Narrating horrific refugee experiences in Hassan Blasim’s short fiction

Hassan Blasim’s short stories, featured in his 2009 collection The Madman of Freedom Square, present the horrors – both spectacular and mundane – of the refugee experience. Blasim’s writing, by turns surreal and grotesquely intimate, evokes familiar themes of the Gothic, and his stories are rife with haunted protagonists and monstrous entities. Focusing on three short stories – “The Reality and the Record”, “The Truck to Berlin”, and “Ali’s Bag” – this article critically considers how Blasim utilizes a Gothic aesthetic in his writing to represent and critique the unspeakable violence that is experienced by Iraqi refugees. Working at the intersection of literary refugee studies, abject theory, and the Gothic, this article argues that Blasim’s fiction closes the distance between his readers and the figure of the refugee, challenging the expectations of his largely metropolitan, European readers who may otherwise seek authenticity, look for allegory, and anticipate abject spectacle amongst his works.