Hassan Blasim: a Requiem for Iraq, a Requiem for Literature

Abstract

The paper discusses the work as well as immanent poetic views of the contemporary Iraqi prose writer Hassan Blasim. His literary works thus far include two collections of poetic and prose compositions that were written over a period of time, The Shia’s Poisoned Child (2016) and Dictionary Man (2019); two collections of stories, The Madman of Freedom Square (2009) and The Iraqi Christ (2013); and finally the novel God 99 – Emails of the Emil Cioran Translator (2018). Blasim’s gift for writing, expressed in prose miniatures found in these collections, earned him the status of “perhaps the greatest living Arab author”, and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, as well as being short-listed for a number of other important literary awards.
Each of Blasim’s literary works is a kind of nightmarish testimony coming from the Iraqi Hades and a requiem for its victims, causing empathy and calling for responsibility. Through his work, the author revises the image of the material and spiritual downfall of a nation, its uncertain territorial survival and reveals to us the horror of an individual living in constant fear for his or her life, pressured both by internal conflicts and external neocolonial wheeling and dealing. Blasim performs an exhumation of the Iraqi national being, an autopsy of the body and a biopsy of the soul, collecting their fragmented lives and burying them in his fiction. He does this in a narratively skillful, stylistically diverse manner, ranging from surrealist contemplation to nightmarish realism, prone to illicit excesses in expression and theme, contrary to canonical Arabic literature. It is through these transgressions that Blasim tries to leave a mark, indulging in explicit mockery of the sacral heritage and intrusion into secular intimacy. Even though he is not the only Arab writer who has an unfettered and nonchalant way of dealing with language and taboo topics, Blasim places them at the center of his literary works.
In addition to analysing the world of Blasim’s fiction, the paper also points to metafictional threads that permeate a large number of Blasim’s works or are in their focus, especially in terms of the creative impulse and the meaning of writing Arabic poetry and prose in particular, as well as literature in general. This is in the spirit of postmodern literature, in which the focus is often placed on rethinking the structure and meaning of one’s narration. Therefore, Blasim dwells on the process of creation (formalistic, stylistic and genre possibilities of storytelling), on the purposefulness and role of the literary in the life of a writer, referring back to some of these issues in the historical development of Arabic literature, especially its poetic heritage. This discussion takes place in the form of a monologue or dialogue, where, in the latter case, the author’s interlocutors are other writers from around the world, or characters found in their works.