Johanna Sellman received her PhD in Comparative Literature from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013. Her research interests include contemporary Arabic and francophone literature, migration literature, gender studies, visual cultures of North Africa and the Middle East, and Arabic literature and theater in the Nordic Countries. She teaches Arabic literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University.
At the height of the 2015–16 'refugee crisis', how were immigrants and refugees portrayed and sel... more At the height of the 2015–16 'refugee crisis', how were immigrants and refugees portrayed and self-portrayed on Finnish and Swedish stages? The production and reception of two plays translated from Arabic – Karim Rashed's I Came to See You (2015) and Hassan Blasim's The Digital Hats Game (2016) – reveal a complex politics of representation in both scripting and staging. Reading Blasim and Rashed's works in light of Arab–Nordic literary studies and migration theatre studies, we also set them against two other migration-themed plays staged in Stockholm: Swedish writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri's groundbreaking Invasion! (2006) and British playwright Anders Lustgarten's more recent Lampedusa (2015). Blasim and Rashed, we argue, had to navigate three traps or boxes endemic to Arab diasporic theatre: the audience expectations of biographical voyeurism, orientalism and the allegory of collective worthiness. Both aimed to reject the first two expectations and embrace the third, seeking to define new directions in Nordic–Arab theatre.
Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ: aḥlām waʿrah (Dancing on Water: Difficult Dreams, 2006) by Maḥmūd al-Bayyātī is... more Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ: aḥlām waʿrah (Dancing on Water: Difficult Dreams, 2006) by Maḥmūd al-Bayyātī is among a number of Arabic post-Cold War exile novels that invite critical reflection on the loss of exilic belongings tied to the Soviet world. In the novel, an Iraqi poet, who has recently arrived in Sweden from Prague, Czechoslovakia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, finds a wallet containing a large sum of money. The poet (and narrator) re-imagines his new exile in Sweden through his search for the owner of the wallet and through the related question of how to distribute the money. As the narrative unfolds, the search begins to resemble the act of circling and pacing (ṭāf, yaṭūf ), a concept that frequently recurs in the novel. Ṭāf invokes both the haunting of the narrator’s past exile and political affiliations, and ṭawāf, the ritual circling around an empty center. Read alongside Derrida’s Specters of Marx the novel offers a compelling reflection on a critical juncture of Arabic literature. By comparing Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ to two other post-Soviet Arabic literary narratives of exile, Iqbāl Qazwīnī’s Mamarrāt al-sukūn (Zubaida’s Window: A Novel of Iraqi Exile, 2005) and Muḥammad Makhzangī’s Laḥaẓāt gharaq jazīrat al-ḥūt (Memories of a Meltdown: An Egyptian between Moscow and Chernobyl, 2006), this article considers the multiple ways that literary narratives have made exile and Marxist political affiliations objects of mourning. The spectral qualities of Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ subvert many of the post-Cold War narratives on national identity and the death of Marxism that the narrator confronts and, in the end, produce an ambiguous yet engaging reflection on migration and exile in contemporary Europe.
The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 2006
Of the fifty-eight men who were sent to the secret military prison Taz mamart for their implicati... more Of the fifty-eight men who were sent to the secret military prison Taz mamart for their implication in the 1971 and 1972 coups against the Moroccan monarchy, only twenty-eight lived to tell their stories. Almost a full third of the survivors would later publish memoirs that detailed the ...
A quick writeup of our March 2016 trip to Tampere, Finland, to see The Digital Hats Game, the fir... more A quick writeup of our March 2016 trip to Tampere, Finland, to see The Digital Hats Game, the first play by Helsinki-based Iraqi short story writer Hassan Blasim. This appeared on the Arabic Literature (in English Translation) blog on April 4, 2006.
The Finland-based Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim rose to international literary acclaim after publish... more The Finland-based Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim rose to international literary acclaim after publishing The Madman of Freedom Square and The Iraqi Christ. Blasim’s stories filter Iraq’s intricate and bloody recent history, including clandestine migration, through the narrative conventions of horror, sci-fi, magical realism and The Arabian Nights.
