A Story to Save Your Life - by Sarah Bishop (Paperback)

About the Book

Through powerful firsthand accounts, A Story to Save Your Life offers new insight into the harrowing realities of seeking protection in the United States. Sarah C. Bishop argues that cultural differences in communication shape every stage of the asylum process, playing a major but unexamined role.

Book Synopsis

Winner, 2023 OHA Book Award, Oral History Association

A young woman flees violence in Mexico and seeks protection in the United States--only to be trafficked as a domestic worker in the Bronx. A decorated immigration judge leaves his post when the policies he proudly upheld capsize in the wake of political turmoil. A Gambian translator who was granted asylum herself talks with other African women about how immigration officers expect victims of torture to behave. A border patrol officer begins to question the training that instructs him to treat the children he finds in the Arizona desert like criminals.

Through these and other powerful firsthand accounts, A Story to Save Your Life offers new insight into the harrowing realities of seeking protection in the United States. Sarah C. Bishop argues that cultural differences in communication shape every stage of the asylum process, playing a major but unexamined role. Migrants fleeing persecution must reconstruct the details of their lives so governmental authorities can determine whether their experiences justify protection. However, Bishop shows, many factors influence whether an applicant is perceived as credible, from the effects of trauma on the ability to recount an experience chronologically to culturally rooted nonverbal behaviors and displays of emotion. For asylum seekers, harnessing the power of autobiographical storytelling can mean the difference between life and death. A Story to Save Your Life emphasizes how memory, communication, and culture intertwine in migrants' search for safety.

Review Quotes

This book is an essential read to better understand the challenges that asylum applicants encounter when sharing their stories. Bishop provides a clear and in-depth analysis of the relationship between communication and asylum outcomes.-- "Social Forces"

Bishop invites us into the room where asylum decisions are made. A Story to Save Your Life is a disturbing account of how everyone from asylum seekers to judges tries to communicate across cultural and bureaucratic barriers in a messy process where the consequences of misinterpretation are devastating.

--David Scott FitzGerald, author of Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers

All storytelling is cultural. It's about time Western gatekeepers understood that. With thought-provoking research and moving stories, A Story to Save Your Life is a leap toward that vital education.--Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You

This beautifully written book uncovers the problematic ways the legal structures for assessing asylum claims ignore, misinterpret, and otherwise skew the narratives asylum seekers must share to qualify for asylum. Bishop elucidates how the asylum process perpetuates trauma and results in asylum denials of people who should qualify. A Story to Save Your Life is an essential perspective on this vital topic.--Beth Caldwell, Southwestern Law School

This brilliant book features the powerful voices of asylum seekers, government officials who have run the deportation machine, and advocates and researchers who make sense of mass migration. Bishop humanizes the lived experiences of those seeking asylum with stunning emotional depth and insight. A must-read for all who care about immigration.--Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants' Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School

About the Author

Sarah C. Bishop is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York. She is on the board of directors of Mixteca Organization, a nonprofit that supports immigrant communities in Brooklyn, and she serves as an expert witness in U.S. asylum hearings. She is the author of Undocumented Storytellers: Narrating the Immigrant Rights Movement (2019) and U.S. Media and Migration: Refugee Oral Histories (2016).