God 99 by Hassan Blasim (tr. Jonatahn Wright)
Review by Elodie Barnes
‘I was watching a report about the discovery of a new mass grave in Iraq when I had the idea of starting a blog… I set out in search of the names of God.’
Hassan Owl is an Iraqi refugee living in Finland. Torn from his old life and struggling to adapt to the new, he sets out to conduct a series of 99 interviews (to correspond with the 99 names of God in Islam) with others whose lives have also been disrupted by war, exile, and/or poverty. His idea is to turn the interviews into a blog, a way of recording and sharing the experience of those who usually don’t have much of a voice. The prompt for this endeavour, the discovery of a mass grave, is an indication of the brutality that follows: brutality that is shot through with flashes of dark humour and literary and philosophical rhetoric, all wonderfully captured in Jonathan Wright’s translation from Arabic.
Although billed as a novel, God 99 is more like autofiction, a hybrid that sits uneasily in the space between fiction and non-fiction, novel and autobiography. The author, Hassan Blasim, is also an Iraqi refugee, who left Iraq in 2000 and spent four years walking illegally across Europe before being granted asylum in Finland. He weaves strands of his own life in and out of the narrative so skilfully that it is sometimes impossible to tell him apart from his fictional namesake. Blasim acknowledged this in an interview, saying that, ‘Luckily, I’m not famous enough for people to know my life, so I can still play with it.’
Like Owl, Blasim has struggled to find a place for his writing. His use of street Arabic instead of the more widely accepted classical Arabic has made him an outcast in the Iraqi literary community (and makes Wright’s translation even more of a feat). It has meant that his work is not published in his homeland, but in his adopted country, writers must be writing in the Finnish language in order to be eligible for grants. Owl phrases it like this: ‘You speak broken English that you don’t like! And broken Finnish that Finns don’t like, and broken Arabic that Arab publishers don’t like.’ Translation into English has been important, and what emerges through that translation is harsh, blunt language that searches for ways to describe the trauma, the violence, and the alienation of the refugee experience.
In ‘Face Mask’, for example, the interviewee made masks ‘that imitate human faces’ for victims of bombs, shootings, and burns. Many of his customers were already dead; ‘the survivors had a human need to see the faces they loved, not the faces that hatred had disfigured.’ In ‘The Grasshopper Eater', Blasim’s own experience is brought to the forefront in the account of an attempted border crossing. The group is caught by Bulgarian border guards, who beat them and rape the only woman among them. ‘We could hear her screaming and crying as she implored them to stop, and all we had to offer her were our tears.’
Writing itself forms an important theme throughout the book. The fear of not being able to write is constant, and there is the sense that the act of writing is all that Owl has been able to carry with him. The new languages of his new life don’t fit the words he wants to say, and he continues to write in the street Arabic of his home, always worrying that one day the words won’t come. Like Hannah Arendt, who was asked in a 1964 interview whether she missed pre-war Germany and replied, ‘I can’t say I don’t have any nostalgia for it. What remains? The language remains.’
The structure of God 99 sometimes feels disjointed, as if it should hang together but doesn’t quite manage to. Blog posts and interviews are interspersed with Owl’s exchanges with an enigmatic writer-translator, which Blasim credits as being based on correspondence with his own literary mentor, the late Adnan al-Mubarak. The reader is constantly reminded that this work defies labelling. There is nowhere to settle — and this is perhaps appropriate given the subject matter. The refugee experience is also one of not belonging, of not fitting in; of being, as Blasim puts it, ‘always between two fires: your first home and your new one’. In highlighting the refugee experience, in all of its bleakness and disconnection, God 99 excels.
God 99 is published by Comma Press, 26th November 2020