Hassan Blasim: Once Upon a Time in Iraq

Hassan Blasim's fiction is angry, often surreal, mired in the violence, paranoia and chaos of the Iraqi occupation and its aftermath. But the stories of his new collection, The Iraqi Christ, are not exploitative 'sniper narratives' told down the barrel of an invading soldier's gun, nor are they chest-beating misery memoirs telling tales of oppression and violence in the sometimes melodramatic way of nonfiction accounts. They are concerned with the humanity of their characters, expressed by Blasim in prose that is by turns brutal, mythic, grittily journalistic, fantastical and macabre. Blasim's work refuses to flinch from the darker side of human nature, and displays a visionary flair for the symbolic, the anthropomorphic, and the supernatural. His work enters territory first mapped by Kafka, J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs – realms where other Arab writers have rarely set foot.

Blasim settled in Finland eight years ago, after a four-year trek through Europe as an illegal migrant, facing extreme hardship, danger and depredation. For all the dark and intense imagery in his novels, and the focused, iconoclastic intelligence of his conversation, he is a warm, friendly interviewee, introducing his young son and laughing frequently. When asked about the gulf that separates him from most Arab writers, both thematically and aesthetically, he gives a wry smile. “They write in a different style in Iraq,” he says, citing a long list of problematic encounters with publishers and reviewers in Islamic countries. But a young generation of writers, raised on the internet and increasingly culturally aware, see Blasim as a figurehead: “They send me emails, and tell me, 'You've done something wonderful for Iraqi literature.' But there are still many Iraqi writers who have a different, more traditional style, who are still afraid of taboo subjects. It's not like I'm a critic – some people think that I criticise religion all the time. But my stories are not just about religion.”

The problem is this: “Iraqi writers still care more about language. I care about story,” Blasim explains. “If you want to be a writer, first you must know how to use the language, you must study it – it's a very classical approach. But now the young Iraqi writers are free to write what they want, they can write many things which go against taboos. That's good. But still, they don't think about the taboo inside language. Because when you stray from the classical language, you put yourself inside another taboo.”

“Truth is still a dream. All our lives, we search for an answer to this. I don't like people who say they have the ultimate truth” - Hassan Blasim

This iconoclastic use of language has caused Blasim's stories to be banned in some places, and ignored by publishers and newspapers across the Arab world, including his native Iraq. “Many Arabic readers feel I use angry, dirty, filthy language,” he explains. “I care more about the street language, and what happens in the street. For years I wrote poems, and they were nearer to rap – many readers also felt that this was not poetry, because it was so dirty and angry. So after a while, I started to accept this.”

Blasim embraced “the language of the streets,” especially in the cadences of his characters’ speech: “I just started to write dialogue how people talk – it’s not like I am doing something new, or surprising,” he says modestly. “I just hear how people talk about politics, how they talk about death. People in the street in Iraq make jokes when a bomb goes off. They joke about death because it’s normal – they have lived for a long time with war. If you don't make these kind of dirty jokes, if you don't embrace that black humour, you can’t survive.”

The stories depict a side of Iraqi culture that the West has rarely shown – one that only someone who has lived there could describe. “The problem is that there are not many publishers [in the West] who are searching for Iraqi writers,” says Blasim. This is something he is addressing, working with his publishers Comma Press to discover new literary voices in Iraq, and the rest of the world. It's all about the viewpoint, says Blasim: “When I come to England I need a visa, I need documents. Even with my book being published in England it is so difficult for me, as an Iraqi, to come to the country, and tell my story. But imagine British soldiers, American soldiers – they go to Iraq without a visa. They go with a gun. So when you hear our stories, they are different. The West has a clichéd picture of us.”

Is he surprised by the strong reaction to his work from Western readers? “I just tell stories about my country, about my people. It’s normal that people have a strong reaction in the West when they read my stories, because it is so different. I can’t write about London while living in Helsinki. I can attempt that, by using my imagination, but it will feel cheesy, you know?”

