The Figure of the Refugee in Hassan Blasim’s “The Reality and the Record”1

Keywords: Refugee, Blasim, Iraq, Displaced, Asylum, Violence, Terrorism

Abstract:

This article considers Hassan Blasim’s short story, “The Reality and the Record”. It argues

that Blasim’s asylum seeker should be read as a powerful challenge to extant responses to

the ever-growing global refugee crisis. Blasim’s text, I argue, is a powerful evocation of a

twenty-first- century refugee. The text questions the morality of asylum seeking

processes in the developed world, demanding that its readers reevaluate their own stance in

relation to displaced persons, and asserting that the demands placed upon those seeking

asylum are neither just, nor feasible.

In “Step Across this Line”, Salman Rushdie (20032) considered the boundaries that we draw Commented [E1]: Suggest referencing this essay from
Rushdie’s collection Step Across This Line as your
bibliography is quite short and the online PDF doesn’t
around our nation states, and what it takes for people to be allowed to cross them: look like the most academic source.

Here is the truth: this line, at which we must stand until we are allowed to walk across

and give our papers to be examined by an officer who is entitled to ask us more or less

anything. At the frontier our liberty is stripped away — we hope temporarily — and we

enter the universe of control. Even the freest of free societies are unfree at the edge,

where things and people go out and other people and things come in; where only the right

things and people must go in and out. Here, at the edge, we submit to scrutiny, to

1
My thanks to Claire Chambers and Rachael Gilmour for their constructive and helpful editing Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman
of this article, which has much improved the final version. To Sam McBean for thoughts on Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman
Butler, and to the peer reviwers for their kind and helpful suggestions: the final version of this
article owes a great deal to their insights. Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman
 inspection, to judgment. These people, guarding these lines, must tell us who we are. We

must be passive, docile. To be otherwise is to be suspect, and at the frontier to come

under suspicion is the worst of all possible crimes. (20032: 4127)

No one is more desperate to cross that line, nor more suspect than the asylum seeker. Without

papers, without rights, displaced people surrender themselves to the scrutiny, inspection, and

judgement of our border controls in the hope that they will evade suspicion and gain entry to

safety. This article considers the work of Hassan Blasim, himself an Iraqi refugee now living in

Finland. In particular, it examines a story from his first collection, The Madman of Freedom

Square, titled “‫ ”اإلرشيف و الواقع‬translated as “The Reality and the Record” in English. Many of

his stories were oOriginally self-published online in Arabic, but the Iraqi filmmaker, poet, and

writer’s first collection, The Madman of Freedom Square, was commissioned by Comma Press,

translated by Jonathan Wright, and published first in English in 2009. Blasim’s work has always

been controversial in the Middle East. In theme, experimental prose, and in its preoccupation

with the farcical or macabre representation of the operation of power, it is a challenging read in

any context, but especially in a region that continues to struggle so viscerally with the themes his

work is most concerned with. Blasim has expressed his desire to see greater access to his work in

the Middle East, and has been frustrated by its continued censorship in the region. ; it has only

ever been published in censored forms in the Arab world. A “‘toned down”’ version of theThe Formatted: Font: Italic

Madman of Freedom Square collection was published by a Lebanese publishing house ( ‫المؤسسة‬

‫ )العربية للدراسات والنشر‬in 2012 (Qualey, 2012). His second collection of short stories, The Iraqi

Christ, was published in 2013 and won the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in

2014. Despite this, Blasim’s work continues to be banned by Middle Eastern countries such as

Jordan where it is “‘prohibited from trading” (Qualey, 2012).’ . Blasim has established himself
as an important voice in contemporary Iraqi writing, praised as “‘the best writer of Arabic fiction

alive”’ by the author Robin Yassin-Kassab (Guardian2010) . The refugee is a recurring and

important figure in his stories. Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman

The refugee stateless person is central to modern and contemporary Middle Eastern

literature. For decades after 1948, the refugee was almost synonymous with the stateless

Palestinian. Whether in refugee camps, as migrant workers crossing forbidden borders, as part of

a new diaspora filled with nostalgic longing, Palestinian refugees became paradigmatic in

Middle Eastern writing. SadlyHowever, Russian and allied bombs, Islamic State slave markets,

the horrors of sectarian civil war, kidnapping, suicide bombings, and the wonders of Anglo-

American state building have ensured that in the last 20 years the Palestinian monopoly on the

paradigm has been challenged as diverse populations across the region have been forced to flee

their homes. “The Reality and the Record”" presents a twenty-first-century rewriting of the

paradigmatic Middle Eastern refugee. No longer confined to the refugee camp, or the countries

immediately surrounding it, Blasim’s asylum seeker reflects what Matthew Gibney calls “a kind

of globalisation of asylum seeking […] whereby many victims of conflict and persecution, as

well as individuals in pursuit of better economic opportunities, have been able to move

intercontinentally in pursuit of asylum” (2004: 4). This “globalisation of asylum” has, Gibney

argues, brought many desperate people to European and other First World shores as never

before. Of course, poor countries continue to bear the brunt of global crises. As Jane Freedman

notes, “the great majority of the world’s displaced people remain within the countries of the

Third World with very few having the desire or the necessary resources to make the perilous

journey to the West. In 2013 Africa, Asia and the Middle East between them hosted over 60 per

cent of the total world refugee population” (2015: 3). A report published by the United Nations
High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in June 2016 found that record numbers — 65.3

million people — had been displaced by the end of 2015 (Edwards, 2016: n.p). These figures do

not include what Freedman calls “‘clandestine’ exiles, those who have fled their country but

have not claimed asylum or refugee status” (2015: 3); though they too have fled their countries

of origin, these exiles are “living in conditions of economic or legal clandestinity”, and so remain

hidden (2015: 3). In exponentially greater numbers, displaced people are travelling further than

ever before to seek a different, safer, better life. Blasim’s text offers us a vision of this new world

order, reflecting the shifts that Gibney began to chart over a decade ago, which show no sign of

abating.

