Frankenstein in Baghdad

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-11

Chapters 12-15

Chapters 16-19

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 9 Summary: “The Recordings”

At the start of the chapter, Mahmoud is living in the more comfortable Dilshad Hotel. He is going over the story of the Whatsitsname, preparing to write it. The Whatsitsname originally returned to Hadi that night to kill him, as he held Hadi responsible for the death of Hasib, the hotel guard who left his post to chase Hadi away. Hadi attempted to argue and reason with the Whatsitsname to spare his life, but the Whatsitsname rebuked his arguments at each turn, though it was also clear to Hadi that the Whatsitsname wasn’t any more certain of his own actions.

The Whatsitsname didn’t intend to kill the beggars. As it turns out, they were already fighting when they saw the Whatsitsname and turned their fear and hatred on him. They began killing each other, then turned to the Whatsitsname, whom they would not have been able to overtake anyway. To the Whatsitsname, they wanted to die but hadn’t the means; the Whatsitsname gave them the means. The rest of the killings were out of revenge, beginning with Abu Zaidoun the barber to avenge Daniel’s death. Hadi, in talking to the Whatsitsname, determines that he is avenging the deaths of the people of whose parts he is made; he senses an opening and convinces the Whatsitsname to kill him last, since he doesn’t matter.

The night that Mahmoud gives Hadi the recorder, Majid’s men try to take the Whatsitsname in, but they fail. The Whatsitsname seeks shelter with Hadi; while he hides out, Hadi convinces him to take the recorder and tell his story. Ten days later, Hadi returns the full recorder to Mahmoud, who listens to it repeatedly over the next couple of sweltering nights at the Orouba hotel. He pitches the story to Saidi, who accepts it, but who also tells him to move to the Dilshad. Although Mahmoud tries to maintain a sense of objectivity in his story, Saidi sensationalizes it, even including a picture from the Robert De Niro version of Frankenstein. Majid reads the article and, concerned about the details, calls Saidi to find out the whereabouts of Mahmoud and have him brought in.

Chapter 10 Summary: “The Whatsitsname”

The Whatsitsname records his story. He says that he doesn’t have much time to complete his mission and is worried that he’ll dissipate before he can do so. He views himself as the savior of the people, “the one they were waiting for and hoped for” (142). He laments that he has been portrayed as a criminal, and he argues that the public has an obligation to support him in his mission.

He is living in Dora, in the south of Baghdad, in an area he describes as a battleground between the Iraqi and American militaries, the Sunni militias, and the Shiite militias. He is living with some assistants who support him: The Magician, who claims he was sent to the Whatsitsname by a djinn and who helps to keep the Whatsitsname safe; the Sophist, who is capable of arguing anything while not fully believing in anything himself; the Enemy, a counterterrorism officer who feeds him information; and the three madmen, all of whom believe him to be a prophet or savior of some kind.

The Whatsitsname goes on his missions at night, surrounded by battle and gunfire, equipped with forged documents to help his safe passage; when he returns, his assistants help restore his body. However, they begin to realize that unless he finishes his missions very quickly, he’ll begin to lose the body parts associated with completed missions and will therefore need to replace those parts to continue, taking on new missions as a result. The Whatsitsname believes he will finish his mission that night. However, while he is napping, his assistants decide to take parts from the victims of a firefight below. He feels a renewed vitality and completes his mission that night with ease.

As time passes, the three madmen each begin to amass their own followers, who believe in distinct versions of the Whatsitsname: The young madman believes him to be the first true Iraqi citizen; the old madman thinks he is a weapon of mass destruction “that presages the coming of the savior that all the world’s religions have predicted” (146); and the eldest madman believes he is the image of God incarnate (153). The three take up their own separate apartments across the building.

The Magician warns Whatsitsname that this development is not likely to end well, as it makes them more conspicuous. The Sophist argues that the Magician is just jealous and not to pay him any mind. By this time, the Enemy has been discovered and has disappeared. The Whatsitsname instructs his followers not to bring him “illegitimate” flesh, meaning the flesh of criminals. However, he is also aware that criminality is not necessarily clear-cut and sides with the Magician’s claim that “Each of us has a measure of criminality” (155). The Sophist, though, argues that the Magician only believes that because he, himself, was a criminal.

