The Iraqi Christ, by Hassan Blasim – review

There is much about Hassan Blasim that demands attention. He is an Iraqi. He escaped from Saddam’s dictatorship in 2000 by walking to Iran and smuggling himself into Europe. He has a confident, almost intimidating demeanour. And with the growing stack of literature about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan all penned by westerners, there is an important space for Blasim to fill.

The Iraqi Christ is his second collection of short fiction, the first being The Madman of Freedom Square, both translated into English by Jonathan Wright. Blasim has been called, ‘the best writer of Arabic fiction alive’. It is is not his identity, how-ever, but the quality of his writing that makes his voice striking. It is deeply troubling and complex, the metaphors arresting and violent.

Blasim’s stories are nightmares. Early in ‘The Fifth Floor Window,’ the narrator describes his surroundings:

Sometimes carts would come, drawn by donkeys or horses, loaded with mangled bodies. It was hard to tell the dead from the living. It was a bleak year. Civil war. Infiltrators from abroad. Secret agents from all over the world. Adventurers. They were making their way together down the river of hell that was Baghdad.

Or in the ‘Green Zone Rabbit’, the narrator recounts the murder of his two brothers. Militia fighters ‘drilled lots of holes into their bodies with an electric drill and then cut off their heads. We found their bodies in a rubbish dump at the edge of the city.’ In both instances, the narrators speak with a detached calm, an almost playful tone, as if this has become expected behaviour. As one observes, ‘for me the world became like an incomprehensible mythical animal’.

The nightmare distends with Blasim’s figurative language. Here is a section from ‘The Song of the Goats’:

My father sent me to live with my uncle and I became a refugee of sorts… I felt like a ball that people kicked around.