Frankenstein in Baghdad

“To make the stories he told more interesting, Hadi was careful to include realistic details. He remembered all the details of the things that happened to him and included them every time he recounted his experiences.” 

Of course, it’s easy to remember important details if you are the one manufacturing them. However, the phrasing also suggests that Hadi isn’t concerned with the truth of his stories—as far as he’s concerned, they are about generating interest, not about convincing his listeners.

“They all dreamed something about Hasib. Parts of one dream made up for parts missing in another. A little dream filled a gap in a big one, and the threads stitched together to re-create a dream body for Hasib, to go with his soul, which was still hovering over all their heads and seeking the rest it could not find.” 

This description is reminiscent of Frankenstein’s monster and foreshadows what this Creature will eventually become, which is precisely this kind of stitched-together being. 

“Apart from the crude stitches on [the corpse’s] face and neck, he looked almost like [Daniel]. The old woman had had that in mind. Given that her sight was definitely weak, when she came back into the sitting room she would see only what she wanted to see.”

Characters in the novel see what they want to see, not necessarily what is there. Elishva does this not once, but twice with Daniel—here, with the Whatsitsname, then at the end of the novel with her grandson. The novel doesn’t critique this practice; rather, it seems to support it, suggesting that truth is contextual. 

“Elishva knew what [Father Josiah] meant, of course, but she saw no harm in setting conditions for God, as Umm Salim and her other Muslim neighbors did. She didn’t see the Lord in quite the same way as Father Josiah did. The Lord wasn’t ‘in the highest’; she didn’t see him as domineering or tyrannical. He was just an old friend, and it would be hard to abandon that friendship.” 

Religion and spirituality are unexpectedly fluid in the book. Elishva in particular approaches her spirituality by taking what she wants from different religions, as she doesn’t appear to distinguish among them. It’s almost happenstance that she’s a Christian, apparently due to her Assyrian roots rather than an actual belief system. 

“Although [Faraj] had clout in the neighborhood, he was still frightened by the Americans. He knew they operated with considerable independence and no one could hold them to account for what they did. As suddenly as the wind could shift, they could throw you down a dark hole.” 

This is an interesting way to differentiate between forms of power. Faraj acts with impunity in other ways, including slapping aid workers and outright stealing houses he wants, yet he’s terrified of the Americans and shows them deference. Throughout the book, the American presence is felt more than seen, yet here we get a sense of the raw fear it inspires.

“Mahmoud clearly didn’t understand anything. He had imagined Saidi was friends with the Americans and the government; why did he want to embarrass them?” 

As with the above quote, power dynamics are rather complicated. As we’ll come to discover, Saidi ends up in exile, accused of stealing aid, while he claims he is being framed for his ambitions. This quote actually supports the latter reading, but more than that, it demonstrates that alliances in post-war Iraq are constantly shifting.

“But there were two fronts now, Mahmoud said to himself—the Americans and the government on one side, the terrorists and the various antigovernment militias on the other. In fact ‘terrorist’ was the term used for everyone who was against the government and the Americans. … ‘Aren’t [Majid and Saidi] both, in one way or another, working with the Americans?’ Mahmoud said.” 

This passage further reinforces the complicated nature of power dynamics. Mahmoud attempts to simplify it, but in his reduction, he only really serves to complicate it further because even the very terms begin to break down. 

“At the condolences ceremony people did their best to cite Abu Zaidoun’s virtues […] That’s how everyone wanted to remember him; death gives the dead an aura of dignity, so they say, and makes the living feel guilty in a way that compels them to forgive those who are gone.” 

Initially, this seems like it might be a critique, but it actually ties into a later argument the novel makes regarding innocence and guilt, even if Abu Zaidoun is not personalized in any way—the argument is that we are all innocents and criminals, so even if Abu Zaidoun died for his misdeeds, it is not inconsistent to remember the good parts as well.

“The story sent shivers down their spines. That spiteful woman had won people over with her story. It didn’t matter that it was made up; it was moving, and the reason they spent part of the day in the courtyard of Umm Salim’s house was to escape Bataween and its daily routines and float in another world.”

This connects with the question of narrative objectivity. The novel frequently suggests that the truth of a story is less important than what it conveys, and that this extends to our experience of the real world; here, the people are happy to accept the story because it entertains them.

“I’d go further and say that all the security incidents and the tragedies we’re seeing stem from one thing—fear. The people on the bridge died because they were frightened of dying. Every day we’re dying from the same fear of dying.”

This quote speaks to the power of fear. The logic of it is that we should naturally be afraid of some things, but when fear drives us, we end up succumbing to the same things in a different way.

“But Hadi adhered to a more imaginative formula—that the Whatsitsname was made up of the body parts of people who had been killed, plus the soul of another victim, and had been given the name of yet another victim. He was a composite of victims seeking to avenge their deaths so they could rest in peace. He was created to obtain revenge on their behalf.” 

It’s unclear by the end of the novel if this view is true, both because we don’t know if the stranger at the end is the Whatsitsname (and how much longer he survives) and because we don’t know if the Whatsitsname exists. If this is all a creation of Hadi, it’s only natural that his theory would be correct. 

“What’s worse is that people have been giving me a bad reputation. They’re accusing me of committing crimes, but what they don’t understand is that I’m the only justice there is in this country.” 

