Frankenstein in Baghdad

When Mahmoud did the layout for the magazine, he illustrated the article with a large photo of Robert De Niro from the film of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Mahmoud wasn't happy when he got a copy of the issue, especially when he saw that his headline had been changed.

“Frankenstein in Baghdad,” Saidi shouted, a big smile on his face. Mahmoud had been trying to be truthful and objective, but Saidi was all about hype.

Iraqi novelist Ahmed Saadawi won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for Frankenstein in Baghdad; which led to an English translation, a nod from the International Man Booker Prize for 2018, and it landing in my own hands. The prose here is terse and spare, the narrative walks a blurry line between journalism and allegory, and it would be hard to call this an enjoyable read, but I'll tell you this for nothing: If an Iraqi novelist attempts to capture what life was like for the residents of an American-occupied Baghdad circa 2005, the reading world ought to be interested in that. I was certainly interested, and while I'd consider four stars a rounding up, that reflects more my personal tastes than Saadawi's effort. Slightly spoilerish review to follow.

He went to the shed, which he had assembled out of scraps of furniture, iron bars, and sections of kitchen units he leaned up against the piece of wall that still remained, and squatted down at one end. The rest of the shed was dominated by a massive corpse – the body of a naked man, with viscous liquids, light in color, oozing from parts of it. There was only a little blood – some small dried patches on the arms and legs, and some grazes and bruises around the shoulders and neck. It was hard to say what color the skin was – it didn't have a uniform color. Hadi moved further into the narrow space around the body and sat down close to the head. The area where the nose should have been was badly disfigured, as if a wild animal had bitten a chunk out of it. Hadi opened the canvas sack and took out the thing. In recent days he had spent hours looking for one like it, yet he was still uneasy handling it. It was a fresh nose, still coated in congealed, dark red blood. He hand trembling, he positioned it in the black hole in the corpse's face. It was a perfect fit, as though the corpse had its own nose back.

Frankenstein in Baghdad revolves around a few central characters: Hadi is a junk dealer who, after his business partner was blown apart by a suicide bomber, decided to assemble a complete corpse to present back to the authorities in order to remind them that these random parts were once people; Elishva is an old woman who refuses to leave her home in case her son Danny – who was unwillingly conscripted into the Iran-Iraq War twenty years earlier and never heard from again – ever comes home; Faraj is an unscrupulous real estate agent who is trying to trick Elshiva (and other desperate home and business owners) out of their property; and Mahmoud is a journalist trying to make sense of all the strange stories being passed around the city's cafes and hotel lobbies – could there really be a monster stalking the streets of Baghdad? As soon as Hadi sews on that nose, the corpse is complete, and when a hotel security guard is vaporised by a truck bomb, his rootless soul finds and enters the vessel:

With his hand, which was made of primordial matter, he touched the pale, naked body and saw his spirit sink into it. His whole arm sank in, then his head and the rest of his body. Overwhelmed by a heaviness and torpor, he lodged inside the corpse, filling it from head to toe, because probably, he realized then, it didn't have a soul, while he was a soul without a body.

The immediate effects of this reanimation are: Hadi wakes up one morning to discover the corpse is missing, and when stories of the murderous, roaming monster begin to surface, he regrets how freely he had been in discussing his project in the local cafes and hotel lobbies; near-sighted Elshiva welcomes the monster into her home, gives him some of Danny's clothes, and tells the neighbourhood that her son has returned; Faraj feels thwarted in his efforts to get the mad old woman's house and begins to plot; Mahmoud follows the trail of stories, finding himself being given a behind-the-scenes view of the hidden Baghdad power structure as his personal prestige grows. And the monster: the monster is compelled to take revenge on behalf of the original owners of each of his body parts – which, in the beginning, seems a rational and humane motive for stalking and killing – but as he begins to gather a following who replace his rotting parts as they fall off, he experiences a type of mission creep; justifying the killing of random people because, “There are no innocents who are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal.” Even the book's title makes it clear that the metaphorical monster is a Western transplant – this is Frankenstein in Baghdad, not simply Baghdad's Frankenstein – and as an allegory for the chaos unintentionally unleashed on Baghdad's streets by Coalition Forces, this narrative works well. 

It would seem that much of this book can be read as an allegory, with frequent touches of Magical Realism: not only can an untethered soul reanimate a rotting, stitched-together corpse, but the Iraqi government has a Tracking and Pursuit Department – staffed with magicians and astrologers who can predict where the next suicide attack will occur – Elshiva's portrait of St George routinely comes to life, and even the monster employs magicians (and madmen) among his followers. In an interesting framing device, we eventually learn that Mahmoud sent all of his research to a novelist – referred to as “The Writer” – and it remains uncertain to what degree this author took literary liberties with the “facts” himself as he wrote the chapters of this book. In a late scene, it is revealed that the Tracking and Pursuit Department – whose astrologers actually do seem to have prognostic powers – is in fact a front for an Assassination Squad:

For a year or more he's been carrying out the policy of the American ambassador to create an equilibrium of violence on the streets between the Sunni and the Shiite militias, so there'll be a balance later at the negotiating table to make new political arrangements in Iraq. The American army is unable or unwilling to stop the violence, so at least a balance or an equivalence of violence has to be created. Without it, there won't be a successful political process.

Ah, so the unleashing of the actual monster was never an accident. Put aside the big literary structure, and Frankenstein in Baghdad is still a valuable portrait of the lives of ordinary citizens of 2005's Baghdad: war widows and grieving mothers; near-daily suicide bombings; business owners sinking into poverty as foreign dollars dry up; being roughed up and robbed by members of your own government; coming home to a big American soldier jumping out of his Hummer and saying you're not allowed onto your own street; Christians living peacefully beside observant and non-practising Muslims, the Jews only present in the “ruins” they left behind. There's a lot to chew on with this book, and I'm happy to have read it.