Credebility performance
“Everybody here wants a story: doctors looking over bruises and scrapes and boils that don’t heal; officers asking to see papers, proof that you are authorized to be here; strangers on the street who think . they recognize something in your face from home. “p18
“The news is full of refugee pieces. They’re on every channel and all sorts of websites—video diaries, insights brought to you by pseudo-celebs, in-depth interviews. It’s as though the more fresh-faced, young women they can find with hoodies raised up as they gaze across borders back at their homeland or logged on to wifi while huddled in a tent at the Greece-Macedonia border, the more likely they are to convince the public there’s nothing to fear here, that a refugee will not kill you. There is no horde of barbarians at the gates. In point of fact, these people are escaping the barbarians." p72
"" Humanize. That’s what they say, when they’re fawning over certain books and documentaries and films. A word uttered easily and without too much thought. A well-intentioned word that nevertheless concedes the argument that some people are not people and so require some art form to render them human." p140
“Not satisfied with sterile facts, she wants a story, a narrative arc and maybe some character development. She wants a tearjerker, emotive and affecting, something to rev the idle engine of empathy. It’s not how we've been trained to speak of what we've been through. At borders and centers and clinics all they wanted was the information—dates, names, places, frequency. Don’t get too emotional. They need to believe you. It’s journalists and authors and poets who have the luxury, the enormous well of credibility, to then take those facts and spin them into something moving. »p192
“A part of me is terrified that a story will diminish the real, that it will cheapen the experience beyond what I can bear. »p192