Hassan Blasim’s God 99: Staying with Fragments, Designing Other Worlds

Abstract

Publicised as Hassan Blasim’s “debut” novel, God 99 is presented by the narrator Hassan Owl, the author’s doppelgänger, as the draft of a blog project of 99 interviews conducted in various cities in Europe with forcefully displaced people, whose lives have been devastated by wars in Syria and Iraq. In stark contrast to the purposiveness of interviews conducted by immigration officials and to the predictability of the stories relayed in the media, the fragmented stories of God 99 related by the interviewees are sewn together in no specific order and with no apparent attention to continuity and narrative progress. They constitute a precarious backbone on which the novel is built and are framed by an email correspondence with the narrator’s friend and author, Alia Mardan, reflecting larger existential questions about life, society, and the role of art. In God 99, the boundaries between autobiography, reportage, and fiction are incessantly blurred.

The chapter analyses first how the novel depicts death, the violence of wars and displacements, and the protagonists’ enduring pain of living with fragments. I also carefully detail how fragmentation, multiplicity, and kaleidoscopic visions are used as stylistic devices best designed to ethically engage with the traumatic experiences related in the novel. In the last part of the chapter, I unpack the hidden structure of the book based on literary affiliations and companionship, which constitute new trails holding books and lives together, against all odds. I argue that the characters and narrators, real-life migrants and storytellers, find solace and meaning in the Islamic theological principle that behind and beyond multiplicity there is unity, beyond fragmentation, there is a striving for wholeness, and that beyond dispersal, literature offers the possibility of a different return, elsewhere and otherwise.