God 99 , livre ebook

Comma Press - Hassan Blasim

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134 pages

English

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Chess-playing people-traffickers, suicidal photographers, absurdist sound sculptors, cat-loving rebel sympathisers, murderous storytellers... The characters in Hassan Blasim's debut novel are not the inventions of a wild imagination, but real-life refugees and people whose lives have been devastated by war. Interviewed by Hassan Owl, an aspiring Iraq-born writer, they become the subjects of an online art project, a blog that blurs the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, reportage and the novel. Framed by an email correspondence with the mysterious Alia, a translator of the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, the project leads us through the bars, brothels and bathhouses of Hassan's past and present in a journey of trauma, violence, identity and desire. Taking its conceit from the Islamic tradition that says God has 99 names, the novel trains a kaleidoscopic lens on the multiplicity of experiences behind Europe's so-called 'migrant crisis', and asks how those who have been displaced might find themselves again.

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Islam

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Publié par	Comma Press
Date de parution	26 novembre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781912697250
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Hassan Blasim is an Iraqi-born film director and writer. Blasim settled in Finland in 2004 after years of travelling through Europe as a refugee. His debut collection The Madman of Freedom Square was published by Comma in 2009 (translated by Jonathan Wright) and was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010. His second collection, The Iraqi Christ, won the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the first Arabic title and the first short story collection ever to win the award. Hassan’s work has been translated into over 20 languages.
In memory of Adnan al-Mubarak whose email correspondence with the author is the basis formed the basis of this book.
First published in Arabic by al-Mutawassit, Milan, 2018.
This edition published in Great Britain by Comma Press, 2020.
www.commapress.co.uk
Copyright © Hassan Blasim 2020.
All rights reserved.
The right of the authors to be identified has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patent Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
This collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authors’ imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental. The opinions of the authors are not those of the publisher.
ISBN: 190558377X
ISBN-13: 9781905583775
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s ‘PEN Translates’ programme.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from the Arts Council England.
Dear Hassan,
You must have had insomnia when you sent that message to me shortly before dawn. I hope you’ve now put behind you that state of semi-wakefulness where memories wallow in the mire. When you’re restless and in the firing line, your only salvation may be the knowledge that any rational understanding of the world has shattered into fragments, like a mirror you’ve dropped on the floor. Doctors say that paranoia is the final stage in the ordeal of insomnia. That may be true, but the other side of the coin is that this paranoia is welcome when it’s pitted against the truths of man and God. The wars waged by this insomnia threaten all the complex systems of the body, which are linked to each other like the arms of an octopus.
I told you that my insomnia is not of the persistent, predatory kind and so in my case the wretched experience has never lasted too long. They say the Buddha didn’t sleep for sixty years but that wasn’t really insomnia, rather a way of cheating insomnia out of a genuine victory. As you know, the Buddha never lost a single battle with his body, or with the outside world either. All theories are possible, including the theory that the Buddha was not a human being but rather a creature that came to us from another world. Some people see him as a product of the transmigration of souls, or that he was the child of cosmic creatures that came and reproduced with us, and among us, and so it wouldn’t have been easy to tell them apart from humans. In other words, they were, to use H. G. Wells’s term, ‘men like gods’.
For many days, I’ve had Cioran’s book The Temptation to Exist in front of me, waiting for me to translate the latest chapter. I’ve no idea how time manages to slip through my fingers like water. Yesterday I outwitted it, but not for long, and I started translating. It’s one of Cioran’s finest texts: as usual, he homes in on the truth with insights of a kind that we do not come across in contemporary or earlier writing.

*

Of course, it wasn’t today that I discovered that life is short, but this old discovery acts like a sharp knife on this fragile vessel that I, for some reason, was chosen to inhabit.
Cioran advises us not to dig around in our memories if we want to be happy. As far as I can tell, though, happiness wasn’t his goal, but rather a mischievous state of mind that is capable of dismissing all the naïve definitions of what it is to be a rational animal with hope.
But happiness is one of my concerns and I’m quite surprised by Cioran’s advice. Clearly, those who look for it are a colourless type of idiot: those faceless, nameless people, for instance, who sleepwalk their way to the ballot box.