Though Gibney is right that the world has changed a great deal since the refugee crisis

that inspired Hannah Arendt’s now famous formulation of statelessness and its tragically

disempowering effects, it remains, to my mind, an important way to think about refugees today.

Moreover, the bureaucracy suggested by either the Arabic alersheef (‫ )اإلرشيف‬or “record” in the

story’s title is evocative of Arendt’s insistence that in order to be recognized as human beings

with rights one must be able to operate within the juridical structures recognized by the

international community. The centrality of these concepts, and the story’s repetitious insistence

on the importance of process over substance, as I’ll go on to discuss, echo Arendt’s own

assertion that “stateless persons”, unwanted by their country of origin, are left in a dangerously

vulnerable position (1958/1986: 284). For Arendt, “the loss of government protection” that

statelessness creates “did not imply the loss of legal protection in their own, but in all countries”

(1958/1986: 284). Like contemporary refugees, the Jews Arendt describes were left in an

impossible situation in which no country would claim responsibility for their welfare, none

offered asylum, never mind citizenship. Deprived of any legal status, the stateless Jews of
Europe were “completely at the mercy of the state police” (1958/1986: 286). Deprived of their

human rights, unwanted by any nation, the rejected minorities of Europe were reduced to an

indefinable, sub-legal category that rendered them utterly vulnerable and allowed the Nazis to

put the “Final Solution” into place. Arendt writes:

Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them;

not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. […] Before [the

Nazis] set the gas chambers into motion they had carefully tested the ground and found

out to their satisfaction that no country would claim these people. The point is that a

condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to life was challenged.

(1958/1986: 296)

Formatted: Indent: Left: 0.5"

Arendt’s description of statelessness continues to be eerily relevant to the plight of today’s

refugees. The categories of refugee and asylum seeker, though theoretically much better defined

since the events Arendt analyses, continue to be ambiguous and subject to interpretation. As Jane

Freedman explains:

The definition of a refugee under international law is someone who has been recognised

either by a national government or by the UNHCR as deserving international protection

under the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention/ Geneva Convention […]. And an

asylum seeker is someone who has asked a particular state to grant him or her refugee

status under the terms of this convention. However, these straightforward definitions are

challenged by the realities of current global migratory trends. Can asylum be separated

from other migratory phenomena? Are refugees different from other migrants? (2015:

3−4)
The loss of status that Arendt describes, the ways in which human life might be devalued by

being neither a citizen of one’s country of origin, nor yet accorded rights as a refugee, continues

to define the experience of stateless persons. How else might we understand how thousands of

displaced people are being allowed to drown in the waters of the Mediterranean, or languish in

the terrible conditions of refugee camps across the Middle East and perhaps especially in Europe

itself? Of course, one cannot compare the horrors of the holocaust to what is happening in Syria,

in Iraq, or in refugee camps in Turkey, off the coast of Italy or Greece, or for that matter in

Calais. Whatever the faults, and they are legion, of what is being allowed to take place, it is not a

systematic and brutal mechanized genocide. But men, women, and children are still dying in the

hope of gaining one of a tiny fraction of places in first-world countries, while these countries vie

to take ever less responsibility for them. Few will be offered sanctuary, and even fewer the

possibility of citizenship. Arendt’s assertion that it is in the denial of a legal, and therefore

legitimate, subjectivity that we begin to dehumanize our fellow human is thus particularly useful

in analysing Blasim’s Iraqi refugee.

Like many of Blasim’s stories, “The Reality and the Record” has a frame narrative. An

anonymous, omniscient narrator, who paradoxically remains unable to distinguish between truth

and falsehood in the story, tells us the tale. This narrator is the first of several important but

ambiguous figures of authority in the text, and sets up the story as follows:

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.(2009: 1;

emphasis in the original)1

‫ الحكايات اإلرشيفية هي الحكايات التي‬.‫ واحدة واقعية وأخرى إرشيفية‬.‫لكل نزيل في محطة استقبال الالجئين حكايتان‬

‫ وتدون هذه الحكايات في دائرة الهجرة وتحفظ‬.‫يرويها الالجئون الجدد من أجل حق الحصول على اللجوء االنساني‬

‫ لكن هذا‬.‫ اما الحكايات الواقعية فتبقى حبيسة في صدور الالجئين ليعتاشوا على ذكراها بسرية تامة‬.‫في ملفات خاصة‬

‫ فقد تختلطا ويصبح التمييز بين الحكايتين مجرد محاولة عبثية‬.‫اليعني انه يمكن التمييز بسهولة بين حدود الحكايتين‬

At the heart of Blasim’s short story is the irreconcilable statement with which it begins:

“[e]veryone staying at the refugee reception centre has two stories — the real one and the one for

the record”. Claire Chambers suggests that this doubling might be read as an allusion to the
Commented [E2]: Somewhere I would like to see you
defining and discussing the term/s ‘performative/ivity’
various processes of translation — literal and figurative — inherent in applying for asylum in a via Judith Butler and others. How does ‘performativity’
differ from plain ‘performance’, and how does it work in
language that is not one’s own, noting that “[o]ne of Hassan Blasim’s most interesting insights the asylum context, as compared to Butler’s interest in
gender?
Commented [NA3R2]: Thanks for this – it was a really
into asylum itself relates to language and translation” (2012: 146). She highlights the useful avenue to explore and now appears in the
conclusion.
performative imperative in the telling of one’s asylum story, and reminds us that “[t]he story ‘for Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman, 12 pt
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the record’ is necessarily a tactical one about trauma, persecution, and likely death if the refugee
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does not leave his or her country” (2012: 146). The English word “story” hints at the possibility
2
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2
When I use performative here, I mean performativity in the pre-Butlarian sense of the word, as Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman, 12 pt, Not
the OED defines it, ‘ A. adj. Of or relating to performance; (Linguistics and Philos.) designating Bold
or relating to an utterance that effects an action by being spoken or by means of which the Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman, 12 pt, Not
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speaker performs a particular act.’ However, Butler’s argument that ‘gender is an identity
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tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. Bold
(1990/1999: 179, emphasis original) and perhaps especially that ‘ it is a ‘performative Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman, 12 pt, Not
accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to Bold

