling her a concubine — are not perceived by her mother as significant offenses, because in her mother's value system, the thousands of meals cooked and eyebrows plucked outweigh those verbal violations.
- Nayeri argues that honest, flawed storytelling about immigrant life is more redemptive than heroic myth-making, and that revealing imperfection in fictional Iranian mothers does not demean them — it makes them more fully human and more beloved.
- Nayeri describes how her mother and aunt broke into her grandmother's home after her death and destroyed her papers to prevent the story of her grandmother's childhood rape from being told publicly, framing this as a cultural reflex to erase women's suffering in favor of a clean family narrative.
- Nayeri observes that intergenerational trauma — not merely a culture gap — underlies her family's dysfunction, specifically tracing a pattern of sexual shame and boundary violation back to the community-sanctioned childhood rape of her grandmother.
- Nayeri reflects that her mother's attempt to navigate Western-style boundaries, though clumsy and inconsistent, represents genuine effort, and draws a parallel to her own stumbling with students' pronouns — arguing both are products of formation in a different linguistic and cultural system.
- Nayeri concludes that a child's performance of love and loyalty for an aging parent — even if not entirely sincere — may constitute a legitimate form of care, and that she now understands she would accept such a performance from Elena, just as her mother needed it from her.
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