From Mobility to Confinement: Nightmare Realism, Ambivalent Space, and Heterotopia in Migration Literature in Hassan Blasim’s “Truck to Berlin”

Following the instability and political turmoil in Iraq since 1980, many Iraqis decided to flee from their countries. Hassan Blasim is one of the Iraqis who began his journey in 2000 to Europe and finally settled in Finland in 2004. Subsequently, Blasim as an Iraqi writer and filmmaker, presented the lived realities and complexities of migrants during their mobility through collections of stories. The most prominent of his works is The Madman of Freedom Square, and the story of Truck to Berlin is one part in that collection. This study examines Blasim’s Truck to Berlin through the lens of migration literature, focusing on how mobility is shifting into confinement within the narrative. Drawing on Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence, Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, Sellman’s framework of nightmare realism, and Fludernik’s narratological framework, the study analyzes how the truck functions as an ambivalent space that simultaneously embodies safety and threat, tranquility and turmoil, as well as life and death. Employing a qualitative methodology grounded in a constructivist paradigm, the study explores how narrative techniques such as focalization, narrative perspective, and discourse time construct migrants’ psychological and spatial experiences. The findings reveal that the truck is not solely a means of transportation but a heterotopic space where mobility is filled with uncertainty, and boundaries between reality and nightmare collapse. Eventually, this study argues that the co-presence of heterotopia, ambivalence, and nightmare realism in Blasim's Truck to Berlin is not a descriptive feature of the text but a structural argument. These frameworks illustrate that Blasim’s work fundamentally reorients the migration literature from a destination-oriented perspective toward a temporary space where migrant existence remains suspended and unresolved.