Spoken by the Whatsitsname, this statement conveys the flip side of permitting freedom with narrative objectivity—this means that how we see ourselves might not align with how others see us. What’s interesting is that the perception of him held by the people seems to be correct—the only question is in whether what he does is justified, not whether he is doing it. 

“They have turned me into a criminal and a monster, and in this way they have equated me with those I seek to exact revenge on. This is a grave injustice. In fact there is a moral and humanitarian obligation to back me, to bring about justice in this world, which has been totally ravaged by greed, ambition, megalomania, and insatiable bloodlust.” 

There’s an irony here, as elsewhere, in the way the Whatsitsname speaks about himself. He sees himself as a savior and the one true hope, the opposite of the criminal he’s been portrayed as. However, his charges against modern society include megalomania, ambition, and insatiable bloodlust, all of which could be reasonably ascribed to himself as well. Is the Whatsitsname the savior of society or an amalgamation of its ills?

“Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds—ethnicities, tribes, races, and social classes—I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen, [the young madman] thinks.” 

In essence, the young madman is literalizing the kind of unity the Whatsitsname seeks to achieve, if indirectly. This might also be read as a critique of a cosmopolitanism without a true sense of purpose or unity—a grotesque mish-mash constantly in danger of melting away rather than a truly unified and human body.  

“It looks like there’s a time factor. If you exact revenge for all the victims ahead of the deadline, then your body will hold together for a while and start to dissolve only later, but if you take too long, when you come to your last assignment you’ll have only the body part of the last person to be avenged.” 

This conclusion by the Magician, though disputed by the Sophist, is supported by the rest of the novel, and in any case is taken as truth by the Whatsitsname. But, in conjunction with the fact that body parts fall off once he has avenged them, this theory virtually guarantees that his mission will continue on forever—he will never be able to exact revenge fast enough; he will therefore always need to take on new missions of vengeance.

“You’re getting more and more like them. You’re trying to be one of them. Anyone who puts on a crown, even if only as an experiment, will end up looking for a kingdom.” 

Farid’s criticism of Mahmoud echoes the larger issues of power dynamics in the novel, in that power begets power. This is part of what complicates the mission of the Whatsitsname, as well—does he seek vengeance to right wrongs, or because he can? Does it matter?

“Amid the waves of pain, a voice in Hadi’s head told him that things would proceed as in an American action movie. His superhero would suddenly appear on the roof in the form of a dark hulk […] But that didn’t happen.” 

Here the novel reverses course a bit and brings Hadi back from fantasy into reality—whereas he usually lives in his own created worlds, no one comes to save him this time. Of course, if the Creature is real, we learn why shortly; if the Creature is a figment of Hadi’s imagination, that adds another interesting layer to his fiction.

“[Abu Salim’s son] told Hadi that the wounds on his thighs needed stitching, and he wasn’t good at that, but he could bandage them up till the morning, and the next day he should go to a nurse or a dispensary to have them stitched, and he shouldn’t move too much during the night so his condition didn’t deteriorate.” 

This passage is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, more overtly, Hadi is becoming more like the Creature as he gets repaired, even if he can’t get stitched. Moreover, it represents community coming together to aid one of their own in the face of government violence and oppression—even if it’s one of their own whom they don’t particularly like. 

“This was the realization that would undermine [the Whatsitsname’s] mission—because every criminal he had killed was also a victim. The victim proportion in some of them might even be higher than the criminal proportion, so he might inadvertently be made up of the most innocent parts of the criminals’ bodies.” 

This quote reinforces the theme of each of us carrying both innocence and guilt within us. The Whatsitsname’s mission relies on clarity between the guilty and the innocent, but as the novel progresses, those lines become increasingly blurred. 

“[Saidi] told [Nawal] [the film] would be about the evil we all have inside us, how it resides deep within us, even when we want to put an end to it in the outside world, because we are all criminals to some extent, and the darkness inside us is the blackest variety known to man. He said we have all been helping to create the evil creature that is now killing us off.”

This theme recurs throughout the novel, but only here is it distilled to its essence, and moreover through the philosophy of a central, enigmatic figure that had been previously undisclosed.

“There were people who had survived many deaths in the time of the dictatorship only to find themselves face-to-face with a pointless death in the age of ‘democracy’—when, for example, a motorbike ran into them in the middle of the road.” 

When the novel discusses progress, it does so in a more detached way, one that suggests that any kind of movement holds within it the possibility for absurdity. The scare quotes might suggest a critique of democracy here, but the larger critique seems to be in response to a belief that any system might make one immune to the dangers of daily life.

“Within an hour the brigadier realized the inquiry he had opened wouldn’t do any good—it might even put him and his department in the firing line from other branches of the government—so he closed it down and temporarily suspended the activities of the astrologers.” 

This is a different take on the theme of narrative objectivity. Initially, Majid wants to find out where everything went wrong, but when he realizes that might include portraying him and his department in a negative light, he decides subjective reasoning is better than an objective report. 

“Mahmoud thought back to his theory about the three kinds of justice, but he wasn’t convinced it was valid. It was anarchy out there; there was no logic behind what was happening. […] What mattered now was that he had broken free of a worry that had been weighing heavily on him.”

This quote reinforces the one above in that it suggests that systems don’t negate the dangers of daily life, particularly in unstable systems. The democracy that promises progress means nothing if the world is chaotic.