believe and to perform in the mode of belief’ (1990/1999:179) also rings profoundly true in this Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman, 12 pt, Not
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very different example (1990/1999:179). Blasim’s asylum seeker’s performance of worthy Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman, 12 pt, Not
victimhood is neither entirely false, nor is it or can it be, entirely true: the story ensures that Bold
neither the reader, nor the central protagonist, nor indeed the generic “‘refugees”’ with whose Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman, 12 pt, Not
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stories the epilogue begins, can distinguish the “ ‘performance”’ from their lived reality of it.
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Like Butler’s conception of gender as a norm that is revealed as constructed only by occasional Bold
of fiction, but in the Arabic Blasim’s language is far more suggestive of the fabulous nature of

the “‘story”’ we are about to be told. ‫( حكايات‬hikayaat) are stories; a novels isare sometimes

referred to as a hikayea, a story, but ‫( حكايات‬hikayaat) are also often fabulous and phantasmagoric

fables, traditionally performed publicly by professional storytellers: hikawati. From the

beginning of the asylum seeker’s tale, then, the Arabic text in particular alludes to the unreal and

performative nature of the asylum experience. In its evocation of the fabulous tales of the ‫ حكايات‬,

it calls into question the role of fantasy, violence, but also of those crucial elements of the fable:

good, evil, and morality in the process of applying for humanitarian asylum.As Ibrahim Muhawi

and Sharif Kanaana note with reference to Palestinian folktales, a “hikaye (which, correctly Formatted: Font: Italic

translated, means ‘tale’), is derived from a root that means not only ‘to narrate’ but also ‘to

imitate’ (artistically). Hence the designation hikaye puts the emphasis on the mimetic, or artistic Formatted: Font: Italic

aspect of narration” (1989: 1). Moreover, hikayat must be distinguished from mere stories

(qissus) as a gendered form, associated with the old women who historically performed them. Formatted: Font: Italic

The phrase old wives’ tales in English is a good literal and figurative translation as it is equally

allusive to the mendacity implied by the Arabic “hikayat ajayiz (‘old women’s tales’)” (1989: 2). Formatted: Font: Italic

Muhawi and Kanaana argue that it is the very falsity of the tale that marks it as feminine in the

Middle East, as “adult men tend to shun [folktales],” noting that “Folktale style depends on a Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman
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interruptions, “‘occasional discontinuity”’; “‘de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman, 12 pt, Not
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phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction”’ (1990/1999: 179),
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the performance of worthy victimhood here evoked neither indicates complete falsity, nor an Bold
assertion of the so-called real, but rather draws our attention to the interstices in between these Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman, 12 pt, Not
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two seemingly irreconcilable poles, giving lie to the any idealised truths that we might seek.
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variety of devices to put the action into the realm of fiction, whereas the story style preferred by

men tends to emphasize historicity” (1989: 2 and 5). Blasim’s use of hikayat therefore marks Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman
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these stories as a fantastical, gendered form – an aspect lost in English translation. In the Arabic Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman
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text, his central protagonist is an emasculated, powerless man; as Muhawi and Kanaana observe,
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“[a] man who likes to listen and tell folktales […] is considered to be a niswanji, or one who
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prefers the company of women to that of men” (1989: 2). This is a derogatory term, often also Formatted: Font: Italic
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understood as an insult connoting homosexual tendencies. From the beginning of the asylum

seeker’s tale, then, the Arabic text in particular alludes to the unreal and performative, and

degrading nature of the asylum experience. In its evocation of the fabulous tales of the ‫ حكايات‬, it

calls into question the role of fantasy, violence, but also of those crucial elements of the fable:

good, evil, and morality in the process of applying for humanitarian asylum. Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman

Throughout, Blasim’s text highlights the importance of narrative in the bureaucratic,

legal processes on which life and death decisions depend in refugee reception centres, airports,

offshore, or other, refugee camps around the world. Ersheef in “ ‫”اإلرشيف و الواقع‬, the Arabic title

of Blasim’s story, translates as record, but also simply “archive”. "‫(”إرشيف‬ersheef) with its

connotations of officialdom and bureaucracy — ideas that are reinforced by the action of filing

these official narratives away, cataloguing them into private files — evokes halls of stories

bound by iconic red tape. Equally, archives are repositories, places where layer upon layer of

evidence can be found, and where we seek through a process of investigation and interpretation

to put the fragmented and elusive stories of the past back together. Wright’s translation of

ersheef /‫ إرشيف‬into record, with its own connotations of a story told simply “for the record” — a

story that sounds legitimate or convincing — is also a reminder of the very great importance of

telling the right story under these circumstances. As Salman Rushdie’s description makes
evident, the stories told in these liminal spaces have the power to transform the lives of displaced

people: a convincing or sufficiently disturbing tale might gain one the right to humanitarian

asylum; a story that doesn’t fit the bill might spell deportation, or even death at the hands of

those to whom the refugee is returned. In these places, refugees are required to tell us why they

deserve entry into the fortresses that we have built around the privileged lives we lead in the

developed world. As Mireille Rosello puts it: ‘[a] refugee is a fine narratologist. Otherwise, the

refugee will not have been allowed to become a refugee. He or she will have remained an asylum

seeker about to be a deportee’ (2012: 5).

