Set in the earliest years of the twenty-first century, Abbas Khider’s A Slap in the Face confronts the complicated realities of the mass migration driven by conflict, poverty and the hope for a better life that has become such a definitive and disruptive feature of this new century. The novel opens with an actual slap across the face. The narrator, Karim, a young Iraqi refugee facing deportation from Germany, has accosted his caseworker in her office and taped her to her chair. Frustrated, anxious and unable to consider returning to his home country, what he really wants to do is force her to listen. Karim rolls himself a joint and launches into his story. Bound and silenced, Frau Schulz, as a representative of a dispassionate bureaucratic system, will now have no alternative but to hear him out:
Here you are. Helpless. All trussed up like a parcel. Sitting there in your expensive black leather chair. You were a goddess, a force of nature, exercising your authority over other people. I was at your mercy, but like a mythical hero I have risen up and stormed Olympus. And soon I’ll leave you to your tiny pen-pusher’s office again. You’ll be left sitting here, a lonely as a creator whose creatures have forgotten him. A god without believers doesn’t exist. That’s true of goddesses too. I’ll leave you behind and go away to a distant land.
What unfolds is one very human account of the complicated forces that can drive one man to leave his home and family behind, taking on, at great cost and risks, with uncertain hopes of success, a flight to a new land, together with a broader portrait of the haphazard expat communities that form in the limbo of an asylum system that can be painfully slow and impersonal. It is a story Khider is well suited to tell. Born in Baghdad in 1973, he was a political prisoner under Saddam Hussein. Upon his release in 1996, he fled, making his way through a number of countries before landing in Germany where has been living since 2000. Writing in German, A Slap in the Face (originally published as Ohrfeige; translated by Simon Pare) is his fourth novel.
Karim’s intended destination upon setting out from Baghdad is Paris where he has a relative, but in submitting to the whims of people smugglers, he finds himself dropped off on a rural road in Germany in the dead of winter. He manages to make his way to a train station where he is immediately picked up and placed in a windowless cell in Dachau. In retrospect he is relieved that he naively does not know the association of that location beforehand. He is terrified enough. From that point, he is funnelled into the confusing, often tedious, administrative system that will determine his fate, ultimately ending up in a small Bavarian town. Here he will build connections with a small group of fellow Iraqis, each carrying their own pasts and burdens that remain unshared. They exist as loose association of men bound by common country of origin, amid a fractious community of other refugees.
Woven into his account of the trials and tribulations that arise as he navigates the complicated asylum application process, periodically reminding Frau Schulz where she has played a role, Karim shares childhood losses and adult longings. Despite his momentary position of power, he comes across as a vulnerable figure, focused and determined but cautious to try to play by the rules. When he reveals the deep secret that lies beneath his initial desperation to head to Europe—an unexpected circumstance that I personally connected with in a way others might not—the space he occupies, slightly offside that of his peers makes perfect sense. He has a very unique reason to want to stay—one he has revealed to no one, least of all the officials at his asylum hearing.
However, 9/11 and the subsequent American invasion of Iraq upends his dreams. Everything changes almost instantly:
From that accursed day onwards, the main term used to describe us Arabs in Germany was ‘suspicious’. I would never have thought that terrorists hiding in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains could, by their attacks in the United States, plunge my life in the Bavarian town of Niederhofen into such disarray. That’s what you call globalization.
Caught up in the confusion of this rapidly changing atmosphere, Karim and his friends struggle with conflicted emotions as they watch broadcasts of the destruction being wrought on their homeland and worry about the safety of their families. Yet around them, fundamentalist passions rise among some, fueling bitter divisions within the expat community itself and further anxiety among the German population. But, once Saddam Hussein is neutralized, Karim finds that his contrived claim for refugee status no longer carries any weight, and his asylum status is revoked, but going back is not an option. He has too much invested in his hopes for a better—even normal—future. So with Frau Schulz as his silent witness, he is unburdening himself as he prepares to take flight again after three years in Germany.
A Slap on the Face offers a look at the reality of arriving in a strange land with little more than the hope for a better future. It does not glamourize the experience. The administrative roadblocks, the uncertainties, the poverty, the prejudice, the appeal of drugs or petty crime for some, and the loneliness or isolation for others all ring true. Karim’s story tumbles out—part confession, part diatribe—fueled by the frequent joints he rolls and his controllled contempt for Frau Schulz and the system she represents that has so heartlessly decided that his years of waiting and working hard mean nothing. It’s difficult not to like Karim, to feel his frustrations, and it is this connection that lends his narrative a such compelling, earnest urgency.
A Slap on the Face by Abbas Khider is translated by Simon Pare and published by Seagull Books.
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