In a recent story in the New Yorker, published well into the controversy surrounding former IMF president Dominique Strauss-Kahn?s alleged rape of the Sofitel housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo, reporter Suketu Mehta follows an African asylum seeker (the country isn?t specified) through her application process. ?Caroline,? or ?Cecile,? works at a Manhattan supermarket under another person?s social security number: ?Caroline was living three lives: as Cecile Diop, a woman with papers who had been in the country for ten years; as Caroline the African rape and torture victim; and as herself, a middle-class young woman who wanted to go to college and make a life in America.? It is, writes Mehta, ?a continuous exercise in willed schizophrenia.?
Through the course of the article, Caroline develops and tells to an immigration officer an ultimately convincing story about her beating and rape by government soldiers in her home country.?
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Source: http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2011/08/25/nafissatou-diallo-and-tiawanda-moore
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