No Place for Truth? Credibility and Dis/belief in Asylum Storytelling

Across the global north, asylum interviews are incidents of coerced storytelling in which asylum seekers must narrate their flight from their country of origin to representatives of their host country, in the hope of being granted refugee status. Whilst media and political discourses often imply that truth within asylum storytelling is the determining factor in shaping the outcome of an asylum claim, socio-scientific research into asylum adjudication processes in the US, UK, France and Ireland reveal that asylum seekers’ stories are instead subject to a series of hostile and prejudiced credibility criteria within a systemic “culture of disbelief”. This article examines the place of truth in asylum storytelling in a comparative approach that draws socio-scientific research together with the literary portrayals of asylum interviews by authors Dina Nayeri and Melatu Uche Okorie. These works of refugee literature emerge as alternative forms of asylum storytelling that denounce the injustices of asylum adjudication all the while creating a place for truth within fiction.