“What would it mean to open the borders in this age?” asks Finland-Based Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim. We sat down with Blasim in a Helsinki dive bar (because his favorite café was closed) on Good Friday 2016. We had come from Sweden to see and review Blasim’s debut play, The Digital Hats Game, at the Telakka Theater in Tampere. “I wanted to create an activist theater,” Blasim told us. In his writing and online activism, he has repeatedly called for an opening of borders as the most humane response to global inequities and the dangers that refugees face on migratory routes. The “white hat” hackers in his play make the same call. They hack into border security systems through a “Borders Game” to allow migrants to cross without depending on rapacious smugglers – only to discover the vulnerability of their own networked community.
Borders, as Blasim suggests, are a philosophical issue. Our conversation probed what it means to write from the perspective of borderless subjectivity. What happens when the borders between people break down? Can we imagine a world where national borders and identities are not policed? Blasim, who rose to international literary acclaim after publishing the short story collections The Madman of Freedom Square and The Iraqi Christ, has been exploring the building and crumbling of borders in his fiction for some time. His stories filter Iraq’s intricate and bloody recent history, including clandestine migration, through the narrative conventions of horror, sci-fi, magical realism, and The Arabian Nights, inviting comparisons to “masters like Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoyevsky” as well as Gogol and Garcia Marquez – a whole array of imagined ancestors in half a dozen languages who have stretched the borders of realist fiction and hammered out vital new genres.
Translated into English even before Arabic publication, Blasim is a quintessential child of world literature. (There’s even a Finnish scholar studying how his work circulates to his various audiences.) However, Blasim also challenges the Eurocentrism of the world literature prestige economy. In this conversation, he asks instead what it would mean for world literature to be truly global and for the novel to be completely transformed by today and tomorrow’s creative online culture. This concern for opening borders spills into other areas. For Blasim, literary texts are open. Reverence for literary figures is counter-productive. National identities are also open-ended and inconclusive. And somehow, he believes, fiction has power to grapple with contemporary challenges. His recent foray into sci-fi, editing a volume of short stories imagining Iraq in 100 years, is a gesture of hope.
The interview was conducted on March 25, 2016 in Arabic, in a register between Modern Standard and colloquial (a mix of Egyptian and Levantine). It was transcribed, translated, and edited for clarity and length by Margaret Litvin and Johanna Sellman.
At the height of the 2015–16 'refugee crisis', how were immigrants and refugees portrayed and sel... more At the height of the 2015–16 'refugee crisis', how were immigrants and refugees portrayed and self-portrayed on Finnish and Swedish stages? The production and reception of two plays translated from Arabic – Karim Rashed's I Came to See You (2015) and Hassan Blasim's The Digital Hats Game (2016) – reveal a complex politics of representation in both scripting and staging. Reading Blasim and Rashed's works in light of Arab–Nordic literary studies and migration theatre studies, we also set them against two other migration-themed plays staged in Stockholm: Swedish writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri's groundbreaking Invasion! (2006) and British playwright Anders Lustgarten's more recent Lampedusa (2015). Blasim and Rashed, we argue, had to navigate three traps or boxes endemic to Arab diasporic theatre: the audience expectations of biographical voyeurism, orientalism and the allegory of collective worthiness. Both aimed to reject the first two expectations and embrace the third, seeking to define new directions in Nordic–Arab theatre.
Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ: aḥlām waʿrah (Dancing on Water: Difficult Dreams, 2006) by Maḥmūd al-Bayyātī is... more Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ: aḥlām waʿrah (Dancing on Water: Difficult Dreams, 2006) by Maḥmūd al-Bayyātī is among a number of Arabic post-Cold War exile novels that invite critical reflection on the loss of exilic belongings tied to the Soviet world. In the novel, an Iraqi poet, who has recently arrived in Sweden from Prague, Czechoslovakia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, finds a wallet containing a large sum of money. The poet (and narrator) re-imagines his new exile in Sweden through his search for the owner of the wallet and through the related question of how to distribute the money. As the narrative unfolds, the search begins to resemble the act of circling and pacing (ṭāf, yaṭūf ), a concept that frequently recurs in the novel. Ṭāf invokes both the haunting of the narrator’s past exile and political affiliations, and ṭawāf, the ritual circling around an empty center. Read alongside Derrida’s Specters of Marx the novel offers a compelling reflection on a critical juncture of Arabic literature. By comparing Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ to two other post-Soviet Arabic literary narratives of exile, Iqbāl Qazwīnī’s Mamarrāt al-sukūn (Zubaida’s Window: A Novel of Iraqi Exile, 2005) and Muḥammad Makhzangī’s Laḥaẓāt gharaq jazīrat al-ḥūt (Memories of a Meltdown: An Egyptian between Moscow and Chernobyl, 2006), this article considers the multiple ways that literary narratives have made exile and Marxist political affiliations objects of mourning. The spectral qualities of Raqṣ ʿalā al-māʾ subvert many of the post-Cold War narratives on national identity and the death of Marxism that the narrator confronts and, in the end, produce an ambiguous yet engaging reflection on migration and exile in contemporary Europe.
