Iraq + 100

by Hassan Blasim

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because it has happened already, my child. All of it. I haven’t been honest with you. The transition is complete. We haven’t talked about it, but you know it to be true. I’m now just a hologram; just a network of algorithms responding to stimuli and playing out scenarios. Recorded by an implant I carried round in me for years, and then transferred to an implant in you, Muhammed, so I could accompany you on this trip.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘They said you would struggle with this part.’

  ‘What part?’ I blurted out. I was shaking, but the security-droids had long since moved along.

  ‘I want you to do this here.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, looking at him through tears, knowing instantly what he meant.

  ‘All of my ancestors were connected to Najaf but none of them were buried there. I ask you now to rectify that, to do me one last favour. Let me have my final moment here.’

  ‘Don’t you want to see your great-grandchildren?’

  ‘Of course I do. But it will be too painful not to hold them. This is not me, Muhammed. I am not me … I know that now. Bring your children here, and your grandchildren. Let them see this place that has survived so many centuries of hardship. Let them see the place where you made the hardest decision of your life.’

  I sat there. I don’t know for how long. My jidu was silent.

  ‘Ok. This is it. Allah wiyak, Jidu.’

  ‘Thank you, my boy.’

  I opened the panel on my sleeve. Among language implants, phone chips and neural website routers, I ejected my grandfather’s card and held it in the open air. I dropped my head and let my hands do what they needed to, knowing that nearly a century’s worth of memories were being obliterated, letting the pieces fall to the carpet.

  I left the shrine without telling Abbas and ducked into the first jewellery stall I saw, to buy a cheap necklace made of bright blue Teflon. Who is this for? I thought to myself, and started laughing. Then, when the giggles had passed, I stepped outside, and tapped my forehead: ‘Call Dad.’

  AFTERWORD

  The best science fiction, they say, tells us more about the context it’s written in than the future it’s trying to predict. The future may offer a blank canvas onto which writers can project their concerns, in new and abstract ways, but the concerns themselves are still very much ‘of their time’.

  This was the thinking behind Iraq + 100: to offer writers a space in which to explore the troubles of the present, many of which were direct consequences of the 2003 invasion, in an uninhibited way—through the allegory of the future, or through the long lens of speculative fiction. It was also an invitation to construct positive visions of Iraq’s future, stories of hope and speculations on what long-term peace and self-determination might look like.

  When Hassan and I first devised the commission, in late 2013, the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq had just passed. We both found ourselves wondering if the horror and scale of that atrocity would now, in Britain at least, be neatly packed away and sent down into the long, high-vaulted archive of ‘crimes this country has committed abroad’, never to trouble the British conscience again. We wanted to commission a book that kept the consequences of 2003 at the forefront of readers’ minds; one that presented them anew, somehow—even if that meant dressing them up in the shiny future-dress of science fiction. We also wanted to invite other Iraqi writers into the space that had been created by Hassan’s own literary success,1 as suddenly, there was a genuine appetite for new fiction from Iraq.

  A call for submissions was posted in late 2013, and stories started coming in from all over the world—both from writers inside Iraq, and Iraqi diaspora writers elsewhere in the world—many of them showing a flare for the surreal and the fantastical that Hassan’s readers will recognise. (Three of the stories here, being written in English, were selected by myself, rather than Hassan, so in that regard the editorial duties were shared.)

  Then, in June 2014, everything changed. Mosul fell to ISIS, and a new war spread its shadow across the country. The long-term consequences of the 2003 invasion were suddenly, tragically, back at the forefront of people’s minds. No one needed any reminders. On top of this, the very existence of Iraq, as a distinct sovereign entity, had become uncertain.

  Many of the stories gathered in this book were written before this second invasion, and some readers may feel this automatically puts them out of step with events unfolding on the ground; the immediate reality of Iraq has since become more terrifying and unpredictable than anything fiction could envision, even for the distant future. But Hassan and I stand by all of these stories—whether written before or after June 2014—for they offer glimpses at a genuinely different Iraq; one in which the original ambitions of the country’s capital, founded by Caliph al-Mansur as the ‘City of Peace’, might still be detected; one in which the great scientific aspirations of that Round City, and its House of Wisdom,2 might one day be realised.

  Ra Page, October 2016

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Hassan Abdulrazzak is an author of Iraqi origin, born in Prague and living in London. His plays include Baghdad Wedding (Soho Theatre, 2007), The Prophet (Gate Theatre, 2012) and Love, Bombs and Apples (Arcola Theatre, 2016). He is the recipient of George Devine, Meyer-Whitworth and Pearson theatre awards, as well as the Arab British Centre Award for Culture.

  Zhraa Alhaboby’s writings incorporate history, mystery and medicine. She has published several novels in Arabic, including The Sumerian Tales series, set in ancient Mesopotamia in 2500 B.C., and Doves and Ravens, which tackles inequality (both with Al-Hafez Publishing, Dubai, 2015). When the Sun Escapes (Al-Adeeb Publishing, Amman-Baghdad, 2008) visualises Babylon and Assyria around 750 B.C. Zhraa is a medical doctor and researcher, and studied International Primary Healthcare at the University of London.

