What does Kahramana get in return for her loyalty? Well for starters the story is not called ‘Kahramana and the Forty Thieves’. As for her fate, Ali Baba rewards her for rescuing him by marrying her off to his son. Kahramana stays in Ali Baba’s household and so does the secret of the treasure.

So I’ve always viewed Kahramana a badass underdog. She’s smart, cruel and undermined.

When an immigration officer at Heathrow Airport waved a finger at me, called me a liar and told me I was to be deported, naturally I thought of Kahramana. I woke up the next morning in my room in London, after they released me with a throbbing headache, dry mouth, lump in my throat from holding back my tears all night. I was angry and humiliated when I wrote ‘Kahramana’. My Kahramana story was a sort of a ‘Fuck You’ to everyone. I had never been so angry in my life and I had never felt so small.

Comma Press had been waiting for over a year for me to contribute to the anthology but every time I sat down trying to write something I struggled. I’ve never written anything futuristic or science fiction, certainly not comedy. But that morning I got out of bed, sat to my laptop and feverishly typed away before I even got up to wash my face. When I was done with it I emailed it to Ra at Comma Press thinking ‘surely he’s going to hate it’, and ‘it’s going to offend him’. Ra was expecting Hitchcock and I gave him South Park. But for once in my life, I didn’t care. I was astonished when Ra wrote back telling me he loved ‘Kahramana’ and asked me to expand and tell him more.

In the story, I wanted to mock the way the humanitarian world handles migration. I’ve seen it often; the disillusioned European or American 20-something aid workers who are annoyed that refugees don’t appreciate the sacrifices they made to leave their ‘civilized’ homes and be in those camps and war zones; the aid workers who’ve become irreversibly desensitized to human suffering; the ones who think every Syrian, Iraqi or Afghan refugee – and even a non-refugee – is a saint, a victim who needs to be cuddled. ‘Kahramana’ exposes and exploits that.

I also wanted to joke about political propaganda, something every Iraqi was force-fed since infanthood. When I listen to ISIS babble on their radio station or when I follow their statements on social media, I am struck by the resemblance to war statements on Iraq’s national television station during the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s. By the end of the long stretches of pompous rhetoric, I could never tell if they were winning or losing. And as in all totalitarian systems, everything in Wadi Hashish, Kahramana’s birthplace, was mandatory. It’s mandatory to cheer in support of the government’s decision to wage wars, to march to your doom when you don’t understand or don’t believe in what you’re fighting for, and to sing and dance and throw rose petals at a dictator even if he’s sent your entire family to the gallows. Every Arab country, to some degree, has an element of this.

Human life and suffering was as insignificant a side-effect during the 1980s Iraq-Iran war as it is in Iraq and the region today – all for the greater cause, of course! Kahramana is casual about other people’s lives. To her they’re ants behind the T-walls, waves of migrants trying to get in on the sunny side. Mullah Hashish (the leader of the radical Wadi Hashish people), NATO (in trying to obliterate Wadi Hashish and its leader) and the aid workers (shaving heads and tagging the people fleeing Wadi Hashish) all have as little regard for human life as Kahramana. The only people who do care are the ‘Kuchan Sulemani’ activists – and they are burnt out and frazzled the whole time.

So to sum up, Kahramana is my way of giving people in the gutter a chance to laugh at their do-gooders, clergy and oppressors. Kahramana is evil and manipulative, and I just wanted to unleash her onto the UN employee who pointed at Syrian aid workers, asked them to stand up while we all sat down, and said ‘let’s clap for the refugees’; onto babbling buffoons who insist that if I am ‘good’, then poof! wars will end and there will be unicorns with wings. I wanted to unleash her as I sat there at Heathrow Airport, resenting people speeding away and resenting myself for being there, confined, stripped of my passport, angrily and anxiously waiting to be deported. Kahramana is all of my pent-up frustrations. If not for her I’d burst in anger all over my keyboard.

To the Kahramanas of the world: cheers!

Iraq+100 will be published on 27 October 2016.

