A critical reading of “The Army Newspaper”, “The reality and the Record” and “Iraqi Christ” by Hassan Blasim, Iraqi Conflict Writer

Abstract

Hassan Blasim, is an Iraqi writer who was born Baghdad in 1973 who began inventing fiction as a child. He was a critic of Sadam Hussein’s regime which reflected in his works. He filmed and wrote against the dictatorship and the government criticising them both for the irrational attacking of the Kurdish and local people. His texts were a blend of the allegorical and historical representation of the inside life of the Iraqi people as those that lived within the control of the state were prohibited to write against state authorities. Blasim takes the function of being the surrogate voice to the people in Iraq in order to expose to the world and testify to the atrocities committed by the powerful. He has been able to do this by using the medium of writing to bear witness and make the reader conscious and question the inside life of the people in Iraq. The paper attempts to critical read “The Army Newspaper”, “The Reality and the Record” and “Iraqi Christ” as texts bringing to the fore the trauma and pain of the Iraqis by blending fact and fiction and thereby exposing the tyrannical situation of Iraq.