The rift between the Magician and the Sophist grows. One night, the Whatsitsname leaves to complete a mission. When he returns, he hears gunfire, which he presumes to be fighting between militias. At the same time, he begins to lose his eyesight and loses one of his eyes. With his one remaining eye, he spots a man walking down an alley toward him. He recalls the Magician’s claim that everyone is a criminal and decides to kill the man and take his eyes despite not knowing anything about him. When he returns, he discovers that the fighting was between the madmen’s followers. In the chaos, the Sophist murdered the Magician and disappeared, along with nearly everyone else. Only the young madman is left.

Chapter 11 Summary: “The Investigation”

Brigadier Majid’s men arrive at the Dilshad to escort Mahmoud to see Majid. In his office, Majid does not serve him the good, strong tea that was served at the previous meeting with Saidi, but rather a weak tea that he tells Mahmoud is an herbal mix designed to loosen people’s tongues.

Majid tells Mahmoud that he uncovered a complaint against Mahmoud from a year prior, when Mahmoud was living back home. A man of some influence accused Mahmoud of inciting murder through a story Mahmoud had written. Majid doesn’t know anything more than that, and he is unaware that was in fact on the cusp of Mahmoud’s shameful secret.

Majid instead turns the conversation to the story about the Whatsitsname, which Mahmoud insists is a fantasy concocted by Hadi. Majid doesn’t want to tip off Mahmoud that the story is real, but he nevertheless presses him for more information. Mahmoud, recognizing that the focus is shifting away from him, tells Majid where Hadi lives and offers a copy of the recording. Majid attempts to turn the conversation to other topics to make up for their unpleasant conversation, but Mahmoud has decided he can’t trust him. Before he leaves, Majid admits that the drink was just weak tea with something to prevent heart attacks, not a tongue loosener of any kind.

Later, the fact that Majid uncovered the earlier incident stays with Mahmoud. Back in Amara, following the arrest of a local criminal, Mahmoud wrote an opinion piece philosophizing about the need for criminals to face one of three kinds of justice eventually: legal justice, divine justice, or street justice (171). After the criminal was unexpectedly released a few days later, two masked men shot him dead, and act that Mahmoud understood as street justice taking the place of legal justice.

The criminal’s brother, known as the Mantis, took over the crime syndicate and held a special vendetta against Mahmoud, whom he believed was the cause of his brother’s death. After discovering Mahmoud’s familial identity, the dispute became one between clans, and at a tribal meeting, Mahmoud swore he would no longer work as a journalist in the province. This vow was insufficient for the Mantis, who now believed that legal justice had failed his brother and, as a result, swore to enact divine justice on Mahmoud. To protect himself and his family, Mahmoud left for Baghdad. Mahmoud calls his brother and asks about the Mantis, hoping to discover he’s forgotten about it all. On the contrary, the Mantis is now a senior official in the province, speaks frequently on the radio about the three forms of justice, and wants to erect a statue in honor of his brother.

At the magazine offices, Saidi tells Mahmoud that he will have to get used to dealing with Majid. Mahmoud grows uneasy, as the incident reminds him of the dealings he tried to escape back home. A week later, Saidi leaves for Beirut unexpectedly, leaving Mahmoud functionally in charge of the magazine. As time wears on, Mahmoud discovers that he’s becoming more like Saidi, even as he tries to convince himself that he isn’t.

Chapters 9-11 Analysis

The chapters in this section—in particular, “The Recordings” and “The Whatsitsname”—are the most narratively jumbled of the novel: They move back and forth without much warning or explanation, and the reader is frequently left to piece together precisely where in the actual chronology they might be. However, as the story is at its most structurally confusing, it becomes much more ideologically clear, as these chapters begin to elucidate the conflict at the center of the novel. These two elements work together in that regard, as this central conflict is the shifting nature of identity and morality. The Creature knows only that his mission is one of vengeance, but the purpose of that vengeance is not entirely clear to him—or to the reader. Some targets appear to be clearly on the wrong side (at least initially), but others, like Hadi, are less obviously bad people: Why does the Creature blame Hadi for Hasib’s death, when all Hadi seems to have done was be poor and lost in thought on the wrong side of the street?

