The question driving Dina Nayeri’s latest book, “who gets believed?”, is deceptively simple. The Iranian-American novelist, once a child refugee, weaves stories from her own life with those people who were wrongly denied asylum in the UK and US. In doing so, she shows how “the accident of birth, the privilege of race, class, and nationality” often trumps “data, history, science, and reason” when it comes to whose voices are heard, and whose truths acknowledged. The consequences can be devastating.
The book is instantly gripping, opening with the story of a Sri Lankan refugee known only as KV. He arrived in Britain in 2011 as an asylum seeker with scars on his back and an account of being tortured by the Sri Lankan government. Despite the support of medical experts, his asylum claim was rejected. KV was accused of inflicting the injuries on himself, kickstarting an eight-year legal battle that reached the UK supreme court.
When she was a refugee, Nayeri learned quickly of a “code” that she had to crack to perform the role of a respectable, believable actor in the US. “As a foreign kid, I knew that American was a performance. So is refugee, good mother, top manager,” she writes. Her professional and financial success, and the ease that would bring to her life, were dependent on mastering this code. And she does, honing its intricacies as a consultant at McKinsey, where she learned to “bullshit gracefully” in order to build trust with her clients.
Many refugees who fail to get asylum do so not because their painful stories don’t afford them the right to a sanctuary, but because they aren’t performing their pain correctly. Nayeri looks at what she was taught at McKinsey and asks how an asylum seeker would fare if they exhibited behaviours that were drilled into her, but don’t come naturally. A Home Office official tells her of an Iranian man she cross-examined who knew precisely the legal grounds for asylum and argued them forcefully. He ensured he covered everything to convince the judge, and won. “The code works; it’s just that only a few are trained in it.”
Nayeri also brings in stories of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted and people of colour whose cries of pain were ignored in medical settings. Her frustration and anger light up the page as she makes formidable arguments for justice. She could have restricted the book to such case studies, but instead the narrative takes a courageous turn as she moves away from nightmarish institutions to write about her brother in law’s struggle with mental illness and her refusal to believe him. “I had cruel thoughts involving refugee camps for soft white boys, or Iranian solutions to this privileged nonsense.” Her brother in law spirals and his life unravels. Here I found myself forced to confront an unsettling question: what impact could my own ideas about credibility have on the people around me?
It’s hard to categorise Who Gets Believed; it is part memoir, part reportage, part criticism. Nayeri often illuminates the bureaucracy of the UK Home Office and US Citizenship and Immigration Service with references to Kafka’s best-known works. But rather than dropping in familiar quotes to underline a specific point, she engages deeply with the texts, alongside other forms of art, to provide refreshing insights that drive the narrative forward. There are some philosophical meditations, particularly in its final act, which feel distracting and interfere with pacing. Even so, the book remains an ambitious and moving exploration of the borders we draw around credible victimhood, and will cement Nayeri’s position as a master storyteller of the refugee experience.
• Who Gets Believed? by Dina Nayeri is published by Harvill Secker (£13.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