The story’s ambiguity is irrevocably entwined with the anonymity and vagueness of the

key protagonists in the text. The tale is framed by an anonymous narrator, told by a nameless and

endlessly reinvented man, to an anonymous (presumably Swedish) worker who we assume is

interviewing the asylum seeker and assessing his claim. This person remains entirely unavailable

to the reader, though they are equally crucial to the narrative and invested in the power to decide

the central protagonist’s fate. Indeed, particularly in the translated text with its English-language

audience, our position in the narrative aligns us with this elusive interviewer; in the absence of a

fixed person listening to and assessing the story, it is we who are offered this tale and asked to

determine its veracity. We are “the people guarding the line” in Rushdie’s terms. This brings into

stark relief the demands we place on those seeking asylum, and asks readers to evaluate not only

the truthfulness or suitability of the story, but what they believe, what their ethics are, in relation

to the broken man they now have before them. How much, the story demands, do we need to

know of the suffering a person has endured to grant them asylum? Is there a particular variety of

atrocity that is more persuasive, more acceptable than others? Genuine victims of violence (not

those “bogus”, fake or shoddy, asylum seekers so familiar from tabloid headlines) are apparently
welcome, but their victimhood must first be established beyond doubt. They are absolutely not

welcome if they themselves might be violent or mentally unstable, even if this is the

consequence of what they have endured; even if this is what makes them astateless refugee. We

want a coherent story that at least appears grounded in reality, when in fact such a story may not

exist, or be reasonably expected. David Farrier’s idea of asylum claims as polyphonic in a

Bakhtinian sense, “a form of double-voiced discourse” that “articulates at once notions of

sanctuary and illegitimacy; the ‘genuine’ refugee and the ‘bogus’ asylum seeker converge in the

polyphony of official, media and vernacular voices” (2011: 6) is helpful in analysing Blasim’s

narrative. “The Reality and the Record” insists that this Iraqi asylum seeker, indeed all asylum

seekers, have two stories: an official one, and a so-called real one. The stories told in asylum

reception centres, Blasim asserts, must be distinguished from “the real stories [which] remain

locked in the hearts of the refugees, for them to mull over in complete secrecy”. “Locked” in

Wright’s text is a translation of the Arabic habeesa /‫حبيسة‬, which might also be translated as

imprisoned, an adjective that seems poignantly apt for refugee reception centres, prison-like

institutions in many countries where — shorn of the protection of the nation state that one has

been forced to flee, not yet offered the protection of the legal system of the country where

asylum is sought — the stateless person is entirely defenceless in the ways Arendt identified

nearly a century ago, imprisoned in what Rushdie calls “the universe of control” (Rushdie,

20032: 412 7).

As the story continues, the narrative fragments further, reflecting the conflicting

discourses that Farrier identifies above, but also further blurring the line between truth and

falsity, fact and fiction. Beyond the frame, the story itself is told by the asylum seeker himself,

an anonymous subject defined only as “a new Iraqi refugee” (1n.p.; emphasis in the original).
This is deeply ironic, given that the he is defined, narratologically, by his statelessness in

Arendt’s terms;, and, as an asylum seeker being interviewed, he has not yet acquired the legal

status of refugee. The anonymous man is notably less anonymous in the Arabic text, though he is

described only as a thin man in his late 30s: “‫”رجل نحيل في نهاية الثالثين من العمر‬. The omission of

these tiny, identifying details in the English language text renders him all the more hollow and

ambiguous. In either case, the man who because of his lack of distinguishing features might be

said to stands for the thousands of other thin, young Arab men in similar circumstances, tells a

convoluted tale in which the distinction between truth and reality is necessarily blurred. We

might note, especially given the gendered connotations of Blasim’s Arabic vocabulary discussed

above, that though the figure of the relatively young, single man is in many ways that of the

paradigmative refugee of our times, Blasim’s tale maps uneasily onto the refugee narratives of

women, who face very different challenges, and whose stories are often obscured. As the tale

unfolds we discover that the asylum seeker was working as an ambulance driver in Baghdad

when one day he was kidnapped. He was then bought and sold, held captive by one violent group

after another. The tale begins in medias res: “They told me they had sold me to another group”,

he tells his interviewer. From the outset, therefore, he is deprived of agency, being passed from

one group to the next; this evokes the lack of agency and vagueness that defines the text as a

whole. Like the man himself, the reader/asylum official never knows who “they”, the

kidnappers, are, or why he was ever taken or, for that matter, subsequently released. The

anonymity of even those with power in “The Reality and Record” heightens the story’s

disorientating impact on the reader. It suggests that while this story has (we are being asked to

believe) happened to this particular man, it could have happened to so many others. In other
words, what is being done could be done by anyone to anyone in Iraq, such is the state of

lawlessness and chaos being described.

The performativity of the story (already evident in Blasim’s Arabic vocabulary), is

further evoked in the description of the man “telling his story at amazing speed, while the

immigration officer asks him to slow down as much as possible” (1; emphasis in original). This

account, which in its tone reads almost as a stage direction, situates the reader in a performative

space characterized by the panicked and uncomfortable speed of the man’s delivery (the Arabic

describes it as a strange or alien speed: ‫)بسرعة غريبة‬. As the tale unfolds we discover that the

asylum seeker was working as an ambulance driver in Baghdad when one day he was kidnapped.