Award-winning author and Iraq+100 editor Hassan Blasim and a number of the book’s contributors will appear at an event at Southbank Centre as part of the London Literature Festival on Saturday 15 October. Find out more and book tickets.

Photo: Kahramana Statue, Baghdad, UNAMI/Sarmad Al-Safy on the United Nations Information Centre Flickr stream, creative commons licence.

The post Why Kahramana? appeared first on English PEN.

Most Europeans hide behind a façade of fine education when they have to deal with the question of migrants, especially those coming from war zones, where life is torment and education is in ruins. This great European education, which in many cases is laden with arrogance and egotism, prevents many of them from understanding the reality of what is happening in the world around Europe. Europe today reads only itself, although it is living in what it calls the age of information and knowledge. Europe has created its own iconic array of writers, artists, musicians, theorists and philosophers and has locked itself in its temple to practise its rituals of democracy. When Europe wants to read the world, it reads it through the lenses of stereotype. These lenses were invented and reproduced in Europe throughout a long history of Eurocentrism practised since the days of colonialism up to the colonialism of capitalism today. This introverted European education produces what I call the ‘ignorance of the educated’.

This European ignorance imposes, among other things, an obligatory identity on migrants from North Africa, the Middle East and some Asian countries: the identity of Islam. When defining themselves in Europe, most migrants do not consider their primary identity to be Muslim. They see themselves as Iraqis, for example, or Moroccans or Iranians, and they are surprised when educated Europeans treat them as a single group. This is a Western tradition with roots going back centuries, and it is useful in this context to refer to studies and books on Orientalism. Educated Europeans ignore the fact that the countries of what is called the Islamic world are diverse and heterogeneous, and that they have vast cultural traditions quite apart from religion. This deliberate oversight is evident in the behaviour of Europeans when they focus only on the religious identity of migrants, just as Western tradition throughout history has ignored the East’s entire legacy of literature, art, music, sciences and civilisation-building, and pinned an Islamic identity on a vast and varied world.

Educated Europe today ignores the culture of all the European Mohammeds, who are born to immigrant families in free Europe but in a cage with bars put in place by free Europe. These Mohammeds grow up in Europe, and in European schools they learn about its icons and traditions. Nonetheless the distorted label of  ‘Muslim’ is attached to them through the media and the channels of education of European society, and their whole mother culture is stripped of its content, leaving only the image of the evil Muslim who wakes up and goes to bed dreaming of destroying free Europe! So the European Mohammeds are besieged from both sides: by the ignorance of the educated European and by the ignorance of the uneducated, in this case their families, whose lives have been destroyed by wars and dictatorial regimes and who have not received the right education to be able to support the European Mohammeds in the face of the flood of distorted images invented by educated Europeans.

Mohammed must be given a chance outside the cage. Europe claims, for example, that it has a duty to let immigrants build mosques to pray in, while the European media and extreme right-wing parties continue to propagate a distorted and stereotypical version of Islam. It’s as if we were telling the European Mohammeds, ‘You were born here in Europe, which has all the beauty, knowledge, literature and arts, while you are from a background which has only evil Islam.’ Cultural diversity, as we know, doesn’t just mean letting the Other perform his religious rites. No, the Mohammeds, and educated Europeans too, have to breathe the culture of the East, which is rich in poetry, music, art, literature, myths, and a vast and varied heritage of traditions, so that immigrants don’t feel weak and powerless and therefore angry.

The European Mohammeds do get angry sometimes. But they don’t get angry on behalf of the historical Mohammed. That’s just a pretext that they hide behind when they are really angry about the way they themselves are portrayed, the way educated Europeans have portrayed them.

Are European humanitarian values now drowning in Europe’s selfishness, while migrants drown at Europe’s locked gates? Is Europe drowning in a deliberate ignorance that derives its disguises from a world that is materialistic, profit-based and cruel, built on contempt for, indifference towards and misunderstanding of other societies?

The post The European Mohammed and the Ignorance of the Educated appeared first on English PEN.

