Who Gets Believed?

8 March 2023

We all think we have an instinct for the truth, but is the truth enough? Or are we listening for something else? Dina Nayeri's new book Who Gets Believed? When the truth isn't enough, will take you behind the scenes in emergency rooms, boardrooms, asylum interviews and even into her own family, to explore the difficulties of persuasion and performance and to ask - where's the line between being believed and being dismissed?

Who Gets Believed? is available in March in the UK by Vintage Publishing, in the US by Catapult Books, and in Germany by Kein und Aber.

Who Gets Believed? cover images - left to right: UK, USA, Germany — Cover images (left to right): UK cover, USA cover, and German cover

Video transcript

>>DINA: So one thing I discovered as I was talking to a lot of undocumented migrants and, you know, asylum seekers was that it's not enough to tell your story in the way that you were taught to tell stories as a child.

You now have to learn to tell your story, your one true and most personal narrative in the Dutch way or the English way or the American way and it's quite a struggle to learn how to do that.

Not everyone has helpers who are willing to help them learn.

In Holland, there's a man that I found, I call him, in my book, I call him the refugee whisperer, and this man just impressed me so much with his dedication, how much time he gives to refugees, but his entire work is to try to teach them how to make themselves seem human to the Dutch.

Can you imagine that this is a job that's needed?

Well, because the fact is that humanity and truth and storytelling are all cultural.

Everything that we believe about those things come from the culture that we were raised in.

So, it makes sense, I suppose, that you have to tell your story the Dutch or the English way, but it isn't fair and it especially isn't fair when the asylum officers have been incentivized to look for inconsistencies and instead of trying to find the truth in your story, and to try to save your life.

They actually are looking for the smallest accidents and lies so that they can reject you.

This is not the way an honest listener looks for the truth.

In fact, a true story is full of inconsistencies.

Life is full of inconsistencies.

There's a terrible case that happened recently in the UK wherein a torture survivor was told that he had by the Home Office that he had inflicted the torture, the signs of the torture on himself in order to get asylum.

They called this self-inflicted torture by proxy.

The notion that the asylum in the UK is so, so valuable that someone would have another person torture them so that they would get in.

This, this notion was considered absurd and it was overturned by the Supreme Court and that's a wonderful win, but the fact that there were asylum officers who would actually use this argument is frightening to me.

Thank you.

Reviews, Who Gets Believed?

"Scintillatingly narrated... An elegant telling of truth to power."
Observer

"Instantly gripping... an ambitious and moving exploration of the border we draw around credible victimhood, and will cement Nayeri's position as a master story teller of the refugee experience."
Guardian

"Superb… honest, unsparing, sad and funny all at once. 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... Essential reading, an extraordinary labor of love and hope that is destined to become indispensable in the continuing struggle for justice.”
John Burnside, author of A Lie About My Father

“An important, courageous, brilliant book: an interrogation of ‘disbelief culture’ and the injustice that both fuels it and is fueled by it, a form-shifting memoir of an already remarkable life, and a moving, harrowing investigation of love, loss, and care.”
Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

"Nayeri's mesmerizing, genre-bending book braids together narratives of asylum seekers, exonerated felons, and religious converts... Heartbreaking and hopeful. Reading this book will upend your preconceptions about who is worthy of belief, as writing it did for Nayeri herself."
Amanda Frost, author of You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping From Dred Scott To The Dreamers

“A compelling, generous, and distinctive inquiry into the nature of belief, credibility, and, above all, the deeply unjust and unequal societies in which we live.”
Chitra Ramaswamy, author of Homelands: The History of a Friendship

“A profound, gorgeous, devastating book, exhilarating in both its compassion and its contemplation of pain ... Who Gets Believed? is that rarest of creations, an original work about a condition in which we are all implicated.”
Jeff Sharlet, bestselling author of The Family and This Brilliant Darkness

“A truly remarkable book, where universal and deeply personal themes are powerfully interwoven ... A masterclass in storytelling, teasing out the crucial implications of 'who gets believed' for all of us.”
Steve Crawshaw, policy director at Freedom from Torture and author of Street Spirit: The Power of Protest and Mischief