He was then bought and sold, held captive by one violent group after another. Each group that

imprisons the anonymous asylum seeker clothes him, or more accurately — dresses him up — to

its own specifications, and makes videos of him claiming responsibility for numerous, often

gruesome, always contradictory, massacres in the name of whatever cause the group espouses. Commented [E4]: I suggest a minor restructure, since it
seems as though some of this information would be
usefully placed earlier on in the essay than halfway
This evolving identity and the process of being dressed for the camera is itself evocative of the through.
Commented [NA5]: Yes, thank you. Done.
performativity of the asylum application. The man is performing the figure of the refugee in the

reception centre, just as he was forced to perform the figure of not one, but almost every

different kind of terrorist during his captivity. He states:

Throughout the year and a half of my kidnapping experience, I was moved from one

hiding place to another. They shot video of me talking about how I was a treacherous

Kurd, and infidel Christian, a Saudi terrorist, a Syrian Baathist intelligence agent, or a

Revolutionary Guard from Zoroastrian Iran. On these videotapes I murdered, raped,

started fires, planted bombs and carried out crimes that no sane person would even
 imagine. All these tapes were broadcast on satellite channels around the world. Experts,

journalists and politicians sat there discussing what I said or did. (10)

‫ صوروا لي أشرطة فيديو أتحدث فيها عن انتمائي‬.‫ تنقلت من وكر الى اخر‬،‫طوال عام ونصف من رحلة اختطافي‬

‫الى االكراد الخونة والمسيحين الكفار و ارهابي السعودية و المخابرات السورية البعثية والى حرس ثورة ايران‬

‫ جميع اشرطة الفيديو‬.‫ في هذه االشرطة قتلت واغتصبت واحرقت وفجرت وقمت بجرائم اليتصورها عاقل‬.‫المجوسية‬

‫ وجلس خبراء وصحفيون وساسة ينقاشون ما قلته وفعلته‬، ‫هذه عرضتها فضائيات العالم‬

As the list of conflicting ideological, religious and political causes that the asylum seeker was

filmed championing reveals, severed human heads, blood and the trappings of ideological

investment are proof of nothing at all. The fact that they are taken as genuine and given the

weight of evidence by news channels, analysts and politicians, further blurs the line between

reality and record in Blasim’s story.

In her essay, “Regarding the Pain of Others”, Susan Sontag considers the video of

the 2002 murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl. She recalls that the debate surrounding the

reproduction in the American press of video stills from his death mainly concerned “the right of

Pearl’s widow to be spared more pain […] against the newspaper’s right to print and post what it

saw fit and the public’s right to see” (2003: 62−63). For Sontag, the lack of substance in the

debate about what we might be able to learn from such a tape and what it might tell us about the

people who had committed this crime, confirms her belief that the video itself was read only as

proof of the enemy’s presumed barbarity. “It is easier to think of the enemy as just a savage who

kills, then holds up the head of his prey for all to see”, she concludes, than to try to look beyond

this, which might necessitate the difficult and challenging act of attempting “to confront better

the particular viciousness and intransigence of the forces that murdered Pearl” (2003: 62−63).
Blasim’s story also implies that the world’s media received these tapes without question partly

because they reflected the barbarity already associated with people they depicted.

Sontag notes that it is only with “our dead”, by which she means Western, or American

dead, that we object to the display of the dead or injured (2003: 63). “The more remote or exotic

the place”, Sontag writes, “the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and

dying” (2003: 63). However, the asylum seeker tells us that the reputable Arabic language news

channel Al-Jazeera “assured its viewers that the channel had established through reliable sources

that the tape was authentic and that the Ministry of Defence had admitted that the officers had

gone missing” (5). In “The Reality and the Record”, the distinction between “our dead” and

“their dead” does not therefore operate along predictable racial or cultural lines. Instead, the

story updates Sontag’s analysis for the twenty-first century, suggesting that the distinction is

between those who are protected from the burgeoning, everyday violence and those who are not

– perhaps a pointed criticism of how little some wealthy and relatively stable Arab nations are

doing to ameliorate the suffering of those in neighbouring countries by this author-activist. One

way of reading the ready circulation of these videos in Blasim’s text in light of Sontag’s analysis

is as confirmation of a barbarity associated with the societies from which refugees flee; their

circulation is permitted because they show other people’s dead, not “ours”; we need not analyse

them in detailed terms because their primary function is to confirm what we already believe we

know about people such as these. It is precisely our belief in this barbarity, Zygmunt Bauman

argues, that enables those of us who live privileged lives in the first world to justify our objection

to the globalized movement of refugees. “The wish of the hungry to go where food is plentiful is

what one would naturally expect from rational human beings”, Bauman writes; “letting them act

on their wishes is also what conscience would suggest is the right, moral thing to do” (1998: 76).
In order to deny others what is logically and morally theirs, and what we ourselves enjoy in the

developed world, Bauman argues, we must deny their humanity:

The pictures of inhumanity which rules the lands where prospective migrants reside

therefore comes [sic] in handy. They strengthen the resolve which lacks the rational and

ethical arguments to support it. They help to keep the locals local, while allowing the

globals to travel with a clear conscience. (1998: 76)

The ease with which the media accept the tapes that circulate in “The Reality and the Record”

might be read in light of these observations. The asylum seeker’s insistence on the falsity of the

tapes demands that we question our investment in the veracity of any given asylum narrative. His

assertion that the video evidence, interpreted as real by journalists and global experts alike was,

in fact, entirely manufactured, also calls into question the ways in which these claims are ever

assessed, laying bare the assumptions that, Bauman argues, underlie our unethical, but

convenient, objections to the movement of people into our world. The anonymous refugee of

“The Reality and the Record” repeatedly insists that he was a mere pawn being dressed up with

the props of violent resistance for causes that he had no investment in. These fake videos require

us to question the evidence of our own eyes, to re-evaluate the boundary between reality and the

fantastic, and to reassess what constitutes incontrovertible proof.

