Frankenstein in Baghdad
Ahmed Saadawi
[Random House]
In her 2003 polemic, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag questioned the assumption that the shocking realism to which much modern war reportage aspires would automatically instil sympathy in those in whose name such wars were – and are – conducted. For Sontag, the ubiquity of such images instead banalizes and numbs. Perhaps another medium is required. As a form the novel might seem uniquely ill-equipped: it must approach its subject obliquely or through the more conspicuously mediated mode of language. And yet, as Ahmed Saadawi’s recently translated Frankenstein in Baghdad shows, the novel is far from being superseded by its technological cousin when it comes to conveying arresting imagery or capturing emotional depth.
Saadawi’s complex narrative blends both the comically grotesque – it trails the murderous peregrinations of ‘Whatitsname’, a mysteriously re-animated corpse and the hideous progeny of Hadi, a chronically mendacious oddball and junk dealer – and the blackly surreal: Elishva, a widow and suspected telepath supplicates to a talking icon of Saint George; four beggars are found dead, mutually asphyxiated, their ends choreographed and minatory; Hasib, a security guard, calmly searches for his own charred remains after a suicide-bomb attack. Tellingly, the latter vignette is followed by one of few episodes that suggest an albeit tentative optimism. In a graveyard scene redolent of George Saunders’ 2017 Booker Prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, Hasib is urged by a fellow spirit to repatriate his soul to his body:
Sometimes the soul leaves the body and you die, but the Angel of Death changes his mind and corrects the mistake that he has made, and the soul goes back inside its body. Then God commands the body to rise from the dead.
In a novel awash with allegory and metaphor, this proves especially poignant: Iraq’s soul is the sum of its parts, dispersed among those variously displaced, exiled, imprisoned and murdered in the wake of its wars. Perhaps they’ll one day return, and with them, something of Iraq’s plenitude. And yet, as the narrative progresses, Saadawi’s refusal of sanguinity – but never humour – seems ever more steadfast. Whatitsname continues to maraud, while stories flood in of ever more victims murdered and mutilated. A pattern emerges: the creature seeks revenge against those deemed responsible for Iraq and its people’s torments. Hadi’s monster is a brilliantly conceived metaphorical incarnation of foreign hubris, the tribalism it can trigger, and how violence begets violence. Saadawi later adds a vampirish conceit in that Whatitsname periodically self-dismembers and so requires replacement limbs; in the absence of ‘legitimate’ targets, it turns to innocents or those tenuously implicated for replenishment.
Saadawi is the first Iraqi writer to receive the Abu Dhabi-sponsored I.P.A.F (International Prize for Arabic Fiction). Jonathan Wright’s translation of his work is precise but never cold, a register which tends to heighten, rather than diminish, the many absurdities that punctuate the narrative. With Iraq’s afflictions appearing as internecine and intractable as ever, Frankenstein in Baghdad feels both timely and prescient – plaudits, we hope, that will soon no longer apply.
Words: Luke Warde