The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 2006
Of the fifty-eight men who were sent to the secret military prison Taz mamart for their implicati... more Of the fifty-eight men who were sent to the secret military prison Taz mamart for their implication in the 1971 and 1972 coups against the Moroccan monarchy, only twenty-eight lived to tell their stories. Almost a full third of the survivors would later publish memoirs that detailed the ...
A quick writeup of our March 2016 trip to Tampere, Finland, to see The Digital Hats Game, the fir... more A quick writeup of our March 2016 trip to Tampere, Finland, to see The Digital Hats Game, the first play by Helsinki-based Iraqi short story writer Hassan Blasim. This appeared on the Arabic Literature (in English Translation) blog on April 4, 2006.
The Finland-based Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim rose to international literary acclaim after publish... more The Finland-based Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim rose to international literary acclaim after publishing The Madman of Freedom Square and The Iraqi Christ. Blasim’s stories filter Iraq’s intricate and bloody recent history, including clandestine migration, through the narrative conventions of horror, sci-fi, magical realism and The Arabian Nights.
“What would it mean to open the borders in this age?” asks Finland-Based Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim. We sat down with Blasim in a Helsinki dive bar (because his favorite café was closed) on Good Friday 2016. We had come from Sweden to see and review Blasim’s debut play, The Digital Hats Game, at the Telakka Theater in Tampere. “I wanted to create an activist theater,” Blasim told us. In his writing and online activism, he has repeatedly called for an opening of borders as the most humane response to global inequities and the dangers that refugees face on migratory routes. The “white hat” hackers in his play make the same call. They hack into border security systems through a “Borders Game” to allow migrants to cross without depending on rapacious smugglers – only to discover the vulnerability of their own networked community.
Borders, as Blasim suggests, are a philosophical issue. Our conversation probed what it means to write from the perspective of borderless subjectivity. What happens when the borders between people break down? Can we imagine a world where national borders and identities are not policed? Blasim, who rose to international literary acclaim after publishing the short story collections The Madman of Freedom Square and The Iraqi Christ, has been exploring the building and crumbling of borders in his fiction for some time. His stories filter Iraq’s intricate and bloody recent history, including clandestine migration, through the narrative conventions of horror, sci-fi, magical realism, and The Arabian Nights, inviting comparisons to “masters like Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoyevsky” as well as Gogol and Garcia Marquez – a whole array of imagined ancestors in half a dozen languages who have stretched the borders of realist fiction and hammered out vital new genres.
Translated into English even before Arabic publication, Blasim is a quintessential child of world literature. (There’s even a Finnish scholar studying how his work circulates to his various audiences.) However, Blasim also challenges the Eurocentrism of the world literature prestige economy. In this conversation, he asks instead what it would mean for world literature to be truly global and for the novel to be completely transformed by today and tomorrow’s creative online culture. This concern for opening borders spills into other areas. For Blasim, literary texts are open. Reverence for literary figures is counter-productive. National identities are also open-ended and inconclusive. And somehow, he believes, fiction has power to grapple with contemporary challenges. His recent foray into sci-fi, editing a volume of short stories imagining Iraq in 100 years, is a gesture of hope.
The interview was conducted on March 25, 2016 in Arabic, in a register between Modern Standard and colloquial (a mix of Egyptian and Levantine). It was transcribed, translated, and edited for clarity and length by Margaret Litvin and Johanna Sellman.
Uploads
“What would it mean to open the borders in this age?” asks Finland-Based Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim. We sat down with Blasim in a Helsinki dive bar (because his favorite café was closed) on Good Friday 2016. We had come from Sweden to see and review Blasim’s debut play, The Digital Hats Game, at the Telakka Theater in Tampere. “I wanted to create an activist theater,” Blasim told us. In his writing and online activism, he has repeatedly called for an opening of borders as the most humane response to global inequities and the dangers that refugees face on migratory routes. The “white hat” hackers in his play make the same call. They hack into border security systems through a “Borders Game” to allow migrants to cross without depending on rapacious smugglers – only to discover the vulnerability of their own networked community.
