"Who Gets Believed? by Dina Nayeri – why asylum seekers struggle to be understood"
"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."
~ Stuart Jeffries
No comments:
Post a Comment