Irakisk Kristus

On a bus in Helsinki, a bearded man from the Middle East somewhere sits reading a book with Arabic lettering. After whispering amongst themselves, one of the passengers eventually works up the courage to ask him if he's reading the Quran. The presumed terrorist tries to look as friendly as he can when explains (yet again) that no, he's reading Kafka in Arabic translation.

This isn't an episode from The Iraqi Christ (though a similar one pops up), but something Blasim mentioned in a talk I saw him give this spring. But it captures some of the mood of this weird, mad, hilarious, agonizing, plainspoken, blood-drenched, heartfelt, surreal collection of stories. Not just because the spirit of Kafka soars all over (or rather, creeps right through) much of it, but because it's the sort of absurdity that shows up in every story - only, in Blasim's stories, the stakes tend to be much higher. The tales here are about people who try to just go on with their lives, the ones who have to fight for their lives, the ones who try to flee, the ones who make it and end up living in a country they're not allowed to call home.

Everyone staying at the refugee reception centre has two stories – the real one and the one for the record. The stories for the record are the ones the new refugees tell to obtain the right to humanitarian asylum, written down in the immigration department and preserved in their private files. The real stories remain locked in the hearts of the refugees, for them to mull over in complete secrecy. That’s not to say it’s easy to tell the two stories apart. They merge and it becomes impossible to distinguish them.

Reality is thin, blown apart by one too many torture sessions or wars or car bombs that scar the entire collective unconsciousness; magic can happen, you just don't have any control. In Blasim's stories, people compete on radio over who suffered the most during their time in Saddam's prisons; soldiers stumble into holes in the ground occupied by dead soldiers from other wars in other countries; immigrants find themselves trapped in their own bathroom in the middle of a big peaceful city while a wolf paces outside; refugees try to explain to immigration officers how they ended up starring in Youtube videos for dozens of different terrorist groups, alternately as terrorist and kidnap victim; etc etc etc.

We watched the adults’ wars on television and saw how the front ate up our elders. Our mothers baked bread in clay ovens and sat down in the sunset hour, afraid and with tears in their eyes. We would steal sweets from shops, climb trees and break our legs and arms. Life and death was a game of running, climbing and jumping, of watching, of secret dirty words, of sleep and nightmares.

Iraq has been one of the most reported-on countries in the world over the last 30 years. We count the dead by the hundreds of thousands, if we count them at all. Quick, name three Iraqi works of fiction that's not A Thousand And One Nights; hell, name three Iraqis known for anything un-war-related at all. Blasim gives voice to both suicide bombers and authors, thugs and lovers, football players and dogs, crossword makers and grieving mothers, all complex characters with their own stories, who fuck and drink and work and weep and kill and live and die and are all just as real as any angsting Franzen character. That shouldn't, in itself, be necessary - but we shouldn't need to see 3-year-olds washing ashore to get it either. But of course, in the end, that's not what makes this great, and neither are the dozens of literary references (from having a character jump out of a fifth-floor hospital window, to an Iraqi emigrant renaming himself Carlos Fuentes to pass as South American) which are both good fun and very deftly handed. This isn't literature to scratch off a check list of odd countries, or simple message fiction. These are stories that have come through both hell and heaven, been chiseled and knocked about and scarred and filigreed until they shine. Or, y'know, don't.

If there was a special search engine for dreams, like Google, all dreamers would find their dreams in works of art. The dreamer would put a word, or several words, from his dream into the Dream Search Engine, and thousands of results would appear. The more the search is narrowed down, the closer he gets to his dream and eventually he finds out it’s a painting or a piece of music or a sentence in a play. He would also find out which country his dream was in. Yes, you know. Maybe life... okay, fuck that.