Uhyggelig horror: Narratives of asylum in Hassan Blasim’s Nordic Stories

Iraqi author Hassan Blasim, who gained asylum in Finland in 2004, has written a number of short stories set in the Nordic region which have received little critical attention compared to his graphic stories centred on the horrors of the 2003 Iraq War. This essay traces narratives of asylum in Blasim’s Nordic stories across his two collections, The Madman of Freedom Square (2009) and The Iraqi Christ (2013), as well as his contribution to an anthology titled The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North (2017). It argues that these stories, which started to circulate in the global literary marketplace during a period of international interest in Nordic culture and politics, present a distinctive form of alienating horror through a sense of “uhygge” – the antithesis of the cosy comfort evoked by the internationally celebrated Nordic concept of “hygge” – as they interrogate the region’s evolving politics of immigration, expose an unequally distributed culture of cosiness, and self-reflexively highlight the complex positionality immigrant authors hold in relation to the region’s literary culture. It shows how the formal complexity of Blasim’s short stories and his subversive experiments with the generic conventions of Nordic noir heighten this sense of “uhyggelig horror” as they disorient and defamiliarise readers. Yet while Blasim’s stories expose exclusionary dynamics in the Nordic region, the essay also demonstrates how his writing has been increasingly incorporated into the region’s cultural brand. It concludes that Blasim occupies – and creatively exploits – an uhyggelig authorial position as he refuses to be cosily enclosed within the Nordic cultural brand.