‘Nobody would believe the protagonist of my story’: From assessing credibility to co-creating (un)reliability in the context of queer asylum narratives

The assessment of credibility plays a central role in the process of determining the refugee status of queer asylum seekers and deeply affects both how they narrate their stories and how decision-makers interpret them. In this article, I take up Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of paranoid and reparative practices to show how credibility assessment operates as a paranoid narrative practice which aims to expose fraud, and as such has a bearing on the outcome of the process. As a reparative practice, I draw from narrative hermeneutics and contemporary fiction to study credibility in queer asylum narratives as a narrative phenomenon, a dialogically constructed (un)reliability. As a case study, I analyse two novels by a Finnish Kosovan writer Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia (2018) and Crossing (2020). My analysis of the novels explores the complexity of narrating violent and traumatising experiences and the accountability of interlocutors in interpreting them.