Literary Defiance: An Interview with Hassan Blasim

Abstract

10 WLT JANUARY/ FEBRUARY 2015 THE STORIES OF WRITER and filmmaker Hassan Blasim have come to Englishspeaking readers via an unusual route: selfpublished online in Arabic and collected in book form only upon English translation. I first encountered Blasim and his work in 2013 when reading alongside him at the London literary event WordFactory—with his engaging smile and sheer enthusiasm for storytelling and for life, he won over both audience and fellow writers with tales of his journey into exile from Iraq. He left his home country due to concerns his films did not play well with those in power there and has lived in Finland since 2004. As of 2014, Blasim’s stories have yet to appear in book form in their original Arabic, but some of his stories in Arabic may still be read on the website Iraqstory.com. Many of Blasim’s stories explicitly reference the conflicts of recent years in Iraq and the surrounding area, albeit in unpredictable ways. The title story concerns an Iraqi soldier who happens to be Christian, known as Chewgum Christ, whose premonitions during the Iraq–Kuwait War save the lives of many fellow soldiers, among them the narrator. Later, as a civilian, Chewgum Christ is forced to carry out a suicide bombing and meets the narrator again in the afterlife. The stories are often disturbing to read, but when do the events of war make for comfortable reading? The life of this interview began when Hassan Blasim and Jonathan Wright were announced as joint winners of the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Iraqi Christ. Over time, it grew into an investigation of how writers transform and translate news and recent events into fiction. Lane Ashfeldt: Why is it important that stories from Iraq reach readers now? Hassan Blasim: What is happening in Iraq now did not come about by chance. It’s an extension of the destruction and the wars that the dictator (i.e., Saddam Hussein) fought earlier, wars in which international capitalism was, and still is, a significant factor. In Iraq we haven’t yet written about the tragedy of the dictator’s futile wars with Iran and Kuwait or about the massacres the Baath Party carried out in the 1970s against the opposition parties, partly because of censorship and partly because of the bloody and terrifying events that followed. Iraq has been a maelstrom of violence and destruction for more than five decades. Literature is one form of human cognitive defiance. It’s like life, which violence cannot stop, however vicious it might be. We can’t just sit around watching and waiting. We have to get on with it. LA: In the first story in your prizewinning collection, The Song of the Goats, a televised story contest acts as a lead-in: The man in the smart suit came back on and urged the contestants to calm down. In simple words he explained Literary Defiance An Interview with Hassan Blasim by Lane Ashfeldt Literature is one form of human cognitive defiance. It’s like life, which violence cannot stop. We can’t just sit around watching and waiting. We have to get on with it. Q&A WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 11 photo : sami kero / helsingin sanomat that the best stories did not mean the most frightening or the saddest, what mattered was authenticity and the style of narration. He said the stories should not necessarily be about war and killing. I was upset by what he said, and I noticed that most of the contestants paid no attention. A man the size of an elephant whispered in my ear, “It’s bullshit what that bullshitter says. A story’s a story, whether it’s beautiful or bullshit.” So is this an argument for content over form, or just a reaction against someone else telling you how to do your job? HB: The story “Song of the Goats” makes fun of attempts to talk about the style of a story or of language in a world of madness and barbarity. In fact, when I despaired of having my stories published in Arabic as books, I published most of my texts on the Internet for more than six years...