A Short Guide to Being the Perfect Political Refugee

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Graphic Nonfiction by Mana Neyestani
Translated from the Persian by Ghazal Mosadeq

In the satirical "guide" below, cartoonist Mana Neyestani draws on his own experience as an Iranian refugee in Paris.

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Le Petit manuel du parfait réfugié politique © 2015 Arte Éditions/Éditions çà et là. By arrangement with the publisher. Rights arranged by the Nicolas Grivel Agency. Translation © 2016 by Ghazal Mosadeq. Lettering by Irvin Carsten. All rights reserved.

First published in the February 2016 issue of Words Without Borders: International Graphic Novels: Volume X.
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for A Short Guide to Being the Perfect Political Refugee
https://wwb-campus.org/literature/a-short-guide-to-being-the-perfect-political-refugee
Mana Neyestani

Television image of Neyestani during an interview with VOA Persian, 2010.
Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani was born in Tehran. For several years, he worked for the government magazine Iran. His use of an Azeri word for "cockroach" in a children's cartoon published in May 2006 triggered riots among the Azeri minority, already persecuted by the Iranian government. The newspaper closed and Neyestani spent months in prison. Upon his release he emigrated to Malaysia and now lives in Paris. He received the Courage in Editorial Cartooning Prize from the Cartoonists Rights Network International in 2010.

Ghazal Mosadeq (translator)

Ghazal Mosadeq is an award-winning writer and poet. She is the winner of the Bayhaqi Short Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Khorshid Poetry Prize. She has published three poetry collections, Dar Jame Ma (2010), Biographies (2015), and Supernatural Remedies for Fatal Seasickness (2018). Her poems and short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines in Iran, Canada, the UK, Portugal, and Greece. Actively involved in creating and promoting a dialogue between Persian and English literary traditions, she has embarked on translation from Persian to English and vice versa, and is involved in leading and producing creative writing workshops in Iran, the UK, and Canada. She is the editor of the Saan Literary Quarterly in Iran and a member of the jury for the Haft Eghlim Literary Award, as well as for the Jamalzadeh Award for Nonfiction.
Context
Links available online only

Meet Author Mana Neyestani

Television image of Neyestani during an interview with VOA Persian, 2010.
- Find out how Neyestani got his start as a cartoonist in this interview with The Comics Journal
- View photos of Neyestani, as well as other images he created, in a Pinterest collection from Art Iran
- Read French? Try this interview: Mana Neyestani, dessinateur iranien et réfugié politique.
Say the Names

Listen to pronunciations of the Persian names in this story, read aloud by Mandana Naviafar.

(Listen on SoundCloud.)

Why Leave Iran?

Neyestani's biography explains:

His use of an Azeri word for "cockroach" in a children's cartoon published in May 2006 triggered riots among the Azeri minority, already persecuted by the Iranian government. The newspaper closed and Neyestani spent months in prison.

You can read Neyestami's memoir of these events, "An Iranian Metamorphosis," in the magazine WWB; and watch the documentary "Metamorphosis, Iranian Style," below. (In Persian with English subtitles.)

(Watch on YouTube.)

Why Come to Paris?

Find out why an Iranian immigrant might come to Paris, in particular, in this entry from Columbia University's Encyclopedia Iranica.

How to Be an Alien

Learn about the inspiration behind Neyestani's book, and read another story of immigration, in Paul Smalera's memoir/ review.

Cover of the book How to be an Alien, created by Nicolas Bentley, 1946.

Iran

New to learning about Iran? Read the country’s profile on encyclopedia.com.
Alleyway in Hamoomchaal, by Kamyar Adl. License: CC BY 2.0.
Playlist
Links available online only

More from the Author
Read an excerpt from Mana Neyestani's memoir of the events that forced him to leave Iran, An Iranian Metamorphosis.

Panels from "An Iranian Metamorphosis," showing a blindfolded prisoner walking, and a man telling him, "Good morning, Mr. Neyestani. Sorry I have bad news."

Then, read an interview he gave in 2010, shortly after leaving Iran: Two sorts of red lines. (The interviewer has a political perspective that comes across in the piece.)

See more work from Mana Neyestani on the Cartooning for Peace website.

You can read Neyestami's entire 2003 collection, Tout va Bien! ("Everything is going well!"), in Sampsonia Way, an online magazine sponsored by City of Asylum/Pittsburgh.

Mana Neyestani on Social Media

Watch a YouTube video that sets Neystani's drawings to electronic music. (Some explicit language).

Or, find Neyestani on Facebook, where he has several hundred thousand followers.

