Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

For the war to attack someone guilty it must also attack innocence. Rather than view any character as innocent or guilty, Saadawi attempts to highlight the duality in every character and in the city. Saadawi builds a narrative beyond just Frankenstein or his monster, but of the city itself. One military email leads to the reign of terror from Frankenstein’s monster. Reminiscent of the novel, Limbo Beiruit, Saadawi displays the way that citizens of Baghdad all affect each other and harm to one begets harm to many others. Soon the attacks mirror the war, destroying not just the perceived guilty, but everything in its path.Īs the attacks increase, Saadawi stitches in the stories of others of the city. The corpse disappears, just as people who were involved with the inception of the war are viciously attacked. His hope, to convince the government to treat the dead with respect and give them a proper burial. Hadi, a junk dealer, stitches together pieces of corpses that have been treated like the junk he peddles, into a single body. The war didn’t eradicate some evil, but rather simply destroyed whatever it touched good or bad. Saadawi shows how life, for some, remains somewhat the same, yet for others, life has changed all too much. The city, now a dichotomy of disparate pieces since the war, is a stranger. Ahmed Saadawi artfully tells the familiar horror story of Frankenstein’s monster in the backdrop of the US occupation of Baghdad.

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi