The Madman of Freedom Square by Hassan Blasim

Traditional Arabic stories begin with the phrase ‘ kan ya makan …’, which is often equated to the English ‘once upon a time’, but can also be translated as ‘there was, and there was not.’ ‘The Reality and the Record’ confronts readers with a provocative reinvention of this traditional narrative opening: before readers are exposed to the asylum seeker’s story, they are warned that it might not be wholly true. They merge and it becomes impossible to distinguish them. That’s not to say it’s easy to tell the two stories apart. The real stories remain locked in the hearts of the refugees, for them to mull over in complete secrecy. The stories for the record are the ones the new refugees tell to obtain the right to humanitarian asylum, written down in the immigration department and preserved in their private files. Yet it opens with a peritextual statement, distinguished from the main body of the text by italics, stating:Įveryone staying at the refugee reception centre has two stories – the real one and the one for the record. The story relays the refugee’s narrative in his own words.

As its title implies, the story explores the boundaries between fact and fiction, exposing the ways in which refugees necessarily move between the two in an asylum-seeking process that requires them to curate a compelling and convincing tale of political persecution in order to be granted asylum. In this opening short story, an unnamed Iraqi asylum seeker recounts his traumatic experiences of war, kidnapping and torture to an immigration officer at a refugee reception centre in Sweden. ‘The Reality and the Record’ is the first tale in The Madman of Freedom Square (2009), a collection of short stories by Iraqi author Hassan Blasim.

The Madman of Freedom Square by Hassan Blasim