Hassan Blasim's Sololand: Iraq's troubled past explored through three novellas

The narrator of one of the stories in Hassan Blasim’s Sololand dreams that he’s written a story in colloquial Iraqi Arabic rather than in standard fusha. He begins reading it to a “hall full of writers, critics and poets … all smoking and glaring at each other.” As soon as he finishes the first line, which repeats a vulgar but realistic Iraqi proverb, “the first shoe hit me from the front row, and then more shoes came thick and fast like a swarm of locusts.”

This reminds me of my own experience attending a literary festival in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, back in 2011. I didn’t commit the sin of reading out a story written in aamiya, but I did make the comparable faux pas of praising Hassan Blasim’s writing to a hall full of Iraqi literary figures.

I repeated what I’d written in the Guardian, that Blasim was perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive. This didn’t provoke actual shoes, but it did result in fuming outrage and several angry ripostes. Blasim uses bad language, they said. He is vulgar. He concentrates on topics that are unsuitable for literature.

But that’s what used to be said about James Joyce, another iconoclast at work in a period of social and cultural turmoil. Those working to find new ways of expressing new realities will inevitably offend sensibilities and step on people’s toes, especially in a country with as many taboos as Iraq.

Iraq is the country that Blasim escaped. His own toes were trodden on in the process. Some of his fingers, to be precise, were cut off during the journey, which took him over the mountains into Iran, then through Turkey and various European countries, working unregistered jobs in dangerous conditions to pay his way. Echoes of the journey can be heard in The Truck to Berlin, a horror story from his first collection, The Madman of Freedom Square (2009).

That was the collection which elicited my praise, and which I often still give as a present. If the question is: How to write about war, when war provides truths every day that are so much stranger and more macabre than fiction? Then this book answers the question with an inimitable blend of surrealism, cynicism and black humour. (Ahmad al-Saadawi’s very up-to-date fable Frankenstein in Baghdad offers another very different answer, and the late Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa, in Death is Hard Work, by far his most pared-down novel, offers yet another.)

Sololand, Blasim’s latest collection, is a further high achievement. Two of the three stories offer visions of the kind of social breakdown that forces Iraqis to flee their country, and sandwiched between them, another story offers a similarly dark picture of the situations in which they arrive in their supposed lands of refuge.

The first story, Elias in the Land of ISIS, is set in the famous Clock Church in Mosul, which is under the Islamic State group's (IS/ISIS) control.

Here is one of the many ways in which Iraqi reality is stranger than anything fiction could hope to achieve. ISIS did in fact take over most of the churches in the areas it conquered. Along with sports stadiums, schools and hospitals, the churches were converted into prisons and military bases. Broken lives are lived out in this broken place.

Elias is a Yazidi boy abducted from his home to work for the organisation. The common factor among all the characters is that none of them are at home. Everybody has been transported from somewhere else. A Spanish journalist has been brought in a curtained crate. The ethnically-North African 'Couscous Brothers' have brought themselves from France for the sake of jihad.

Sara, a poet and pharmacist, has been forced out of her marital home into a relationship with an ISIS commander. The character who emerges as the quiet hero of the story is – somewhat typically for a Blasim hero – interested in texts, specifically church manuscripts, which he attempts to give a home.

In the middle story, The Law of Sololand, the narrator, like Blasim, is a refugee settled in 'the North' (Blasim arrived in Finland in 2004). He is sufficiently linguistically proficient and well enough versed in his native as well as his adopted ways of life to straddle both cultures. He is moved to give up his job in a fish restaurant in the capital and go even further north, to Sololand, where he will work as an interpreter and cultural facilitator. His idea is to bring refugees together with the locals through cooking.

The tragedy and occasional comedy which ensues covers various points from the centrality of food in people’s sense of identity to the West’s obsession with the supposed sexual deviance of the East.

It indicates the blindnesses and hypocrisies which get in the way of mutual understanding. In the end, the well-intentioned socializing is upended by a neo-Nazi plot. One evening in particular goes horribly wrong, and the narrator ends up in prison.

The hero of the third story, Bulbul, Muhsin Abd al-Zahra, is known as Bulbul, or Nightingale, “an especially vocal bird”, because “he was one of the first people in Iraq to open a Twitter account.”

Because of family connections and for the employment opportunities, Bulbul is a member of Ahbab Allah, a Shia political movement and militia. Ahbab Allah is fictional, but it’s easy to think of a real-life equivalent. The movement revolves around a charismatic religious leader known as the Sayyid.

Recruited for his social media savvy, Bulbul sets up the Bulbul al-Sayyid email account on the Sayyid’s request. The account is designed for communication with the leader’s female admirers. An adventure ends our hero’s involvement in this project, but he’s soon at the centre of another – this one a radio show called Bulbul’s Daydreams. Bulbul is sacked when he upsets the listeners with his overly provocative (though entirely innocent) religious-social-political questions.

After a spell as a drone operator for the Hashd al-Shaabi (not a fictional organization but the very real alliance of Shia militias established to aid the Iraqi army against ISIS), Bulbul is sent to spy on the Tishreen Movement, an anti-corruption uprising with the potential to overcome Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic conflicts by writing a new national story about citizenship.

Having served as a series of metaphors for the writer, or the writer in embryo, by the end of the story, Bulbul has transformed into an actual writer of stories, including this one.

In his translator’s note, Jonathan Wright (who has done a characteristically brilliant job) explains that the original text was written in Iraqi aamiya, in that 'colloquial language' which Bulbul tells us, “is sensual, warm and honest. You feel it coming from your heart. It is significantly, amazingly succinct.”

Blasim tells us, very succinctly, that Iraq is “a country that makes no sense.” It makes so little sense that it can only be understood by negatives.

“It’s not a protectorate, it’s not democratic, it’s not Islamic, it’s not a dictatorship, and it’s not a country.”

From his northern distance, Blasim does better than anyone at engaging this Iraq, which is both maddened and maddening, but full of possibility, and at understanding the far-flung lives of Iraqis in their new unhomely homes.

Robin Yassin-Kassab co-wrote Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War and is the English editor at ISIS Prisons Museum

Follow him on X: @qunfuz2