CityLife

The Madman of Freedom Square - Review

Hassan Blasim

THE Madman of Freedom Square is a new collection from local maverick short story publishers Comma Press by the Iraqi poet, filmmaker and short story writer Hassam Blasim. The collection, published this week, makes the bold claim of being the first major literary work about the Iraq War as told from an Iraqi perspective.

The eleven short stories collected here belong to a valuable and time-honoured tradition in literary fiction: the realistic reportage of shocking contemporary events. These are tales that demand to be told.

Historically, both the novel and the short story have close links with journalism. For Charles Dickens, realist fiction was a natural progression from his newspaper writing; faithfully rendering and exposing the most appalling aspects of nineteenth century Britain was far more important to him than crowd-pleasing literary escapism.

Hassan Blasim is very much a writer in this Dickensian mould. His stories set in war-ravaged Iraq over the last two decades are effortlessly powerful and affecting, in large part because the narratives are drawn directly from the lived experience of a torrid reality.

‘The Virgin and the Soldier’ opens with a starkly visual prose-portrait of a mutilated body (perhaps betraying Blasim’s background in documentary filmmaking), while ‘The Corpse Exhibition’ is every bit as luridly macabre as its title suggests.

The author does not flinch in detailing the minutiae of atrocity. But this is no gratuitous Edgar Allan Poe-style gothic shock-fest. These precise, clinical, filmic descriptions reflect a modern-day Iraq more surreally gruesome than the goriest of horror stories.

However, for all that Blasim’s approach is grounded in a straightforwardly realistic appropriation of fact, he is also aware that, in a country riven by censorship, propaganda, and the confusions of a seemingly interminable, endlessly complicated conflict, the nature of representation itself is likely to become a major issue of contention.

The collection opens with the memorable line: ‘Everyone in the refugee reception centre has two stories – the real one and the one for the record’, and again and again throughout The Madman of Freedom Square, Blasim throws a self-reflexive emphasis on the disparity between facts and their communication.

In stories such as ‘The Reality and the Record’, ‘An Army Newspaper’, ‘The Composer’, and ‘The Market of Stories’, Blasim suggests that, in a context in which freedom remains an elusive buzzword, an exact realistic rendering of truth will ultimately always be a tragic impossibility.

Thankfully though, that hasn’t stopped Hassan Blasim and translator Jonathan Wright from making an eloquent, moving attempt at doing so.