Who Gets Believed?
When the Truth Isn’t Enough
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- 9,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
The prizewinning author of The Ungrateful Refugee asks who is believed in our society, who is not - and why?
'Ambitious and moving... it will cement Nayeri's position as a master storyteller of the refugee experience' Guardian
Dina Nayeri's wide-ranging, groundbreaking new book combines deep reportage with her own life experience to examine what constitutes believability in our society. Intent on exploring ideas of persuasion and performance, Nayeri takes us behind the scenes in emergency rooms, corporate boardrooms, asylum interviews and into her own family, to ask - where lies the difference between being believed and being dismissed? What does this mean for our culture?
As personal as it is profound in its reflections on language, history, morality and compassion, Who Gets Believed? investigates the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another.
'An important, courageous, brilliant book' Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland
'Dina Nayeri asks an incredibly important question, and the answers she finds are crucial for all of us' Oliver Bullough, bestselling author of Butler to the World
'I was hugely moved by this book. Who Gets Believed? is essential reading, an extraordinary labour of love and hope that is destined to become indispensable in the continuing struggle for justice' John Burnside, winner of the David Cohen Prize for Literature 2023
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist and novelist Nayeri (The Ungrateful Refugee) argues in this wide-ranging and provocative study that believability is often a matter of "performance," and that "disbelief is the baseline" in British and American immigration courts. Weaving stories of asylum seekers, prisoners, faith-seekers, and medical patients with her own experiences as a refugee, Nayeri examines intriguing issues around the question of truth. One of the strongest stories in the book is that of the brutal torture of a Sri Lankan political prisoner, his subsequent escape to the U.K., and his struggles to convince refugee agents that his scars were evidence of torture and that he should be granted asylum. The Home Office refused to believe him, Nayeri argues, because caseworkers are prone to doubt asylum seekers. Elsewhere, she describes the disbelief and dismissal of prisoners and the poor who come to emergency rooms for medical treatment, and recounts her experiences as a child refugee from Iran and evangelical Christian in Oklahoma, and reflects on her own unwillingness to accept that her brother-in-law struggled with mental illness. Though the discussions about the mistreatment of asylum seekers and refugees are insightful, abrupt changes of subject somewhat undermine the force of Nayeri's arguments. The result is an incisive yet scattered investigation into the nature of doubt.
