When Helsinki-based writer Hassan Blasim follows the heated debates around migration, he is reminded of a journey he would rather forget. For more than four years, he trekked across the Iraqi-Kurdish mountains into Iran, then Turkey, working the black markets so that he could pay smugglers to make it across the next border and into Europe.
"I've seen the road, how terrible it is and how savage it is. I see all the double standards in the West," Blasim told The National.
He lost a finger on the way, and remembers the brutality of the border police when he reached Europe. “You don't see how the Eastern European armies behave with people across the border,” he said. The treatment he received there, Blasim said, amounted to torture. He did not go into the details.
Today, the policies to crack down on smuggling gangs and tighten Europe’s borders revive memories of those perilous crossings he made 20 years ago.
And growing hostility towards migrants in Helsinki, Finland – mirroring developments across Europe – is making the city in which he sought refuge feel less safe. “The discrimination has always been there, it rises and falls depending on the politics,” Blasim said.
These are themes the award-winning author addresses in his latest collection of short stories, Sololand, which will be published in English translation by Comma Press this month.
The Law of Sololand tells the story of a refugee and his encounters with a Neo-Nazi ring in a remote Scandinavian town, while Elias in the Land of ISIS is told from the perspective of an ISIS prisoner in Mosul.
The collection’s last story, Bulbul, which means nightingale in Arabic, addresses the Tishreen movement in Iraq, where young people took to the streets demanding better job opportunities and services. The demonstrations also called for an end to the sectarian power-sharing arrangement that emerged in the post-Saddam era.
“Before ISIS I wrote about violence in Iraq, I wrote about violence from the dictator. I want to stop writing about violence, but the violence does not stop in Iraq,” Blasim said.
He has not been back to Baghdad since leaving in 1998, but when the protests broke out in 2019, he travelled to Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi-Kurdistan to join a group of people who were supporting the movement happening in the capital and Iraq’s southern cities.
“I thought something might change, now, with a young generation leading, maybe there is going to be free speech,” he said.
Among Blasim's roles was to put out statements and announcements, particularly in moments of internet blackouts. But he is bitterly disappointed by the crackdown that ensued, with hundreds of young activists killed by Iranian-backed militias that were given free rein.
Video: Kurdistan smugglers bring death to the shores of Europe
Blasim became the first Arabic writer to win The Independent’s Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014, for his collection of short stories, The Iraqi Christ. His first collection, The Madman of Freedom Square, appeared in English translation in 2009.
He continues to write and publish in Arabic but he laments what he sees as the decline in Arabic fiction – for which he blames the states and publishing houses. With writers being constrained by what they can say, fiction was limited and readers were turning elsewhere.
“Most Arabic people will read books in translation because they find more freedom inside the novel, or they watch Netflix,” he said. "There is nothing [political] in Arabic literature. Our language is empty. It's not fighting. It's a literature that has surrendered."
Blasim was born in Baghdad in 1973 but during the Iran-Iraq war moved to Kirkuk, where his father worked with the army to protect oilfields. "We lived under the atmosphere of war and the militarisation of society imposed by the dictator’s regime," he recalled.
War was everywhere, with the perpetual ringing of air raid sirens from Iranian air strikes, and what felt like daily runs to the nearest bomb shelter. "At school, we used to chant songs glorifying Saddam and the war, and we would draw tanks and soldiers in our notebooks," he said. "The regime also carried out public executions of army deserters in front of crowds, and I personally witnessed executions while still in elementary school."
Despite the war, living conditions in Iraq were still high from the economic boom of the 1970s, he recalled. His love of writing came from the large library he had at home, and he and his brother's subscriptions to literary magazines. During the summer holidays, he would go to the city's science centre, where he learnt about electronics, physics, aviation and, crucially, cinema projectors.
Blasim's father passed away at the end of the war in 1988, and the family returned to Baghdad two years later. He enrolled at Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts to study cinema, after a friend of his, a poet, advised it would be the best way for Blasim to pursue his love of writing. "It would enhance my knowledge and expand my imagination … he was right."
While a film student in Baghdad during Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, Blasim was repeatedly harassed by his professors and the Baath regime’s sprawling security services.
His brother had been detained without charge or trial for political reasons, which made Blasim a natural target for persecution. His student film about the life of a poor man in Baghdad sparked their ire. “It was just a student film,” he said of it, dismissively. The family spent two years without knowing the brother's whereabouts, and when he was finally released he told them he had been transferred from prison to prison across Iraq, and repeatedly tortured.
Like many young men of his generation, Blasim fled to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which had achieved autonomy in the 1990s after Saddam’s horrific massacres and chemical attacks on the Kurds. The region was then harbouring Iraqi dissidents from across southern Iraq seeking refuge.
He gave himself a Kurdish name, Ouazad Othman, which means “free man”, concealing his identity to protect his family back in Baghdad from Saddam’s informants. His feature film The Wounded Camera was about the Kurdish uprisings against Saddam.
It was shot using VHS home video tapes, owing to an embargo on Iraq that had drained resources. Although he speaks with great pride about the film, he has not seen it since it was made, and he believes it is still held in an archive in Sulaymaniyah.
When civil war gripped the Kurdistan region, he fled once again, into the mountains to Europe. He arrived in Finland in 2004, where he now lives with his partner and son.
Blasim insists he does not want the book to "teach" readers anything. "I don't write to make people learn. I write to enjoy it. Literature is a kind of knowledge but literature is not a lesson," he said.
He worries that Iraqi refugees today have no good options. “You are between two fires. You run away from ISIS and you come here to racism,” he said. But he is also shocked by the declining living standards closer to home in Helsinki.
In the city's poorest districts, people have little time for books, theatre or cinema. "When people try to survive day by day, they don't think about books. Even in Finland, where you have the best education, in the poor areas they don't read," Blasim said.
The speech from Europe's growing far-right has worrying reminders of life under autocratic rule. "They talk about immigrants, immigrants, immigrants. When you make people scared and worried all the time, it's easy to control them." he said.
While he says he still "trusts in European society", the divisive forces of politics are so overwhelming that he is left feeling powerless. "You can't do anything. You just wait," he said.