Blasim’s work is far from reportage of his own experiences, although he frequently crops up as a character. “I don't tell stories just about myself, because I love literature,” he says. “I know how to tell stories in a literary way – I'm not interested in just reporting what I have seen in my life, in the war and while living in Iraq. All the while, while I was seeing these things, I was an artist on the inside.” His stories are full of transformation, possession, and strange, symbolic supernatural agency – the stuff of nightmares.

“Violence is nightmare,” says Blasim. “I remember one terrible week I had in prison in Iraq. But for me, now, it is not real. It is a nightmare. But, when you look at humanity in general... I still trust people. Even deep inside me, I still trust. So it’s ever-present – war is nightmare, violence is nightmare. Iraqi people talk a lot about nightmares, you know. We say: ‘Every person has five nightmare stories.’ Bad stories, about his life. Because when you live for fifteen years inside the different rhythm of the war... it’s not a nightmare, it’s something real, in their life. But I don’t think that there is always a very strong line between reality and dreams. I think when you have broken this line, it answers a lot of questions for me, in my work. I can say this with symbols.”

Blasim is, in many ways, ahead of the modernist curve in Arabic literature. The editor of iraqstory.com, he praises the new generation of Iraqi writers for experimenting with innovative narrative forms and techniques, but says they still have much to learn. “In the next twenty years, a great many changes will take place in Iraqi literature. We'll replace the classical Arabic concerns with feeling, with love and death – death as this big tragedy. People won't be scared to use humour when talking about tragedies, or to make jokes about religion,” he predicts.

But that change, whether in literature or in the wider culture, must now be led from within. “Democracy, free countries – these things are not medicine,” says Blasim. “You can’t come from America and give people medicine to be like people in the West. There is a different history. We are not the same, we cannot build on in our country in the same way. After the British left Iraq [in 1947] we had military dictators, then war with the West. We work hard inside our society, we take care of our problems. But no matter how hard we work, frequently the West comes in and destroys everything.”

On the subject of Western milirtary intervention, Blasim pulls no punches: “Britain and the U.S.A. don’t really care about us, they don’t really care about freedom or democracy. It’s an old story – the mixing of dirty politics and oil and business, and religion. As a result, sometimes we feel really dark. For example if you are a writer or a journalist in Iraq, or an artist, you fight inside the culture, just trying to build something. And then the West shows up with another army and destroys everything... When you came, looking down the barrel of a gun, from another country, you destroyed what many people had been trying to do inside the country, for freedom.”

Iraq is trapped in a cycle that has been tied inexorably to Western interests and interference: “During the war with Iran, Saddam was getting huge support from the West – all the guns and arms he used, they sold him,” says Blasim. “After that he tries to invade Kuwait, so they decide he is the devil, bad, and so they come and destroy everything. And it’s not just Iraq, it’s our neighbours. It’s a circle. Why is it like a circle? Because we are just people, and every time it happens, people die and go to prison.”

Blasim sees growing opposition to the idea of continuing Western interference in Iraq, both in and out of the Arabic world. “Many people think, ‘Well, Islam as a religion is a problem.’” He shakes his head. “We know! Maybe it’s a cliché, but it's true – if you leave us alone, let’s see how we fix it. That's freedom. We need to build our own history. We need a new generation, and it's coming. They’re thinking about religion, about culture. They’re thinking about the kind of relationship we need to have with the West. And it’s not easy, it’s not. But up until now what has happened is that every time we build something – blood, war, people dying.”

Blasim’s next project is Iraq + 100, which lays down the gauntlet to Iraqi writers to describe their country in 100-years time. It is “a new kind of writing” entirely, as there is almost no tradition of speculative fiction in the Arab world. Nonetheless, says Blasim, as Iraqi writers, “People are always asking us ‘What will happen in Iraq in fifty years time? How do you see your country in the future?’ It's a challenge first, to write something that’s never been done in Iraqi literature, but also it's a chance to ask our literary people what they think about Iraq – how it’s going, where it is headed.”

