Writing and Unsettlement: Narratives of Migration in Bekim Sejranović and Hassan Blasim

Abstract

Abstract The present article focuses on unsettling language and place in texts by two contemporary migrant writers, Hassan Blasim (Iraq-Finland) and Bekim Sejranović (Bosnia-Norway). They fled war-torn areas while leaving a remarkable textual trace in Sejranović’s Diary of a Nomad (2017) and Blasim’s “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes” (2014). This article addresses the ways in which these authors engage migrant multilingualism and question the ethics of exploiting migrant lives as material for media consumption. It argues that their writings are politically engaged counternarratives that are boundary-crossing because they problematize disciplinary, linguistic, and narrative borderlines.