Grief and Embodiment in Ahmed Saadawi’s “Frankenstein in Baghdad”
I could write a great piece on how Ahmed Saadawi adapts Shelley’s groundbreaking novel for a contemporary, post-war Iraq. I could focus on the similarities between the two novels, the concept of grafting and adapting classic European literature for an increasingly globalized audience, or the way Saadawi’s novel fits into certain hallmarks of the Gothic in the context of “literature” as a whole.
I am not going to do any of that.
Just as the novel’s irresolute protagonist balks at the journalists referring to his creation as “a Frankenstein in Baghdad”, I, too, take issue with examining this novel as purely an adaptation of a previous work. It stands alone in many ways: a reverent examination of grief and trauma in a people not often revered in the North American literary landscape.
Frankenstein in Baghdad is a heartwrenching ode to violence; the aforementioned monster is simply an accident of well-intentioned internment gone awry. What happens when the corpses you bury voice their thoughts on their funeral?
Set in U.S.-occupied Baghdad, with car bombs going off with alarming regularity, local junk-collector and known eccentric Hadi begins to collect the body parts that lay strewn in the streets at the end of each day—the aftermath of each day’s acts of war.
He feels these parts—all of them bits of former humans—deserve a proper burial. No one inters pieces of corpse, after all.
In fragmentation, they are no longer treated as human.
To combat this, Hadi begins stitching together the intact pieces he finds into one singular corpse. This corpse at least resembles a human, fully whole and in the flesh, and is so deserving of a real burial. He plans to leave the corpse somewhere the police will find it when it is finished. Maybe they won’t notice the stitch marks and it—they—can be laid to rest.
A freak lightning storm animates the Whatsitsname (as Hadi calls it), and it escapes, presumably to haunt the streets. Not only does this lightning storm give the thing sentience, it gives the thing a burning desire to avenge the various people that make up its now-living flesh.
SPOILERS BELOW
“The rest of the shed was dominated by a massive corpse—the body of a naked man, with 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… 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 had a fresh nose, still coated in congealed, dark red blood. His hand trembling, he positioned it in the black hole in the corpse’s face. It was a perfect fit, as if the corpse had its own nose back.”
As the pandemic rages on and we once again find ourselves in a new and seemingly hopeless wave of illness, the beautiful mundanity with which Saadawi treats abject horror is, at least for me, cathartic. The privileged of the Global North are finally getting a sense of what it is like for areas of the world that are ravaged by violence for long periods of time, which, I would hope, leads to some empathy in understanding how we (our media and our discourse) treat people who have been under duress for much longer than we have.
North American media seems to oscillate wildly between vilification and victimization in its coverage of war (particularly in Iraq, where nonwhite bodies are deeply impacted), and Saadawi’s plain, almost deadpan reporting of the novel’s violence is refreshing. It does not attempt to evoke any sort of pathos. It simply is.
“Nahem didn’t live long enough to find out whether his head of hair would last as Hadi always predicted. By the time Hadi sat in Aziz’s coffee shop with Mahmoud al-Sawadi and some old men, telling more of his story, Nahem had already been dead for several months—from a car bomb that had exploded in front of the office of a religious party in Karrada, killing also some other passersby and Nahem’s horse. It had been hard to separate Nahem’s flesh from that of the horse.” (24-25)
Hadi’s anger bleeds into reverence in his very human quest to find a tangible transmutation for ongoing and increasingly existential loss. Desensitization to the level of violence he has become accustomed to is, in and of itself, a crisis of embodiment—both for himself and the very literally disembodied people he grieves for. Giving a face to grief is quite literal in this novel, and Saadawi delivers an interesting question with it: does giving a face to grief help those who have passed? Or is it simply a selfish way for those left behind to find some kind of physical purchase on an emotion that should, as all emotions should, remain supremely transient?
As with all open-ended questions, I must leave you to your own musings, but I will offer mine as a potential spark of thought.
Embodying grief and giving a body to grief are two different exercises with fundamentally different outcomes. Saadawi’s examination of giving a body to grief ends with the grief itself transmuting into something far less controllable: rage.
‘“My face changes all the time,” the Whatsitsname told the old astrologer that night. “Nothing in me lasts long, other than my desire to keep going. I kill in order to keep going.” This was his only justification.’ 267
As such, there is latent caution in the words of the Whatsitsname. To live through your grief, you must put an end to it. Embody it, do not allow it to become embodied, for in doing so you give it power, sentience, and potentially, a mind of its own.
Perhaps there is power in the mundanity of horror. Keeping it raw and plain invites soothing, not mending. Internment does not (and nor should it) always require the dying act of a body.