Borders, as Blasim suggests, are a philosophical issue. Our conversation probed what it means to write from the perspective of borderless subjectivity. What happens when the borders between people break down? Can we imagine a world where national borders and identities are not policed? Blasim, who rose to international literary acclaim after publishing the short story collections The Madman of Freedom Square and The Iraqi Christ, has been exploring the building and crumbling of borders in his fiction for some time. His stories filter Iraq’s intricate and bloody recent history, including clandestine migration, through the narrative conventions of horror, sci-fi, magical realism, and The Arabian Nights, inviting comparisons to “masters like Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoyevsky” as well as Gogol and Garcia Marquez – a whole array of imagined ancestors in half a dozen languages who have stretched the borders of realist fiction and hammered out vital new genres.
Translated into English even before Arabic publication, Blasim is a quintessential child of world literature. (There’s even a Finnish scholar studying how his work circulates to his various audiences.) However, Blasim also challenges the Eurocentrism of the world literature prestige economy. In this conversation, he asks instead what it would mean for world literature to be truly global and for the novel to be completely transformed by today and tomorrow’s creative online culture. This concern for opening borders spills into other areas. For Blasim, literary texts are open. Reverence for literary figures is counter-productive. National identities are also open-ended and inconclusive. And somehow, he believes, fiction has power to grapple with contemporary challenges. His recent foray into sci-fi, editing a volume of short stories imagining Iraq in 100 years, is a gesture of hope.
The interview was conducted on March 25, 2016 in Arabic, in a register between Modern Standard and colloquial (a mix of Egyptian and Levantine). It was transcribed, translated, and edited for clarity and length by Margaret Litvin and Johanna Sellman.
“What would it mean to open the borders in this age?” asks Finland-Based Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim. We sat down with Blasim in a Helsinki dive bar (because his favorite café was closed) on Good Friday 2016. We had come from Sweden to see and review Blasim’s debut play, The Digital Hats Game, at the Telakka Theater in Tampere. “I wanted to create an activist theater,” Blasim told us. In his writing and online activism, he has repeatedly called for an opening of borders as the most humane response to global inequities and the dangers that refugees face on migratory routes. The “white hat” hackers in his play make the same call. They hack into border security systems through a “Borders Game” to allow migrants to cross without depending on rapacious smugglers – only to discover the vulnerability of their own networked community.
Borders, as Blasim suggests, are a philosophical issue. Our conversation probed what it means to write from the perspective of borderless subjectivity. What happens when the borders between people break down? Can we imagine a world where national borders and identities are not policed? Blasim, who rose to international literary acclaim after publishing the short story collections The Madman of Freedom Square and The Iraqi Christ, has been exploring the building and crumbling of borders in his fiction for some time. His stories filter Iraq’s intricate and bloody recent history, including clandestine migration, through the narrative conventions of horror, sci-fi, magical realism, and The Arabian Nights, inviting comparisons to “masters like Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoyevsky” as well as Gogol and Garcia Marquez – a whole array of imagined ancestors in half a dozen languages who have stretched the borders of realist fiction and hammered out vital new genres.
Translated into English even before Arabic publication, Blasim is a quintessential child of world literature. (There’s even a Finnish scholar studying how his work circulates to his various audiences.) However, Blasim also challenges the Eurocentrism of the world literature prestige economy. In this conversation, he asks instead what it would mean for world literature to be truly global and for the novel to be completely transformed by today and tomorrow’s creative online culture. This concern for opening borders spills into other areas. For Blasim, literary texts are open. Reverence for literary figures is counter-productive. National identities are also open-ended and inconclusive. And somehow, he believes, fiction has power to grapple with contemporary challenges. His recent foray into sci-fi, editing a volume of short stories imagining Iraq in 100 years, is a gesture of hope.
The interview was conducted on March 25, 2016 in Arabic, in a register between Modern Standard and colloquial (a mix of Egyptian and Levantine). It was transcribed, translated, and edited for clarity and length by Margaret Litvin and Johanna Sellman.