The Subversion of Borders and ‘Nightmare Realism’ in Iraqi Migration Literature

In Hassan Blasim’s short story ‘Kalimat Mutaqatʿia’ (‘Crosswords’), Marwan, a young crossword-puzzle writer, wakes up in a Baghdad hospital only to discover that his body now hosts the soul of another man: a police officer who died in the explosion that caused his own injuries. In the ensuing narrative, the two souls (Marwan and the police officer) are forced to coexist and intersect, much like the increasingly obscure words that are featured in Marwan’s crossword puzzles. Marwan’s sense of self is disrupted; no longer able to see himself as a singular or bounded entity, he becomes both a space of intersecting, open-ended signs and a space of claustrophobic and unwanted intrusion. The crossword puzzles and Marwan’s perplexing predicament are both apt metaphors for the crossing and subversion of boundaries that are central to Hassan Blasim’s literary narratives, especially those that explore migration, where similar metaphors of crossing and melding proliferate. Indeed, Blasim’s many short stories of migration are tied to this broader project of exploring more open-ended subjectivities (and approaches to writing violence and war) and modes of interconnectivity that entail a subversion of boundaries and borders.Finland-based Iraqi Hassan Blasim is a writer and filmmaker who has forged new directions in the twenty-first-century Arabic short story. His literary narratives stage recent conflicts in Iraq through the macabre, the fantastic and through experimental approaches to narrative. His stories of forced migration and human trafficking contribute to a rewriting of migration and exile in Arabic literature. As a public intellectual and activist, Blasim often emphasises the liberating potential of opening up national borders and identities. He made the following remarks in a March 2016 interview in Helsinki, Finland:You’re part of a dream. You’re Finnish, and you’re part of the world. Of the Earth, the planet. You’re part of it all. It’s all linked. But then people start talking about being pure, just this or that, like, ‘You’re Finnish’, or ‘You’re Iraqi’, or ‘You’re an engineer’, and nothing else. That’s so limited. You’re everything. You’re an engineer, an artist, a dead person, you’re nothingness, you’re a dream. This connectedness … it helps you write better.Purity, of course, is a fiction.