Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi Colin Cutler (bio) frankenstein in baghdad Ahmed Saadawi, trans. Jonathan Wright Penguin Books https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/529924/frankenstein-in-baghdad-by-ahmed-saadawi/ 288 pages; Print, $18.00 I grew up on and around Air Force bases, and was twelve when I watched the Twin Towers fall; my dad's flight out of Offutt Air Force Base was grounded while they were taxiing. Six years later, my older brother was in Iraq with the Army as part of the surge, and I signed up for Army ROTC the next year—I eventually became an infantry officer with the Virginia National Guard. While I was in training, I read books about our current wars: Lone Survivor and House to House stand out in my memory. The main thing that I remember is the intensely personal detail about fellow soldiers, down to their hobbies and quirks, and the relative facelessness of those they ran across in the course of their missions, whether combatant or noncombatant or in that murky area between. When I first read Frankenstein in Baghdad a few years ago, it was a revelation: here were the faces of the Iraqi people who lived through a war that went on around them and sometimes cut through them, punctuating their lives with the uncertainty of bullets and suicide bombers and vehicle-borne IEDs. Part magical realism, part war story, part political intrigue, part neighborhood drama, Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad is set in the cracked-windowed suburbs of Iraq's capital in 2005. It revolves around an aspiring journalist, an Assyrian Orthodox widow with her ikon of St. George, an arak-drinking junkman, and the corpse the junkman stitches together from the unburied body parts of IED victims. Winner of the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, with the English translation shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, Frankenstein in Baghdad is an eviscerating look at America's most recent wars through the eyes of those who lived through them as bystanders. [End Page 27] The book opens with a bang. Starting off with an IED may be initially shocking to the reader, but two hundred yards from the exploding bomb, a widow continues on her way to prayer at the Orthodox church and doesn't notice. Similar scenes throughout the book display the randomness of violence in a war zone and how it is absorbed into daily life. This, in turn, contributes to a pervadingly dark humor both among the characters and in the narration. The cordons are inept at catching a monster terrorizing the neighborhood, and the intelligence directorate attempting to catch the monster relies on astrologers for its assessments. Faces and their transformation are crucial to the book. Elishva, the Orthodox widow, is in nearly constant conversation and negotiation with her ikon of St. George the Martyr and his "angelic face" for the return of her son, lost in the Iran-Iraq War two decades before. When she believes she has finally received her wish, she cuts the face out of the portrait. Hadi, the junkman who stitches together the pieces of IED victims because the police will only bury complete bodies, creates a monster—and is later shocked when his own face is burned and turned into a grotesque. Meanwhile, when the monster begins his forays for vengeance, he is only known as having a deformed face. At one point, a cordon is formed around the neighborhood by the Iraqi and US militaries, and Mahmoud, the journalist, realizes that "what … all [the detainees] had in common … was that they were ugly. Some had genetic defects, others had been disfigured by burns, and others seemed to be insane." When one of the astrologers encounters the Whatsitsname, he asks to see his face. The monster responds, "What's the point of that? It changes. I don't have a permanent face." But the astrologer's wish is granted, and he believes "it was the face of his own personal past, which he had thought had no face or features." What he realizes, with the brutality of an axe blow, is that even those who are trying to solve...