The looking back and summing up season is upon us, and I’d like briefly to look at the PEN Atlas as it nears the end of its first year of life. Our main aim has been to look at new voices and literature all over the world and to introduce them to an audience in the UK by commissioning new and original blogs written by writers, critics and translators.

English PEN itself has a translation programme helping both the promotion and translation of international literature via two Writers in Translation Awards – PEN Translates! and PEN Promotes! – and some of the books featured in the Atlas come to us through these grant schemes.

In many of our 2012 blogs we looked at how writers dealt with political problems and conflicts in their countries, in this way supporting the core PEN activity of defending and promoting the freedom to write and the freedom to read. We will be returning to many of these countries again next year, as unfortunately most of the conflicts covered by the Atlas are still underway. These continue to make it difficult for writers to express themselves freely as well as endangering their lives. Samar Yazbek wrote to us from Syria about the perils of reporting from a war zone and in January we will have another Syrian, Nihad Sirees, one of the winners of a 2013 English PEN Writers in Translation Award, writing about Aleppo and its incomprehensible destruction. And later in the year we will be covering another of the PEN Award Winners: Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus, which compiles some of the most exciting new writing borne out of the Arab Spring.

Hassan Blasim discussed the aftermath of the war in Iraq and the role literature plays in how society deals with tragic events. The Devil’s Workshop by Jachym Topol, again one of the winners of a Writers in Translation Award, deals with the more distant past of concentration camps in Belarus. We will be talking to Jachym Topol later this year.

Selma Dabbagh wrote very movingly from the Palestinian Literary Festival about the fragile situation in Gaza. Alas, the crisis there has deepened and we will return to the festival next year to look at the response of writers to the events there. Lydia Cacho’s reporting from Mexico has won awards and accolades. For us, she wrote about taking risks and being afraid. She is still reporting and still in danger.

We hope that as the reviewing space in print media shrinks, PEN Atlas, like some other literary websites, is filling that gap and providing more outlets for literary criticism and debate.

We also have been following trends and reported on developments in international publishing by featuring specialists’ opinions. We have looked out for new writers who might be interesting for a British audience and for publishers here. In this way, we have introduced Alisa Ganieva from Dagestan, Yuri Herrera from Mexico and Park Wan-Suh from South Korea among others.

PEN Atlas dispatches in 2012 took us all over the world, from Mexico and China to Greece, the Netherlands, Croatia and Russia. And as we continue to explore the world’s literature in the New Year, we hope to bring you closer to interesting places and introduce you to new writers.

And if you still have any presents to buy, you might find inspiration here in our list of books recommended by publishers, writers and festival organisers. And for literary inspiration look at one of our most moving stories this year – Santiago Gamboa’s ‘Of Poets and Aviators’.

In the meantime, happy festive reading and all the very best in the New Year!

Tasja Dorkofikis,

Editor, PEN Atlas

The post PEN Atlas – One Year On appeared first on English PEN.

Both Madman of Freedom Square and The Iraqi Christ books are short story collections. What do you enjoy about that form? How does it fit with what you want to do in your writing?

As far as I’m concerned there is nothing particularly special about the form of the short story. I am just as interested in the short story as I am in other forms of writing; I write poetry and articles, I write short films and I even tried to write some plays. All those forms are appropriate and interesting to me, and each one has its own challenges. They can all be a vehicle for expression in good or bad ways. After these two collections, I have started thinking seriously about spending some time writing screenplays.

Were your stories published in Iraq and what was the reaction there?

My collection The Madman of Freedom Square was printed and published in Lebanon after the censor had already cut out a lot of text. Despite this, the book was banned in Jordan, and whenever my publisher participated in a book fair in an Arab country, the book was forbidden from being displayed. I published most of my stories and poems online and I have started thinking about publishing everything I write on the net in order to be done with the matter of censorship. Among the young generation in Iraq and throughout the Arab world there has been a large positive and excited response to my writing. On the other hand, there have been various criticisms because of what has been called ‘foul language and derision against religion and sect’ in my stories.

