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The Madman of Freedom Square
by Hassan Blasim
Translated by
Jonathan Wright
Comma Press 2009, Paperback
First collection
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Hassan Blasim
was born in Baghdad in 1973. He studied at the city's Academy of
Cinematic Arts, where he twice won the Academy's Festival Award for
Best Work. In 2004 he moved to Finland, and has since made numerous
documentaries for Finish television. His short stories have previously
been published on www.iraqstory.com.
Read
an interview
with Hassan Blasim
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"But I see no
need to swear an oath in order for you to believe in the strangeness of
this world."
Reviewed by Mithran Somasundrum
In The Market of Stories,
from this collection, Hassan Blasim writes that, "Since the fall of
Saddam Hussein there have been incessant calls for writing to be
intelligible, realistic, factual and pragmatic." Completely ignorant of
the Iraqi literary world, I have no idea whether this is true or not,
but if so, then Blasim has set out to swim against the tide with the
strongest of strokes. For he has decided to let the camera lens of his
documentary-style writing swing outside of reality. The resulting
stories can either be read as true events seen through a prism of
madness, or as a fabulist tapestry where the threads are stained by
real blood.
The tipping point to madness is often not clear, we only suspect it
must have happened.
In the opening story, The Reality
and The Record (one of the collection's strongest), a Baghdad
ambulance driver is kidnapped and then passed from one jihadist group
to the next. Each group beats him and then videos him admitting to
atrocities. We hear the man's story as he tells it, in a refugee centre
in Sweden, explaining to the immigration officer why he was found back
in his ambulance with six severed heads. Even as he explains, the
driver admits "those six heads cannot be proof of what I'm saying, just
as they are not proof that the night will spread across the sky."
Ultimately the only thing we can trust is his last four words: "I want
to sleep." But then, like many of the characters here, he no longer
cares whether anyone believes him.
Certainly the "madman" in Freedom Square no longer cares; he only wants
to rest in the shade, and of course the plagiarizing editor of the
Iraqi newspaper doesn't care (An Army
Newspaper), because he's already dead and facing up to the
identity of the writer whose letters he stole. In fact, the only
character who wants to be believed is Jankovic, the Serbian policeman (The Truck To Berlin), who tells his
wife about Iraqi refugees locked in a truck in a field and the
fantastic occurrence when the truck was opened... But then Jankovic
probably still expects to have some control over his life.
That expectation has gone from most of the Iraqi characters, who find
themselves at the whim of forces (fate, governments, God) they can't
understand or appeal to. Characters like Private Hamid (The Virgin And The Soldier), who
works in a factory producing army uniforms and only wants a chance to
be alone with Fatin without her brothers knowing. The factory is
wrongly suspected by the U.N. of being used for "prohibited military
purposes," and with that fact, and non-existent WMDs, in mind it
becomes possible to see Hamid's end as a mirror of his country's: "a
man who fell victim to a macabre story."
Even when the characters here do try to start again, their past comes
with them. In Holland, Salim changes his name to Carlos Fuentes and
claims to have a Mexican father, but in his dreams Iraq returns with a
vengeance (The Nightmares of Carlos
Fuentes). In Finland an Iraqi refugee wakes with a smile on his
face that he can't remove, even when surrounded by neo-Nazi thugs (That Inauspicious Smile).
By the end of this collection you feel that Blasim's choice has been
the right one. Why stick to reality to describe unreal times? Often
bleak, often bloody, sometimes quietly, powerlessly angry, these
stories show us Iraq without theorizing abstracts, through the eyes of
its people. And so to the Madman in
Freedom Square. He remembers the time of two angelic blond men
who transformed his poor district, but were driven away by the military
coup. No one else seems to share this memory and perhaps it's all to do
with the piece of shrapnel in his head. We can't know, because Blasim
doesn't tell us, which interpretation is correct. We can only realize
that if he's not insane he must be that more worrying thing: someone
who knows the truth.
Listen to one of the stories from this collection on Spoken Ink
(paying website)
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