Title: Frankenstein in Baghdad

Author: Ahmed Saadawi, translated by Jonathan Wright

Date of First Publication: 2013, 2018 (English translation)

Place of Publication: Penguin (English translation)

Type: Novel

Characters: No Character

Themes: ANDROID; RACE/POLITICS; POSTHUMAN; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER

Critical Summary: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad is set in post-war Baghdad—principally in the neighborhood of Bataween—and follows an ensemble cast of characters whose lives and stories become increasingly intertwined as a contemporary reimagining of the famous Creature from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein begins to haunt the city streets and the public consciousness. These characters include Mahmoud al-Sawadi, a young journalist who tries to live down his politically-tinged past while rising through the ranks of the controversial newspaper al-Haqiqa, Hadi, a junk dealer who assembles the Creature out of the blown-off body parts of bombing victims, Elishva, an old woman who communicates with a painting of Saint George the Martyr and who believes the Creature to be her son who went missing in the Iraq-Iran War, Brigadier Majid, the head of the Tracking and Pursuit Department who, with the help of his team of government agents and fortune tellers, tries to capture the Creature, and many more. The novel also follows the Creature itself, as it begins to kill the residents of Baghdad, amass a cult-like following (whose members cannot decide who or what the Creature really is and secretly all have their own agendas), and claim itself to be the first true citizen of the new Iraq.

The foremost analog between Frankenstein in Baghdad and Frankenstein are the Creatures. Like Shelley’s Creature, the Creature in Frankenstein in Baghdad is the only one of its kind, assembled from others’ body parts. And like Shelley’s Creature, this Creature also begins to question its rights, its place in society, and the nature of its own existence. As a highly political text, Frankenstein in Baghdad also seems to incorporate the composite nature of Shelley’s Creature for its own purposes and in its own ways, often in relation to the socio-political climate in post-war Iraq and the types of texts and stories to arise out of that socio-political climate. Like Frankenstein does with its multiple framing devices, Frankenstein in Baghdad focuses on questions and problems of writing and storytelling. Writing and storytelling seem to be at the crux of the novel for characters like Mahmoud, a journalist, Hadi, a teller of tall-tales, and Brigadier Majid, who employs fortune tellers in his attempts to track the Creature. For example, just as the veracity of the contents of Walden’s letters in Frankenstein cannot be verified, the veracity of the story the Creature captures on a digital recorder in Frankenstein in Baghdad is called into question by more than one character. But if the characters in Frankenstein, namely Walden, Victor, and the Creature, are inspired and driven to action by texts and stories, the characters in Frankenstein and Baghdad are left uncertain and come to standstills because of them. In a world dealing not with the aftereffects of a scientific endeavor gone wrong but instead with the repercussions of generations of scientific achievement used for destruction by the mechanisms of economics and politics, a level of skepticism towards the possibility of language to describe, express, and affect the outside world in a systematic and precise manner perhaps makes sense.

Administrative Notes: Kiyan Mullen, CSUF; Dr. David Sandner (editing)