It’s difficult to understand his mission as a righteous one when it is tainted by these kinds of inconsistencies, and this conflict is ultimately where the novel takes his crisis of identity, as he becomes more keenly aware of the grayness of morality: “Each of us has a measure of criminality” (155), the Magician tells him, and this will be repeated by several characters by the end of the novel. As he continues his missions, he embodies this criminality both figuratively, as he becomes driven more by pure vengeance than by righting wrongs, and literally, as his need for replacement parts necessitates taking them from criminals rather than those who died innocently. These acts might be understood politically as representative of how good intentions in a leader might ultimately degrade in an unjust world—what begins as a mission to aid a people quickly requires more and more concessions until the savior becomes as corrupt as those who came before. Out of belief in one’s own righteousness, however, the savior presses on—as the Creature recognizes that he will need to continue replacing parts ad nauseum and thus continue taking on never-ending missions.

Further reinforcing this metaphor is the fact that the Creature lives on the frontlines of several battlegrounds, both clear and hidden. At the start of his tale, he recognizes the overt battleground between government forces and two different militias, but he fails to recognize the battleground closer to him between his various followers. Strikingly, the novel demonstrates this similarity by showing us only the aftermath of the destructive battle, one that the Creature initially believes to be between the more traditional armed forces. His acolytes all see different things in him, though, leading to irreconcilable differences and, ultimately, bloodshed. This conflict is a mirror for what’s happening outside the compound’s walls, as it isn’t fundamentally different from the armies and militias—particularly the Sunni and Shiite militias, whose differences fundamentally lie in a difference in Quranic interpretation.

This conflict is also not fundamentally different from the qualms he has with others’ perspective of him—his acolytes may view him in a positive light but not necessarily as a positive, constructive force. Regardless, what frustrates the Creature is the fact that he cannot control his own image, and he feels that the image others have of him is incorrect. Truth is hard to pin down in this novel, though, and many characters experience something similar. For example, Saidi speaks ill of Majid to Mahmoud, suggesting that he’s the kind of duplicitous, dangerous man whom Mahmoud will have to get used to working with. However, this doesn’t square with the image of Majid that the narrator provides, in which Majid is impotent and overlooked, always just barely hanging onto work thanks to the few friends he has. Likewise, Mahmoud sees in Saidi what he wishes to see, believing that he is a fundamentally good person. Key to the novel is that none of these perspectives is ever fully confirmed or denied—we never see Majid put a bullet in an enemy, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t, and we never discover whether Saidi is a true believer of Mahmoud or is simply a con man trying to gather allies. In a sense, the truth is less important than the battle itself—it’s the instability that is important, not whose interpretation is right.

Although the novel is less concerned with the nature of technological progress than its source material was, the digital recorder stands in for this while connecting the concept of technological progress to the larger theme of storytelling, in particular in relation to an oral storytelling tradition. Hadi, for example, is a prolific storyteller but someone whose stories are ephemeral; he is spooked by the digital recorder when he is first visited by the two men in Aziz’s shop in part because he doesn’t trust them, but also likely in part because a recording would create a record in a way that oral storytelling typically does not. Mahmoud’s relationship with his digital recorder is more complicated: It’s an invaluable tool for him, but in part because pen and paper are reminiscent of a great loss of stories for him. The digital recorder is central in these chapters because it is the only way we get the Creature’s story—in the world of the novel, without this technology, the Creature’s story would never have made it to Mahmoud or the author. Further, the use of the digital recorder works to recall the epistolary nature of Shelley’s novel while updating it for the modern era.

In that and in other areas, the novel wrestles with tradition and progress. In this section, Mahmoud has moved from the Orouba to the more-comfortable Dilshad, and beyond representing a further loss for Abu Anmar, this move carries with it some immediate implications for him: First, it ensures that Saidi is able to inform Majid of his whereabouts, since he insisted on the Dilshad; and second, we see that Mahmoud’s signal to the clerk goes unheeded, suggesting that Mahmoud was expecting a familiarity with the clerk that he likely had with Abu Anmar—and which he does not have here.