More from the Translator

The translator of this story, Ghazal Mosadegh, is also a fiction writer and poet. Read her story "Ney Boulevard," which was inspired, in part, by "A Short Guide to Being the Perfect Political Refugee." Below, Mosadegh explains how translating Neyestani's story inspired her own:
"My comic book writer and cartoonist friend Mana Neyestani, who had gone through the whole process of applying for asylum in Paris, was of great help with the details. When he told me that the Préfecture de Police is located on a street called Ney Boulevard, the story began to take shape."

Finally, you can find more fiction from Mosadegh in her book Biographies, "extra-ordinary biographies plus ordinary chairs," available from Susak Press.

"A real refugee would . . ."

Read, watch, and listen to contemporary stories about immigration to the United States and migration around the world, beginning with Mohammed Elsaleh's TEDx talk "The Refugee Crisis: Coming to a Doorstep Near You."

Then, read 9 myths and facts about immigration from the Anti-Defamation League (PDF).

You can find more stories of refugees and immigrants in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and in the UN’s video archive.

Poetry about Refugees

For poems, articles, and audio/video recordings about the experiences of refugees, check out the Poetry Foundation's "Poems on Immigration" collection.

More Stories of Leaving Home
The cover of Dina Nayeri's The Ungrateful Refugee

For another story about leaving Iran, read Dina Nayeri's memoir The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You.

Interested in reading more about refugees from other parts of the world? Check out The Displaced, an anthology of essays by refugee writers edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

(Note: both of these titles were recommended by Lesley Williams in this list of literatures of exile).

More Genre-Bending Literature*
Panel from Ilya Kitup's "The Only True Guide to Russia: Hidden Secrets Revealed."
- The Only True Guide to Russia: Hidden Secrets Revealed: another comic "guide,' also published on WWB Campus
- Self-Help, by Lorrie Moore: like this story, this collection of fiction offers a take on a traditional guidebook
- Dante's Inferno: a novel in verse that posits itself as a guide to Hell and includes a character (Virgil) who acts as a guide
- Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, two novels by Julian Barnes. The first is a quasi-biography; the second, a quasi-history.
*For Teaching Idea 1

More Comics and Comix*

Also available on this website, these stories use classic comic techniques in new ways:
- Two Million People in the Square, an Egyptian political pamphlet
- A Drifting Life, a Japanese manga artist's memoir
- The Pharaohs of Egypt, a story about a Bedouin tour guide's imagined revenge
- Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
- Maus, by Art Spiegleman
- Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi speaking at the film premiere of Persepolis, 2007. By Rama.

*For Teaching Idea 2

More How-tos
- There's a collection of guides on Wikihow, such as this one, on donating blood
- A guide to living "like a local in Paris," aimed at a very different kind of new arrival from the refugees in this comic.
More Art and Humor as Resistance*

From the series "Eternal Sorrow," by Wu Wenjian, an artist and former protester in the Tiananmen Square Uprising.

On WWB Campus and WWB:
- Interview with Wu Wenjian: a memoir of imprisonment in China
- Ney Boulevard, written by translator of this story and including many of the same references and themes
- Arm Wrestling in Chebachinsk, depicting Russian community made up of people exiled and jailed in the Stalin era
- The Queue, an excerpt from a dystopian novel about people waiting in line.
Other Fiction:
- The Iliad, by Homer. Homer takes care that the individual soldiers remain individuals, even in the thick of battle, and that their deaths matter.
- Kafka's novels The Castle and The Trial; and The Trial: a Graphic Novel
- Bartelby, the Scrivener: a Herman Melville story in which, for unknown reasons, a man declines to serve the bureaucracy
- Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens
- Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury: art and literature vs. totalitarianism and bureaucracy
Other Nonfiction:
- Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, describing one man's retreat from industrialization and homogenization
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; and Journey into the Whirlwind, by Yevgeniya Ginzburg, both depicting ways in which prisoners of the Soviet gulag struggled to retain their humanity
- By Fire: Writings on the Arab Spring, by Tahar Ben Joullon, transl. by Rita S. Nezami: the story of how one man's shame and rage against inhuman bureaucracy kindled the Arab Spring
*For Teaching Idea 2
Teaching Ideas
Reading Grade Level(s): 8, 9
- 1. Playing with Genre: Guides and Comics
- 2. Comix vs. Bureaucracy, Humor as Resistance
To access these Teaching Ideas, please register or login to WWB-Campus.

Related Reading

Ney Boulevard - Fiction

The Pharaohs of Egypt - Graphic Fiction

The Gringo Champion - Fiction