Journal of Literary
Multilingualism 1 (2023) 225–239
brill.com/jlm
Published with license by Koninklijke Brill NV | doi:10.1163/2667324X-20230206
© Majstorovic, 2023 | ISSN: 2667-324X (online)
Writing and Unsettlement: Narratives of Migration
in Bekim Sejranović and Hassan Blasim
Gorica Majstorovic | ORCID: 0000-0001-7363-2672
PhD; Professor of Spanish and World Literature, Stockton University,
Galloway, NJ, US
Gorica.Majstorovic@stockton.edu
Received: 9 August 2022 | Accepted: 1 August 2023 |
Published online: 3 November 2023
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 ques-
tion 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.
Keywords
migration literature – literary multilingualism – Bekim Sejranović – Hassan Blasim
Introduction
Since the migration waves caused by the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, to the wars
of today, one of the most complex dynamics structuring the contemporary
world includes the contradiction between the free movement of capital and
the restricted movement of people. During the so-called 2015 migrant crisis
alone, more than one million people moved through Greece via the Balkan
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