At one point a group makes a mistake that reveals the fallacious nature of their video to

the world’s media, Blasim writes:

I appeared as a Spanish soldier, with a resistance fighter holding a knife to my neck,

demanding Spanish forces withdraw from Iraq. All the satellite stations refused to

broadcast the tape because Spanish forces had left the country a year earlier. I almost paid

a heavy price for this mistake when the group holding me wanted to kill me in revenge
 for what had happened, but the cameraman saved me by suggesting another wonderful

idea, the last of my videotape roles. They dressed me in the costume of an Afghan

fighter, trimmed my beard and put a black turban on my head. Five men stood behind me

and they brought in six men screaming and crying out for help […] They slaughtered the

men in front of me like sheep as I announced that I was the new leader of the al Qaida

organization in Mesopotamia and made threats against everyone in creation. (10)

‫ كان عند تصوير الفيديو الذي اظهر فيه كجندي أسباني يسلط أحد رجال المقاومة‬، ‫اما الحظ السئ الوحيد الذي صادفنا‬

‫ لقد رفضت جميع المحطات الفضائية بث‬.‫سكينا على رأسه ويطلب من القوات االسبانية االنسحاب من العراق‬

‫ فتلك الجماعة‬، ‫ وكدت أدفع ثمنا باهظا على هذه الغلطة‬. ‫ فالقوات االسبانية كانت قد غادرت البالد قبلها بعام‬.‫الشريط‬

‫ كانت النهاية‬، ‫ لكن من أنقذني كان المصور الذي إقترح عليهم فكرة رائعة اخرى‬.‫أرادت ذبحي إنتقاما على ما حدث‬

‫ وقف خلفي‬.‫ ألبسوني زيا للمقاتلين االفغان وشذبوا لحيتي ثم وضعوا على رأسي عمامة سوداء‬:‫ألدواري الفيديوية‬

‫ وجاءوا بستة رجال يصرخون ويستغيثون باهلل ونبيه وآل بيته ذبحوهم أمامي مثل الخراف وأنا أعلن بأني‬.‫خمسة‬

‫ كما هددت الجميع من دون استثناء‬،‫الزعيم الجديد لتنظيم القاعدة في بالد الرافدين‬.

However, while the man claims that no video is what it purports to be ideologically, the violence

is real: men are slaughtered before us. The anonymous asylum seeker insists that each video is

staged, that in each case the different and contradictory terrorist is a person who not only has no

investment in the cause for which people have been slaughtered, but that they are themselves

victim of a power vacuum that has allowed violent militias to wreak havoc over the lives of

innocent people. At all times, Blasim’s anonymous refugee asks us to believe in his innocence.

But, can it possibly be true that he never killed or maimed people, as he insists, or is this a

convenient omission designed to gain him asylum? From its inception, the text offers us a

number of conflicting narratives that masquerade as the real, or the legitimate, story. These

narrative are always multiple, but while only one of them can logically be “true”, the text insists
that, such is the nature of narrative in this context, it is impossible for anyone, including the

asylum seeker himself, to distinguish between them. Whatever truth may once have existed,

“The Reality and the Record” intimates, it no longer exists. All that is left is the debris of human

suffering, including that of the broken man sitting before us.

With veracity presented as an impossibility, the asylum seeker repeatedly insists that

in its place only good, effective, narrative will secure a place in the safety of Europe. For David

Farrier, “seeking sanctuary is an act of storytelling. The account which asylum claimants give of

themselves, and whether this is deemed credible or not, is the hinge on which turns the question

of refuge” (2012: 1). The asylum seeker of Blasim’s story is acutely aware of this. Several times

in the story, he reminds us of the importance of performance and the appearance of veracity in

his story-telling. At one point, he catches himself seemingly straying from the topic: “[w]hat I

am saying has nothing to do with my asylum request. What matters to you is the horror” (9). This

mode of direct address once again implicates us, the readers, in “hearing”, and assessing his tale.

His insistence that it is “the horror” that will determine the success of his request for asylum

points to a voyeurism on the part of us or the official at the refugee reception centre: a sort of

schadenfreude at the heart of the asylum application process. The words, “the horror” (translated

from the Arabic ‫الفزع‬, which might mean fear, dread, or fright, but also terror or a feeling of

foreboding), cannot but evoke the final words of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz in an English-language

literary context (Conrad, 1902/1994: 106). Given the story’s preoccupation with what it takes to

be considered human and to be accorded one’s human rights, it naturally calls to mind Conrad’s Commented [E6]: After this word, add in your
parenthetical date/s, and ensure Heart of Darkness
goes into the bibliography.
exploration of what constitutes civilization or barbarism, and (read generously) Conrad’s

suggestion that although Europeans have looked for the barbaric in their others for centuries, it is
in Europe’s own so-called civilization that the horrors humans are capable of inflicting upon one

another are often found.

On one point, however, the story is unambiguous, as David Farrier puts it: “asylum

seekers are charged with narrating themselves into a condition of sanctuary” (2012: 1). Not

veracity, but the successful and compulsive evocation of the same is key to the success of

Blasim’s anonymous asylum seeker’s application, as the character well realizes:

If I go on like this, I think my story will never end, and I’m worried you’ll say what

others have said about my story. So I think it would be best if I summarise the story for

you, rather than have you accuse me of making it up. (9)

The emphasis on performance and on a good, persuasive narrative is reflected in the story’s

insistence that a search for the truth is futile, and that it is impossible to determine the real from

the fantastic. “It’s [not]easy to tell the two stories apart”, Blasim writes, “They merge and it

becomes impossible to distinguish them” (1; emphasis in original). In the Arabic, the language

alludes much more to the idea of limits, geographical locations, and restrictions. Rather than

simply stating that one cannot tell the “false” story apart from the “real”, the Arabic states that it

is not necessarily possible to distinguish al-hudood (‫)حدود‬, the boundaries, or borders, of each

tale. ‫حدود‬, seems particularly apt for a story about what it takes to successfully cross borders to

safety, but it also further complicates the distinction between “the reality and the record”. Instead

of one false and one true, the stories blur ever more complicatedly into one another. In a

particularly fantastical section of the tale, the asylum seeker’s boss and mentor connects the

murder of his friend Dawoud and almost his entire family by masked men with the whiskey-

fuelled musings of an Iraqi poet, based in London (a figure evocative of the author himself).