*

You ask me about writing? For some people the process is akin to digging a grave for words! Either way, this word ‘writing’ tastes of ashes and death. I really enjoy it when I write to you though. I feel that I’m in your presence. The word enjoy may not be appropriate. I think it would be more correct to say that I feel I’m breathing a sigh of relief when I email you, since not everyone can stomach what I write.
All the best.
My Uncle BBC

I thought about starting the God 99 blog after I became anxious about not being able to write. I wasn’t anxious that I might lose money or my reputation. How could I be? I’m an unknown writer living as a refugee in Finland and no Arab publishing house has ever wanted to publish my short stories or my poems. They say my Arabic is vulgar, lacks beauty and offends religious taboos. Much has been said about literature and how people are attached to writing in general. Pessoa said something to the effect that literature was the most enjoyable way to ignore life. In my case, literature hasn’t only provided ‘hiding places for pleasure’, but I would also argue that literature has saved my life, since I was born in a country where every decade the barbaric level of violence has risen to higher and more grotesque levels.

Your official profession in that country was a vet. You used to treat cows in the villages around the city of Babylon. The last time you smelled a cow was twelve years ago. You wrote a funny story called ‘The Cow Whose Cunt Turns Out Porno Mags’.

In my adolescent years, I read the expression ‘Ideas are thrown on the roadway’, and it excited and enthused me, particularly when I replaced the word ideas with the word stories . As time passed, what at that age was my dream of a profusion of stories turned into a nightmare. The avalanche of images, information, news and stories now horrifies and disgusts me. It makes me feel I’m powerless and that writing is futile. I wrote to my dear friend complaining of my despair. In the email she sent in response, she said, ‘Despair associated with writing is definitely a complex form of despair. It includes despair brought on by the absurdity of the world as well as despair brought on by complete paralysis towards it – not the partial paralysis that has afflicted writers in certain markets. The cause of this latter type of writerly despair is the thought that what we write doesn’t read like a cry in the wilderness, but more like a fart in the wilderness. That’s how the world is constructed and I’m convinced it’s not my fault that it’s so frivolous. Let’s write, my dear, according to Henry Miller’s formula (I learned from him that I shouldn’t do anything else but write, that I must write and write and write). I understand your situation, but the idea of stepping back must be dismissed. The only thing stopping us from falling into the pit of despair is defiance and perseverance. For sure, what Miller said is no more than a bunch of advice, but what’s to be done if the advice remains valid and useful in so many contexts!’

Your friend’s emails give you joy, pleasure and consolation! You want to meet her face to face, hug her and smell her.

I was watching a report about the discovery of a new mass grave in Iraq when I had the idea of starting a blog and publishing my short stories and poems as a way of circumventing Arab censorship. I went online and searched for free blogs. It quickly bored me. It was ten o’clock at night, so I got changed and went out to a bar. I thought my blog should have a uniform writing style and that all the texts should be new. I drank beer and Jaloviina as I rummaged around in my memory and mulled over the idea of the God blog. I met a nice young Senegalese man and we got drunk together and laughed a lot until the bar closed. He told me about his childhood in Senegal and I told him some amusing anecdotes from when I was working as a vet in the Iraqi countryside. The next morning I woke up and the remains of a dream about my uncle were still stuck in my mind. I sat on the edge of the bed and opened the laptop. I thought the beginning should be simple and distinctive i.e. collecting writing material through interviews with people in the real world. Later I thought about the shape of the mould into which I would cast the material. As I had breakfast I gathered together the fragments of my dream about my uncle and went through the pages of my memories of him. I put some music on. At first I listened to Massive Attack, then switched to Radiohead before settling on Nils Frahm. After drifting off, it suddenly occurred to me that the God blog could have roughly the same rhythm as my uncle’s garbled stories.
I was born into a poor family. I heard the story of my birth from my uncle dozens of times. He would tell the story and joke about it on every family occasion, until I hated the story of my rubbish birth. My uncle said I was born in the city centre hospital. At the time my father was at the front killing Iranians. My mother didn’t have enough money to take a taxi home, so she called my uncle to ask for help. My uncle arrived at the hospital in a municipal rubbish truck. One of the nurses brought an empty egg box from the hospital kitchen. They put me in the box and we went home in the rubbish truck. The truck was orange and on the side it said ‘Keep Your City Clean’.

Your uncle suddenly abandoned his family and moved to Cairo. At the time you felt it was now your turn to take revenge on him in the same way – by telling his story on every family occasion, whether sad or joyful.

Throughout his youth my uncle had worked as a government driver with the municipality. He drove