Yes, because Kafkaesque means finding yourself in a situation where reality looks like a nightmare, and a nightmare like reality. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up and finds himself changed into an insect. I was a human, and then I woke up in the Asylum Seeker Centre (ASC) and found myself changed into an asylum seeker. So, yes, it’s a very accurate word.

We asylum seekers are looked at like that: nobody wants us, but where should they throw us?

There’s a powerful metaphor that you’ve used in the past: that wars and indeed nation-states treat asylum seekers as ‘chemical waste’. Could you speak a little more on that comparison?

Chemical waste is dangerous when it is beside you. But where should you throw it to remove the danger? If you do nothing, it will, just by its presence, hurt you, and the next generation, and the environment, and humanity at large. But if you throw it elsewhere, its presence will hurt another group of people in the same way. We asylum seekers are looked at like that: nobody wants us, but where should they throw us? We are a problem, and the solution is a problem for another; we are a problem – a circular problem.

Both those questions were a little about language, which is something I want more explicitly to ask you about: you write in Dutch, a tongue you learnt without recourse to language teaching. What does it mean, now, for you to write in Dutch? And does Arabic continue to influence your writing?

Living in Iraq, I grew up with Russian, English, German and French literature translated into Arabic. I found the European literature freer; writers were not scared to say what they believed. From then onwards, I wanted to write in a European language in which I could, somehow, be myself. When I first started writing in Dutch, Arabic influenced what I wrote. But now I have a big problem: I am beginning to think in Dutch, though I am not Dutch. It is as if a motor from a Mercedes has been put into a Toyota. It’s difficult, driving without a license. But I manage to avoid accidents.

Two Blankets, Three Sheets is deeply interested in people. If there’s one thing an asylum centre has, it’s people – 500, in your protagonist Samir’s case. Is there a conscious decision, in writing about a system and experience whose stock-in-trade is dehumanisation, to inversely represent the richness of humanity?

In the ASC, we weren’t allowed pets. There was nothing there: no rabbit, no mouse – just people. We weren’t allowed to travel, the longest journey being a trip, once or twice a week, to the local Aldi. So there was nothing to write about other than the people. I saw how a humanmade system – the Dutch Asylum Seeker system – treats people in an inhuman way. In a court of law, you are not guilty until proven so. In the ASC, you are not human until you get a piece of paper from the system. I think I didn’t answer you, so I’ll answer again: I didn’t make a conscious decision to write like this; the situation chose it. It was a rich situation, in a way. You live with 500 people and each of them could be the central character of a book. I was living, then, in the book that I wrote.

We were laughing with tears in our eyes for something we should cry about with sorrow. But we had to, because humour can save you from violence.

The book is also deeply amusing, at points. How vital is comedy in the situation you render?

I come from Iraq – from the fabric of wars, victims and perpetrators. If you don’t have comedy or humour, there, reality will destroy you. Once, a bomb fell a few hundred meters from our house in Bagdad, and me and my brothers laughed and laughed because we thought it had maybe fallen onto the house of our terrible aunt. Can you imagine? We were laughing with tears in our eyes for something we should cry about with sorrow. But we had to, because humour can save you from violence.

Finally, I want to ask who this book is for? You’ve been a writer of, as it were, several countries and no country, and I wonder who you most want to reach with your writing.

The people I would most want to read it are the people who will be the refugees of the future. I want to tell them that life is not a dream when you have to leave your country, not as a student, a businessman or a tourist, but as a refugee. Those – the people who do not realise that they might be the asylum seekers of tomorrow – are the people who need to read it. To learn that life is not always a dream.

Rodaan Al Galidi is a poet and writer. Born in Iraq and trained as a civil engineer, he has lived in the Netherlands since 1998. As an undocumented asylum seeker he did not have the right to attend language classes, so he taught himself to read and write Dutch. His novel De autist en de postduif (‘The Autist and the Carrier Pigeon’) won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011—the same year he failed his Dutch citizenship course. Two Blankets, Three Sheets, translated into English by Jonathan Reeder, already a bestseller in the Netherlands, is his most successful novel to date.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

The post Where Should They Throw Us? An Interview with Rodaan Al Galidi appeared first on English PEN.

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.

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.

The post PEN Atlas Q&A – Hassan Blasim, author of The Iraqi Christ appeared first on English PEN.