“Listen, Mahdi. I’ve been through a lot in my life and I know that sooner or later some misfortune will happen to me. But that’s not the important thing. You are sixteen. Today I will teach you to be a lion. This life is bullshit. Whether you die today or in thirty years, it makes no difference. The important thing is today, being able to see the fear in the eyes of others. They are the fearful ones who will give you everything. And if someone says to you, for example, “fear the Lord” or “it is a sin”, give him a kick in the ass, because this God is assholes. He is theirs, not yours. God is you, now is your time. There is no God without worshipers or crybabies who starve to death and endure anything in his name. In this world, you have to learn to be God. Only then will people kiss your ass while you shit down their throats. You’re coming with me today, but you have to keep your mouth shut. Not a word, shut up and dumb as a sheep. Got it, asshole?”
I had already read after that The madman in piazza della Libertà (translation by Barbara Teresi, Editrice Il Sirente) I stayed impressed by the narrative ability of Hassan Blasimbut with The Iraqi Christ e Allah 99 (also translated by Barbara Teresi and both published by Utopia Editore), the prices of the Iraqi author have risen further. These are texts that navigate in anguish, horror and surreal madness of a country torn apart by war and poverty, which collect fragments of the memory of exiles, of those who fled, despite themselves, in the face of death, destruction, war stupidity.
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The Iraqi Christ is made up of authentic pearls that make up a ruthless portrait ofIraq contemporary and of the false paradise represented by rich Europe. Kamikaze improvised, national crossword experts, souls of dead policemen who take possession of the bodies of survivors of devastating attacks, teenagers who become men thanks to murder, terminally ill who defenestrate themselves, clubs of friends capable of making knives disappear… through surreal and grotesque metaphors Hassan Blasim throws the imagination in the face of reality, making it a symbol of Iraqi carnage and slaughterhouses. Disenchantedsometimes ironic, ruthless and with a pinch of nostalgia for what it was Baghdad and, in general, the past life in one’s place of origin, The Iraqi Christ is, in my view, a masterpiecewhich must be read to try to understand what has been done in the name of (Western-style) freedom, to understand that good and evil are not concepts in watertight compartments.
“When we woke up the next day, American troops were at the gates of Baghdad. A few hours later the statue of the dictator was demolished. It was a surreal trauma. We changed into civilian clothes and went back to our families. It had been just another blind war. None of our battalion had fired a single shot. After the war, I met Daniel several times. He had moved back in with his elderly mother. When the country fell into chaos, I visited him at their home in Baghdad. I wanted to propose to him to go back to the army with me. He told me that he hated the dictator, but which would not have swelled the ranks of an army under the aegis of the occupier. We never saw each other again after that. I reenlisted, and Daniel continued to mother him.”
In Allah 99however, Blasim collects ninety-nine interviews (ninety-nine is the number of appellations attributed to Allah in the Koran) to men and women marked by terrorism, war and emigration. Female doctors who, after becoming widows following an attack, flee to Berlin and dedicate themselves to techno music, bakers making masks for the victims of terrorist attacks, young jihadists hiding in the bucolic Scandinaviaenigmatic translators of Cioran grappling with philosophy and embargoes.
Violence, racismpromiscuous sex, late night hangovers, tortured bodieshorror and profound reflections on literature, life and survival in a new world, not always better than the one we left behind.