“Because the world is all interconnected, through feelings, words, nightmares, and other secret
channels, out of the poet’s article jumped three masked men” (5). In this fictive leap, Blasim

asserts once again the connection between the creative and the so-called real. In a story that

questions each of these categories, shedding repeated doubt on both, this is the most fantastical

example of its insistence that the limits of each are dubious, and their interrelationship constant.

Where one ends and another begins, where the boundaries, the borders, ‫الحدود‬, of each lie, is not,

the story seems to suggest, all that clear. We want our refugees authentic: traumatized, but not

too traumatized. We might recall that Blasim’s refugee states that he “murdered, raped, started

fires, planted bombs and carried out crimes that no sane person would even imagine” (10).

Perhaps these are exactly the kinds of crimes that no sane person would imagine; perhaps they

are the ravings of a madman, as Blasim’s story finally intimates.

Almost every character in Blasim’s story is anonymous or ambiguous. The six

decapitated men whose corpses lead the asylum seeker onto the bridge and into captivity are

neither identified nor, therefore, named and we never know why they were killed, or by whom.

Some of his colleagues and even some of his captors are given names, but we learn little if

anything about them. Rather, it is the enigmatic “cameraman” and/or “the Professor” that occupy

a good deal of his thoughts and fantasies. His boss, the director of the ambulance unit at the

hospital, Blasim writes, “saw himself as a philosopher and an artist, but ‘born in the wrong

country’ […]. [T]o him running the ambulance section of the Emergency Department meant

managing the dividing line between life and death” (2). As a result, he is nicknamed al ustaath,

the Professor, (a title of respect, usually used to address teachers or lecturers but also more

generally to refer to those with authority, clearly employed sarcastically by some of his

colleagues, but not seemingly by the man himself). The Professor pontificates about matters of

life and death, as well as the defining features of humanity — particularly poignant subjects for
the figure of the refugee in the twenty-first century. Among his rushed account of the horror of

his captivity, it is notable that he finds space for the Professor’s assertions that “[s]pilt blood and

superstition are the basis of the world. Man is […] the only creature who kills because of faith”

(2−3). The narrator reflects on his colleague, Abu Salim’s, “notion that the Professor had links

with the terrorist groups because of the violent language he used” (3). Though at first he asserts

his loyalty to, and affection towards, the Professor, in captivity his mind turns almost

immediately to morbid thoughts of conversations about death he had with the latter. This leads

him to imagine “the Professor picking [his] severed head from a pile of rubbish”, implying a

level of fear on the part of the asylum seeker (4). On the other hand, the Professor is an idealized,

fantastical, figure in the text. He is given god-like traits: posited as all-knowing, associated with

life and death, and explicitly linked with God in the man’s mind, as he describes how he “felt

that God, and behind him the Professor, would never abandon me throughout my ordeal” (4).

Like a deity, the Professor is described as a figure of benevolence: “[h]e was my solace and my

comfort throughout those arduous months”, the refugee states (4). Indeed, his description of the

solace and companionship he finds in the Professor are often intertwined with descriptions of his

Muslim faith: “I felt the presence of God intensely in my heart, nurturing my peace of mind and

calling me to patience. The Professor kept my mind busy and alleviated the loneliness of my

captivity” (4).

However, among the pseudo-philosophizing he attributes to the Professor and the

comfort we are to believe the man finds in thoughts of their friendship, are suspicions that the

Professor’s reflections on violence and bloodshed stem from his associations with violent

paramilitary groups. While these doubts have their roots in his colleagues’ musings, they

culminate in his conflation of the Professor and the cameraman, “the mastermind of this dreadful
game”, to whom the asylum seeker attributes overall responsibility for the actions of the

paramilitary groups that kidnap and use him (4). The refugee thinks that the “The cameraman’s

voice was very familiar”; it reminds him of “the voice of the Professor when he was making an

exaggerated effort to talk softly” (7). At first, this association is dismissed by reasoning that

seems rational and balanced. He wonders if he merely thinks that he might recognize it because

“it resembled the voice of a famous actor” (7). Later, as his grasp on reality and the cohesiveness

of the tale we are being told has almost fully unravelled, the refugee sums up his request for

asylum by implicating “everyone”, and especially the Professor/cameraman, in the horror and

violence that has brought him to this point (11):

They are all killers and schemers — my wife, my children, my neighbours, my

colleagues, God, his Prophet, the government, the newspapers, even the Professor whom

I thought an angel, and now I have suspicions that the cameraman with the terrorist

groups was the Professor himself. His enigmatic language was merely proof of his

connivance and his vile nature. (11)

In his belief that no one is to be trusted, that we are all interconnected in a web of violence, and

that no one is really innocent, the man (perhaps inadvertently) echoes the words he attributes to

the Professor: “the world is just a bloody and hypothetical story, and we are all killers and

heroes” (11). The narrative’s insistence on the ambiguity of the Professor, and indeed on the

ambiguity of the man’s identity itself, combined with the fact that his own ideas seem to parrot

those he attributes to the Professor suggest that — at least in one reading of this story — the

asylum seeker himself is the Professor. Rather than being a hapless victim of all this violence, he

(the Professor and therefore the cameraman) is in fact responsible for it all: “the mastermind” of

the bloodshed, and therefore not a victim at all.

