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language: Arabic (English tr. Jonathan Wright)
country: Iraq
year: 2013
form: novel
genre(s): speculative
dates read: 11.3.23-18.4.23
Fear of the Whatsitsname continued to spread. In Sadr City they spoke of him as a Wahhabi, in Adamiya as a Shiite extremist. The Iraqi government described him as an agent of foreign powers, while the spokesman for the U.S. State Department said he was an ingenious man whose aim was to undermine the American project in Iraq.
But what project might that be? As far as Brigadier Majid was concerned, the monster itself was their project. It was the Americans who were behind this monster.
Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, translated by Jonathan Wright, is really, really good. told from a wide range of perspectives — an elderly Assyrian Christian woman waiting for her son to return from the Iran-Iraq war, a junk dealer who unintentionally creates a monster, a journalist thrust into some high-level politicking he doesn’t fully understand, a government official in a department that uses astrology to predict bombings, and a composite man made of corpses and animated by the desire to avenge their deaths. and a bunch of other people whose perspectives appear in bits and pieces, including the author of the novel.
the book is thinking through a tangle of questions: what does vengeance accomplish? can a death truly be “avenged”? where is the line between “victim” and “criminal”? how can life continue in the devastation created by the invasion of Iraq? how do the realities of military occupation, of the violence and corruption that the occupation enables, become ordinary? how can someone “move forward” when the disaster is ongoing? it’s interested in the everyday absurdities of life under the conditions created by the occupation — suicide bombings, inexplicable and intransigent road closures, the ability of security forces to kill and torture with impunity, all of these things as the backdrop against which people are going to work, going to church, talking on the phone with their families, having sex, going to the bar, trying to continue to live their lives.
it’s also interested in the less everyday absurdities of the occupation government and elements of “civil society,” in particular journalism and the arts, ranging from petty corruption to massive fraud to interrogations to journalistic investigations of urban legends to the aforementioned department that uses astrology to predict bombings and trace the movements of “Criminal X,” “the Whatsitsname,” “He Who Has No Name,” Daniel — the Frankenstein’s monster (or Hadi’s monster) at the heart of the novel. Daniel — named by Elishva, the Assyrian woman, who believes him to be her long-lost son, brought back to her by St. George — is the thread that ties all of the other perspectives together: journalists report on him, junk dealers live in fear of him, government officials hunt him down, and Elishva prays for him to come home to her again. this is another of the novel’s theoretical concerns: how does a person become a legend? it’s also one of the ways the novel explores absurdity, through the three different cults that develop around Daniel as he moves through the streets of Baghdad in pursuit of a vengeance he doesn’t really understand.
it’s a captivating read.
moods: dark, reflective, tense