How does Blasim feel when his books are banned, as his first collection, The Madman Of Freedom Square, was in Jordan last year? He laughs heartily. “It's nothing! In Iraq, I made short films... I had problems all the time with the secret police. I've dealt with this for a long time. Getting my books banned is no surprise. I'm laughing, because I sent my stories to so many newspapers in Arabic countries, because they asked me! ‘Please, send one story!’ So I send it, and then they start to censor it, and the editing goes on and on... I know that in the future, perhaps there will be even more censorship of my writing. I make jokes about those newspapers in my writing. I said to myself, okay, I won’t start... I'll just make jokes about these newspapers in my books. Because if I start... they will never publish my books. It’s okay, it’s just a stupid taboo. Like with Salman Rushdie for example. They made him more famous, and all the young Arabic people wanted to read him. So now if they make my book taboo, more people will be interested, in Arabic countries.” Blasim has an elegant solution – last year he e-published both Arabic versions of his collections for free. “The bans are nothing really,” he smiles. “It’s okay.”

Blasim is a vociferous champion of the internet: “Many of my friends in Finland say: ‘You use Facebook too much!’ I say yes, but we don't use Facebook all the time just for say, nice food, or ‘Oh, you have a nice dog.’ We take it seriously. We do some work... like critics. We criticise politics, we criticise culture. For me the internet, when I met it for the first time in 2002, or 2003, I just said, ‘YES. Now nobody can control me.’ Because people simply don't have the imagination to figure out how to control me if I want to write an article online. No Arabic newspaper around the world would publish it. Even if you are a famous writer, if you use this language, and you are free, then no-one will publish you.”

The internet has also liberated many people in the Arabic world from reliance on TV news: “We don't need to follow the BBC to tell us what’s going on in Syria. We make contact all the time, immediately, with Arab people from Egypt, from Tunisia, so that we can all think together. Because I'm finding in all Arabic countries now there is a new generation, who are more sane in their thinking, who have this dream about love and peace.” Blasim smiles wistfully. “Let’s see, let’s see, let’s see.”

He is concerned that some Western readers may take his books too literally. “If I read one novel by an English writer, do I understand England?” he asks. “Now I live in Finland, I’ve lived here for eight years, but I still don't understand deep Finland. It takes some time to understand a culture. Sometimes we say we feel really strange about Western readers, because it’s too easy. Sometimes they translate a novel, it’s about women and how they suffer under male oppression. And it gets big this novel, everybody translates it. Okay, that’s good. But it's not the full story. You can’t understand Iraq by reading The Madman of Freedom Square. It's one writer, and it’s fiction. It’s not easy to gain a deep understanding of what happened in Iraq.”

Literature and books are central to several stories in his collections. Their function is both personal and symbolic: “A revolution is really coming in Iraq,” says Blasim. “People want education, they are becoming interested in knowledge again. We have a really deep history with literature, with poetry. So if that occurs a lot in my stories – instances where literature and books play an important role – it is because I’m sure, for many people inside Iraqi society, they have this dream about knowledge and education making peace.”

His fiction is not always a comfortable place to inhabit, not as a reader, and not for Blasim himself: “I charge myself inside the story,” he explains. “I ask about myself, what I do, what I write. In this world, people die. Should I write a short story when people die? Sometimes I feel guilty, like I'm a bad person. So all the time I have this dialogue inside so many stories, about literature, about books. It’s personal. Many times I’ve had to answer the question, ‘Okay, must I stop writing?’ It’s bullshit, nothing. But still, I want to talk about when we lived in Baghdad, and how important literature and art and theatre were for people. Because it’s a very big step to make life about peace, and art and democracy, and now it's very difficult.”

In interviews, Blasim often quotes from the 13th century poet Rumi: “The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.” Why is this quotation so enduring for him? “I like what Rumi said because really, that is what I see around me in the world. If you come here to Finland, a cold country, and some time you go to the forest, and you meet some old man who is drunk, he is talking about truth, also. So I like Rumi because that is what we are fighting for inside Iraqi culture – because truth is coming from everywhere, and you can never say to somebody, ‘This is really the truth. This is my truth.’ Truth is still a dream. All our lives, we search for an answer to this. I don't like people who say they have the ultimate truth.” Blasim gives another half-sad smile and says: “Maybe there is someone asleep somewhere, and maybe when he dreams, what he dreams is the truth. But for me, truth is everywhere.”