  Anoud is an Iraqi-born author living in London.

  Ali Bader was born in Baghdad, where he studied Western Philosophy and Foreign Literature, and now lives in Brussels. To date, he has published thirteen novels, several works of nonfiction, film scripts and plays, as well as two collections of poetry. He has also worked as a war correspondent covering the Middle East. His best-known novels include Papa Sartre, The Tobacco Keeper, Running After Wolves, and The Sinful Woman, all of which have won awards. He has written about art, politics and philosophy for many Arab newspapers and magazines.

  Hassan Blasim was born in Baghdad in 1973, where he studied at the city’s Academy of Cinematic Arts. In 1998, he was advised to leave Baghdad, as his documentary critiques of life under Saddam had put him at risk. He fled to Sulaymaniya (Iraqi Kurdistan), where he continued to make films, including the feature-length drama Wounded Camera, under the Kurdish pseudonym ‘Ouazad Osman’. In 2004, after years of travelling illegally through Europe as a refugee, he finally settled in Finland. His first story to appear in print was for Comma’s anthology Madinah (2008), edited by Joumana Haddad, which was followed by two commissioned collections, The Madman of Freedom Square (2009) and The Iraqi Christ (2013)—all translated into English by Jonathan Wright. The latter collection won the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Hassan’s stories have now been published in over twenty languages.

  Mortada Gzar is an Iraqi novelist, filmmaker and visual artist. Born in Kuwait in 1982, he has an engineering degree from the University of Baghdad, and has been a participant of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has written, directed and produced a number of films that have screened at international festivals. His animation Language won the Doha Film Award. He is the author of three novels: Broom of Paradise (2008), Sayyid Asghar Akbar (2013) and My Beautiful Cult (2016), and is a regular contributor to the Lebanese newspaper al-Safir al-Arabiandis.

  Jalal Hasan was born in Baghdad in 1968. He published his first story ‘Five Travelers by Five Paper Boats’ whilst still in secondary school and graduated from the University of Baghdad’s Spanish Department in 1994. In 1
992, after the publication of his ninety-eight-word story, ‘The Last Day for Rain!’ in the Lebanese Magazine Al-Aadab, Hasan was arrested and detained for seven months. After continued pressure on him personally, Hasan fled to Jordan in May 1997, and worked in Amman as a freelance writer and journalist, until he moved again to Arizona, as a refugee in 1999. He currently lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles, where he writes and drives a cab (what he calls ‘the best job in the world!’). He has published two collections of short stories The Last Day for Rain! (1998) and Meanwhile … in Baghdad (2008, both with Alwah, Madrid). He is currently writing a novel.

  Diaa Jubaili was born in 1977 and still lives in Basra. Growing up he was unable to complete his education due to war and the economic blockade during the ’90s. He is the author of five novels—The Curse of the Marquis (2007), which won the Dubai Magazine Award, The Ugly face of Vincent (2009), Bogeys, the Bizarre (2011), General Stanley Maude’s Souvenir (2014) and The Lion of Basra (2016).

  Khalid Kaki was born in Kirkuk in 1971. He studied Spanish Literature and Philology at the University of Baghdad 1989–93, and at Autónoma University in Madrid (1997–2000) where he has lived since 1996. He has published four collections of poetry—Unsafely (Alwah, Madrid, 1998), The Guard’s Notes (Alaliph, Madrid, 2001), Cages in a Bird (Phenix, Cairo 2005) and Ashes of the Pomegranate Tree (Alfalfa, Madrid, 2011)—and two collections of short stories—The Land of Facing Mirrors (Alahlia Editions, Baghdad 2005), and The Suicide of Jose Buenavida (Almutawasit, Milan 2016).

  Ibrahim al-Marashi is an associate professor of History at California State University San Marcos. He is both a U.S. and U.K. national, and obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford, completing a thesis on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, part of which was plagiarised by the British government’s ‘Dodgy Dossier’. He is co-author of Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (Routledge, 2008), and The Modern History of Iraq, with Phebe Marr (Westview 2016).

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

  Emre Bennett is a keen linguist and a fanatic reader of Middle-Eastern literature. He is an Arabic language graduate from the University of Westminster where he is currently studying a masters in Specialised Translation. He recently completed the City University’s ‘Translate the City’ summer course in literary translation with Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, and currently works part-time as a translator and English tutor.

  Katharine Halls’s co-translation (with Adam Talib) of Raja Alem’s prize-winning The Dove’s Necklace appeared in 2016. Her film translations include Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk’s Out On The Street and Eyal Sivan’s Common State, Potential Conversation, and her stage translations have been performed in Europe and the Middle East.

