When the burning metal rod sank into his shoulder, K passed out to the sound of his own screams. He sensed more burning wounds on his back when he came round. It was August 2009 and he was in a government interrogation room in Sri Lanka. K’s torturers kept asking him where the gold was that he hid for the Tamil Tigers. “I swear I don’t know,” he told them. “I’m not LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam]. I’m a jeweller’s assistant.” They poured petrol over his wounded body and threatened to set it alight unless he told them what they wanted to know.
Or did they? Did any of this happen? When K arrived in the UK in 2011, he sought asylum, but had his claim repeatedly rejected. The scars, officials decided, could have been caused by what was known officially as “wounding SIBP” (self-inflicted by proxy), in order to manufacture evidence in support of a false asylum claim.
It took until 2019 for the supreme court to decide that there was no evidence to back this theory. K had told the truth, but for many years was disbelieved; a form of torture in itself.
The outrage of what happened to K underpins this ardent, harrowing and occasionally exasperating book. Who gets believed, asks the Iranian-born American writer Dina Nayeri, author of two novels and an award-winning book of creative nonfiction, The Ungrateful Refugee (2019). Not those who can’t perform their pain to the satisfaction of those predisposed to be sceptical. Not the innocent African Americans who can’t escape being put in the frame for murder by racist law enforcers. Not the Ugandan lesbian refused asylum by British officials who disbelieved her claim that there is a practice of “reparative rape” (that is, raping women until they “turn straight”) to which she risked being subjected if sent home.
The queasy sense one gets throughout this book is that all the world’s a stage and its gatekeepers – asylum officers, courts, cops – incredulous audiences for whom the most vulnerable have to give credible performances. Nayeri describes the Babyn Yar massacre in which 34,000 Jews were murdered outside Kyiv by the Nazis in 1941 and how Soviet film crews convinced bereaved women to re-enact their reactions as they rummaged through bodies – and even to perform more credibly for the camera in order to spur the war effort.
Nayeri learned the value of performance early. Fleeing Isfahan after Iran’s Islamic revolution with her Christian mother, she wound up at a refugee camp outside Rome. Little Dina would sit around campfires with other refugees “practising, tailoring our stories for asylum officer[s], knowing that our lives depended on what the officer found credible”.
Later, during her training at Harvard Business School and then working for management consultant McKinsey, Nayeri became fully fluent in the “glossolalia” of business speak, deploying to clients such aggressively meaningless phrases as “directionally correct”, “outperforming at scale” and, my favourite, “achieving granularity”.
What Nayeri learned, she writes, “is how to be believed – how to be the one people want to believe, feel safe believing”. Sri Lankan torture victims and Ugandan lesbian asylum seekers rarely get such training.
“The refugee in me fumed,” writes Nayeri. “These lessons exist, have long existed and have been handed to those who need them least. The rules were created for the children of the (native and colonising) rich. I just happened to be in the room.” The author now teaches creative writing in the UK at St Andrews University, no doubt coaching students in how to give literary performances believable enough to woo cultural gatekeepers – agents, publishers, critics – as she has.
Hers is a scintillatingly narrated journey from refugee campfire to academia, but another story rubs nigglingly against the narrative’s grain, that of her partner Sam’s brother Josh, a troubled soul who took his own life. While alive, Josh’s situation irritates her – for Nayeri, he’s a privileged westerner. He’s coddled by a fond family who bankroll his performance therapy classes while not giving him the tough love that she thinks he needs, nor the work ethic that impelled her to overcome her shortcomings. “I had cruel thoughts involving refugee camps for soft white boys, of Iranian solutions to this privileged nonsense. Wish I could schedule tea with the crankiest mullah in Isfahan.”
I don’t know whether Josh was a “soft white boy” or overwhelmed by inner demons (perhaps both), but Nayeri’s reduction of him to type rather than person shocked me in its heartlessness.
Referring, in an author’s note at the end, to what reads like quite an indiscreet account of a tragedy, she says: “I have kept my language true to particular times and places, and tried not to sanitise thoughts or language after the fact.” No doubt, but such truth-telling, apparently devoid of tact or compassion, is not necessarily the virtue she takes it to be.
But her book is mostly an elegant telling of truth to power. The verb in the title is key: not who is believed, but who gets believed, as if to suggest that officialdom – be it the Home Office immigration controls, the police or the courts – systematically discounts the believability of the most vulnerable. For those who can’t afford savvy attorneys who know how to beat these systems, or who can’t narrate their sufferings to order, Nayeri suggests, justice and compassion are rarely attainable.
Her book is published at a poignant moment. Our prime minister wants to exclude asylum seekers for ever if they arrive in small boats. As if how they got here rather than the suffering that drove them to undertake such desperate journeys is of decisive importance. As if Britain has become so heartless that we don’t want even to hear about, still less believe in, those who come to our shores in the greatest distress. At best, Nayeri’s book is an eloquent rebuke to that heartlessness.
• Who Gets Believed? When the Truth Isn’t Enough by Dina Nayeri is published by Harvill Secker (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
