ABSTRACT

This chapter considers how undocumented migrants negotiate shifting patterns of trust and mistrust as they travel. Two French-language accounts of sub-Saharan migration are compared to demonstrate the centrality of trust to all travel. Yet mistrust often prevails in a context where migrants are viewed with suspicion and where they must remain alert to real dangers. The chapter also argues that relationships of mis/trust are exemplified in the ways in which the ‘legitimacy’ of accounts of undocumented migrancy is adjudicated in literary/critical contexts: whilst fabrication and invention clearly undermine the trustworthiness of the migrant author, collaboration with a western author becomes a strategy to restore trust.