  Elisabeth Jaquette is a writer and translator. Her translations of Arabic literature have been published in Banipal and Words Without Borders, and are forthcoming in Portal 9. She has worked as a translator for the PEN World Voices Festival, and has previously translated Rania Mamoun for The Book of Khartoum (Comma, 2016). Jaquette was a CASA fellow at the American University in Cairo in 2012–13, and is currently a graduate student at Columbia University.

  Andrew Leber is a translator and researcher based in Doha. He graduated from Brown University and was a Fellow of the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo from 2012 to 2013. He has previously translated short excerpts of Syrian and Palestinian literature, including a selection of Hani al-Rahib’s The Epidemic (1981), Saadallah Wanous’s play The Elephant, Your Majesty (1969), along with an assortment of writings by Gazan authors Najlaa Ataallah and Atef Abu Saif.

  Adam Talib is the translator of Fadi Azzam’s Sarmada, Khairy Shalaby’s The Hashish Waiter, and Mekkawi Said’s Cairo Swan Song. Most recently he cotranslated (with Katharine Halls) Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace. He teaches classical Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo.

  Max Weiss is the Elias Boudinot Bicentennial Preceptor and Assistant Professor of History and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi`ism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon, and the translator from the Arabic of Samar Yazbek’s A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution and Nihad Sirees’s The Silence and the Roar. Currently he is translating Mamdouh Azzam’s Ascension to Death.

  Jonathan Wright is a British journalist and literary translator. He joined Reuters news agency in 1980 as a correspondent, and has been based in the Middle East for most of the last three decades. He has served as Reuters’s Cairo bureau chief, and he has lived and worked throughout the region, including in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Tunisia and the Gulf. From 1998 to 2003, he was based in Washington, D.C., covering U.S. foreign policy for Reuters. For two years until the fall of 2011 Wright was editor of the Arab Media & Society Journal, published by the Kamal Adham Center for Journalism Training and Research at the American University in Cairo. He is the translator of all of Hassan Blasim’s fiction in English.

  SPECIAL THANKS

  The publishers would like to thank Christine Gilmore, Chelsea Milsom, Lauren Pyott and Noor Hemani, all of whom worked as editorial assistants at various points on this project, as well as CASAW (the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arabic World), English PEN and The British Institute for the Study of Iraq, who supported the project financially. Particular thanks are also due to Lauren Mulvee and Erica Jarnes for their patience and support throughout.

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Described by The Guardian as “perhaps the greatest writer of Arabic fiction alive,” HASSAN BLASIM is an Iraq-born film director and writer. A multiple PEN award winner, he is the author of The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq, which won a number of awards, and The Iraqi Christ, which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014, making Blasim the first Arabic writer to win that award. He lives in Finland.

  Visit him online at hassanblasim.net, or sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  INTRODUCTION

  Hassan Blasim • Translated by Jonathan Wright

  KAHRAMANA

  Anoud

  THE GARDENS OF BABYLON

  Hassan Blasim • Translated by Jonathan Wright

  THE CORPORAL

  Ali Bader • Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

  THE WORKER

  Diaa Jubaili • Translated by Andrew Leber

  THE DAY BY DAY MOSQUE

  Mortada Gzar • Translated by Katharine Halls

  BAGHDAD SYNDROME

  Zhraa Alhaboby • Translated by Emre Bennett

  OPERATION DANIEL

  Khalid Kaki • Translated by Adam Talib

  KUSZIB

  Hassan Abdulrazzak

  THE HERE AND NOW PRISON

  Jalal Hasan • Translated by Max Weiss

  NAJUFA

  Ibrahim al-Marashi

  AFTERWORD

  Ra Page

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

  SPECIAL THANKS

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  COPYRIGHT

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

  IRAQ + 100

  Copyright © 2016 remains with the authors and translators

  Cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill

  All rights reserved.

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  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

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  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-250-16132-1 (trade paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-250-16131-4 (ebook)

  eISBN 9781250161314

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  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Comma Press.

  First U.S. Edition: September 2017

  1 ‘Arab Fiction Faces Up to the Future’, Mustafa Najjar, Asarq al-Awsat, 9 Nov 2014.

  2 ‘How the Sumerians invented space aeronautics’, Adnan al-Mubarak, available in Arabic on www.iraqstory.com, and in English at https://thecommapressblog.wordpress.com.

  1 Kalashes: handmade Kurdish shoes.

  1 One of the oldest public squares in present-day Basra. Originally a cemetery for inhabitants of neighbouring areas, though burial was forbidden in 1933, its name comes from ‘burm,’ an Iraqi word for a large pot. During the plague and famine of 1875, Hajji Muhammad Basha al-Malak—one of the notables of Basra—provided for the hungry and those fleeing sickness by setting out large numbers of such cooking pots in the square. From thence came the name ‘Umm al-Burum’ or ‘Mother of Cooking Pots.’

  2 Notable North African historian and historiographer.

  3 Fourteenth-century Moroccan historian.

  4 Early twentieth-century Iraqi politician and researcher.