 In the final paragraphs, Blasim completely undermines the story we have been told.

Perhaps, after all, the man seeking asylum has made the whole thing up: “They all told me I

hadn’t been away for a year and a half, because I came back the morning after”, he reflects,

unsure whether the six heads that he returned with are proof of anything at all (11). At the end of

the story, the protagonist is in fact taken away to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. The man,

however, seems less mad than exhausted:

Three days after this story was filed away in the records of the

immigration department, they took the man who told it to the psychiatric hospital. Before

the doctor could start asking him about his childhood memories, the ambulance driver

summed up his real story in four words: “I want to sleep.”

It was a humble entreaty. (11; emphasis in the original)

The suggestion that the refugee might be delusional further complicates the category of truth or

reality in the face of trauma. Is it always possible for a victim of violence to distinguish between

reality on the one side, and a distorted, reimagined, or indeed entirely fantastic state of being that

feels like reality on the other? One of the ways in which we might read the gaps in the asylum

seeker’s story is in relation to a traumatic repression of, and inability to recount, his tale. This

kind of trauma would prevent him from being able to give us the details we require to award him

humanitarian asylum; ironically, it is also a common and widely recognized response to intense

trauma. At one point, the refugee states:

In fact I don’t know exactly what details of my story matter to you, for me to get the right

of asylum in your country. I find it very hard to describe those days of terror, but I want

to mention also some of the things which matter to me. (4)

It is exactly his difficulty in telling his tale that, in at least one interpretaion, indicates the scale of

his loss and the immensity of the ordeal he has undergone. In these cases, we might conclude

that it is the very lacunae that point us to the very worst aspects of their asylum seekers’

experiences, though of course offer no proof of what they have been through. We might read the Commented [E7]: Please rework this sentence, as the
‘their’ is a floating possessive pronound, and the
grammatical subject is unclear in your final clause,
gaps, the omissions and indeed the fantastical stories that fill the gaps they leave, in light of this. ‘though of course offer no proof’.

As the narrative comes to its close, the man’s account has been categorized — and thereby

dismissed — as a symptom of mental illness. His carefully crafted story, with its insistence on

veracity and its painful attempts to find just the right level of horror to be plausible, is ultimately

judged unbelievable: the fantastical ravings of a mad man.

Blasim’s asylum seeker is a fractured human being: geographically, psychologically, Formatted: Tab stops: 0.79", Left

and morally dislocated. “The Reality and the Record” presents us with an asylum seeker defined

by ambiguity, whose story demands the re-examination of all our narratives, perhaps especially

those surrounding the morality of our approach to the ever-growing numbers displaced persons

who find their way to our shores. With its emphasis on the dual narrative of real as opposed to

recorded, the story’s graphic representation of what can be faked, and its insistence that the truth

is an elusive — perhaps even an impossible — aim, shine a damning light on asylum processes.

Blasim demands that we question the very categories that determine whether or not a person

seeking asylum might elude suspicion, to be allowed, in Rushdie’s terms, to step across our lines.

Even stripped bare, the modern-day asylum seeker may not be able to conform to our demands,

the Iraqi-Finnish author implies. Rushdie’s formulation of “the edge” where those who wish to

enter “must be passive, docile” in order to avoid coming under suspicion (“at the frontier to

come under suspicion is the worst of all possible crimes”), itself alludes to the performative

imperative we place on those who wish to enter the safety of the world we already inhabit
(20032: 4127). I have used performative throughout this article in the pre-Butlarian sense of the

word, as the OED defines it, “‘A. adj. Of or relating to performance; (Linguistics and Philos.)

designating or relating to an utterance that effects an action by being spoken or by means of

which the speaker performs a particular act.”.’ However, Butler’s argument that “gender is an

identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition

of acts”. (1990/19992006: 19179, emphasis original), and perhaps especially that “‘it is a

‘performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors

themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief”’ also rings profoundly true in

this very different example (1990/2006:1792). Blasim’s asylum seeker’s performance of worthy Formatted: Not Highlight

victimhood is neither entirely false, nor is it or can it be, entirely true: the story ensures that

neither the reader, nor the central protagonist, nor indeed the generic “refugees” with whose

stories the epilogue begins, can distinguish the “performance” from their lived reality of it. Like

Butler’s conception of gender as a norm that is revealed as constructed only by occasional

interruptions, “occasional discontinuity”; “de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the

phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction”, the performance of

worthy victimhood here evoked neither indicates complete falsity, nor an assertion of the so-

called real, but rather draws our attention to the interstices in between these two seemingly

irreconcilable poles, giving lie to any idealised truths that we might seek (1990/2006:17992). Formatted: Not Highlight
Formatted: Not Highlight
Like Rushdie’s essay, Blasim’s story reveals that what we require is not the elusive reality of a

refugee’s lived experience of suffering, but that they perform worthy victimhood. The success of

this performance, enacted in the telling of stories considered legitimate, is what determines

whether a person successfully inserts themselves into our systems, rendering themselves a

recognizable subject with rights before the state, or whether they will continue as “stateless” and
therefore rightless. This is a damning indictment of what it takes to be recognized as human, to

be granted one’s basic human rights, in the twenty-first century. Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman

References:

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Blasim H (2009) The reality and the record. In: The Madman of Freedom Square. London:
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Blasim H (2013) The Iraqi Christ. London: Comma Press.

All references to the arabic text of ‫ اإلرشيف و الواقع‬are to the online, uncensored, version published
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Rushdie S (20032) “Step aAcross this lLine: the Tanner Lectures on human values, Yale, 2002.”
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world Formatted: Font: (Default) Times New Roman

1
Subsequent references are to this (2009) edition of The Madman of Freedom Square and will be

cited parenthetically by page number in the text.