Your stories mix realism and hyper-realism and have almost hallucinatory effects. Do you believe that the reality of what happened in Iraq is impossible to describe in any other way?

Truthfully I don’t know what the appropriate form or style is for writing about what happened and what is happening in Iraq. In general I am not drawn to what many Iraqi writers are writing, about the situation in Iraq, a poetic and mournful language about the tragedy of blood! Violence is an experience at once nightmarish, horrifying and unreal. In Iraq violence has been practiced over the past fifty years with severity and savagery; it has been a chain of painful and peculiar nightmares.

The war has clearly changed Iraq’s entire society. People’s behaviour in your stories is illogical and irrational. How does writing help us to comprehend the events of the past?

It isn’t easy to tear hope out of a human being. Iraqi society needs more time, but first of all the political circumstances have to be stabilised, which means the capitalist West and Iraq’s neighbors need to quit fighting their own battles inside the country.

‘The Song of a Goats’ gives its characters an opportunity to tell their own personal stories. Do you think that the process of narration helps people to heal?

Perhaps it helps people. What most impresses me when people tell their own stories is the sarcastic commentaries they make on those tales, no matter how painful or horrific. In Iraq we say that every Iraqi has at least five good horror stories, and there are nearly 30 million people in Iraq. It was from here that the idea for the story, ‘The Song of a Goat’ first emerged.

Your stories are about the act of storytelling itself.  How do you see the role of a writer in times of war?

I believe that the role of the writer today, whether in times of war or peace, is to not let what is going on all around us become a cheap and easy target for the media, for politicians or for our own forgetfulness.Writing for me is an important piece of Jalal al-Din al-Rumi’s mirror fragments, as when he says, more or less, that, ‘The truth is like a mirror that has fallen from the sky and shattered into tiny shards. Every human being is capable of holding onto a piece of the truth.’ I think the fragment of ‘imagination’ for example, contributes somehow to our understanding of the past.

Which writers do you admire? What do you think about other books about the war?

I read whatever falls into my hands, but reading is not my first source of inspiration. Rather, that comes from watching movies. Lately, though, I have been into Haruki Murakami, for example.

How does your film-making influence your writing?

I started writing at an early age. When I wanted to go to college, I asked a poet friend of mine, whose opinions I deeply respect, ‘What kind of university education is going to make me a better writer?’ My friend said, ‘Don’t study Arabic or Arabic literature. Go and study film.’ That was fantastic advice. A lot of times I feel as though all the stories I write are merely postponed film scripts. Although up until now I’ve not worked in a serious way in the movies because of my anxiety and nervousness about working in a group. Nevertheless, film has a big impact on my writing.

About the author
Hassan Blasim (born 1973) is an Iraqi-born writer and film director who lives in Finland. Blasim went to Finland as a refugee in 2004 after getting in trouble when making the film The Wounded Camera in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. He made four short films for the Finnish broadcasting company Yle. His first short story collection The Madman of Freedom Square was on the long-list for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010.

About the editor
Tasja Dorkofikis is the editor of the PEN Atlas as well as a freelance editor and publicist. She used to work as Publicity Director at Random House and most recently at Portobello Books as Associate Publisher and Commissioning Editor. Tasja shares her time between London and a small village in Vaud in Switzerland.

About the translator
Max Weiss is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi’ism and the Making of Modern Lebanon (2012). He is also a noted translator of contemporary Arabic literature into English. His translation of Abbas Beydoun’s novel Blood Test won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in 2010.

Additional Information
In December, English PEN supports the promotion of The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim (winner of a 2012 English PEN Award), a unique collection of short stories that explore Iraq’s recent past – an incredibly timely collection as the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq approaches in 2013. Translated by Jonathan Wright and published by Comma Press.

Hassan Blasim will visit the UK in December. He will appear in Newcastle on 10th December, in Manchester on 11th and in London at The Mosaic Rooms on 12th December, where he will appear with his translator Jonathan Wright.

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