The figure of the refugee in Hassan Blasim’s “The Reality and the Record”

In “Step Across this Line”, Salman Rushdie (2003) considers the boundaries that we draw around our nation states, and what it takes for people to be allowed to cross them:

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 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. (2003: 412)

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 “الإرشيف و الواقع”, translated as “The Reality and the Record” in English. ¹ Many of his stories were originally 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 with which his work is most concerned. 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. A “toned down” version of The Madman of Freedom Square was published by a Lebanese publishing house (المؤسسة العربية للدراسات والنشر) in 2012 (Lynx Qualey, 2012: n.p.). 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” (Lynx Qualey, 2012: n.p.). 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 (2010: n.p.). The refugee is a recurring figure in his stories.

The 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, or as part of a new diaspora filled with nostalgic longing, Palestinian refugees became paradigmatic in Middle Eastern writing. Sadly, 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 (الإرشيف) or “record” in the story’s title is evocative of Arendt’s insistence that in order to be recognized as a human being 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 will 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 whom 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). Stripped of their human rights, unwanted by any nation, they 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)

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 decreasing 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 original) ²

لكل نزيل في محطة استقبال اللاجئين حكايتان. واحدة واقعية وأخرى إرشيفية. الحكايات الإرشيفية هي الحكاياتالتي يرويها اللاجئون الجدد من أجل حق الحصول على اللجوء الانساني. وتدون هذه الحكايات في دائرة الهجرةوتحفظ في ملفات خاصة. اما الحكايات الواقعية فتبقى حبيسة في صدور اللاجئين ليعتاشوا على ذكراها بسريةتامة. لكن هذا لايعني انه يمكن التمييز بسهولة بين حدود الحكايتين. فقد تختلطا ويصبح التمييز بين الحكايتينمجرد محاولة عبثية

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 various processes of translation — literal and figurative — inherent in applying for asylum in a language that is not one’s own, noting that “[o]ne of Hassan Blasim’s most interesting insights into asylum itself relates to language and translation” (2012: 146). She reminds us that “[t]he story ‘for the record’ is necessarily a tactical one about trauma, persecution, and likely death if the refugee does not leave his or her country” (2012: 146). The English word “story” hints at the possibility 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. حكايات (hikayaat) are stories; a novel is sometimes referred to as a hikaye, a story, but حكايات (hikayat) are also often fabulous and phantasmagoric fables. As Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana note with reference to Palestinian folktales, a “hikaye (which, correctly 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 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. 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). 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 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; 5). Blasim’s use of hikayat therefore marks these stories as a fantastical, gendered form — an aspect lost in English translation. In the Arabic text, his central protagonist is an emasculated, powerless man; as Muhawi and Kanaana observe, “[a] man who likes to listen and tell folktales […] is considered to be a niswanji, or one who prefers the company of women to that of men” (1989: 2). This is a derogatory term, often also 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, 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.

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 “الإرشيف و الواقع”, the Arabic title of Blasim’s story, translates as record, but also simply “archive”. “إرشيف”(ersheef) 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 full 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 /إرشيف into 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 does not fit the bill might spell deportation, or even death at the hands of those to whom the asylum seeker is returned. In these places, displaced people 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 whom 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 with 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 stateless. 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 — has 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 in the aftermath of the Second World War, imprisoned in what Rushdie calls “the universe of control” (2003: 412).

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 is told by the asylum seeker himself, an anonymous subject defined only as “a new Iraqi refugee” (1; emphasis in original). This is deeply ironic, given that he is defined, narratologically, by his statelessness in Arendt’s terms; 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 thirties: “رجل نحيل في نهاية الثلاثين 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 stand 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 although 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 pace of the man’s delivery (the Arabic describes it as a strange or alien speed: بسرعة غريبة). 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. This evolving identity and the process of being dressed for the camera is itself evocative of the 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)

طوال عام ونصف من رحلة اختطافي، تنقلت من وكر الى اخر. صوروا لي أشرطة فيديو أتحدث فيها عن انتمائي الى الاكراد الخونة والمسيحين الكفار و ارهابي السعودية و المخابرات السورية البعثية والى حرس ثورة ايران المجوسية. في هذه الاشرطة قتلت واغتصبت واحرقت وفجرت وقمت بجرائم لايتصورها عاقل. جميع اشرطة الفيديو هذه عرضتها فضائيات العالم ، وجلس خبراء وصحفيون وساسة ينقاشون ما قلته وفعلته

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 the 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 by this author-activist of how little some wealthy and relatively stable Arab nations are doing to ameliorate the suffering of those in neighbouring countries. One way of reading the ready circulation of these videos in Blasim’s text in light of Sontag’s argument 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 in which he had no investment. These fake videos require us to question the evidence of our own eyes, to reevaluate 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’s asylum seeker states:

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)

اما الحظ السئ الوحيد الذي صادفنا ، كان عند تصوير الفيديو الذي اظهر فيه كجندي أسباني يسلط أحد رجال المقاومة سكينا على رأسه ويطلب من القوات الاسبانية الانسحاب من العراق. لقد رفضت جميع المحطات الفضائية بث الشريط. فالقوات الاسبانية كانت قد غادرت البلاد قبلها بعام . وكدت أدفع ثمنا باهظا على هذه الغلطة ، فتلك الجماعة أرادت ذبحي إنتقاما على ما حدث. لكن من أنقذني كان المصور الذي إقترح عليهم فكرة رائعة اخرى ، كانت النهاية لأدواري الفيديوية: ألبسوني زيا للمقاتلين الافغان وشذبوا لحيتي ثم وضعوا على رأسي عمامة سوداء. وقف خلفي خمسة. وجاءوا بستة رجال يصرخون ويستغيثون بالله ونبيه وآل بيته ذبحوهم أمامي مثل الخراف وأنا أعلن بأني الزعيم الجديد لتنظيم القاعدة في بلاد الرافدين، كما هددت الجميع من دون استثناء.

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 Iraqi man 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 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 the asylum seeker’s 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, his boss 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 seemingly not 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 the asylum seeker 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 the asylum seeker’s conflation of the Professor and the cameraman, “the mastermind of this dreadful game”, to whom he attributes overall responsibility for the actions of the paramilitary groups that kidnap and use him (4). The refugee thinks that “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 have almost fully unravelled, the man 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 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 the asylum seeker’s 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 asylum seekers’ experiences, though of course offer no proof of what they have been through. We might read the gaps, the omissions, and indeed the fantastical stories that fill the gaps they leave, in light of this. 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, and morally dislocated. “The Reality and the Record” presents us with an asylum seeker defined by ambiguity, whose story demands the reexamination of all our narratives, perhaps especially those surrounding the morality of our approach to the ever-growing numbers of 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” (2003: 412)), itself alludes to the performative imperative we place on those who wish to enter the safety of the world we already inhabit. I have used performative throughout this article in the pre-Butlerian 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” (1990/2006: 191, emphasis in 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” (1990/2006: 192) also rings profoundly true in this very different example. Blasim’s asylum seeker’s performance of worthy 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” (1990/2006: 192; emphasis in original), 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 the lie to any idealized truths that we might seek. 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.