Piecing the City Together: Studying Violence on the Land and the Body in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad
Ruth HeholtUnlike Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in Ahmed Saadawi’s novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), it is not only the body of the monster which is fragmented, broken and piecemeal. Rather, the source of horror in the novel is the brokenness of the city of Baghdad, torn apart by violence and war. In Saadawi’s text, when the creature made out of the body parts of bomb victims comes to life, we have a living palimpsest of the stories about the victims of the land. Frankenstein in Baghdad, therefore, situates the supernatural in the junction between the city and its people, scarred by war. In this paper, I will argue that Saadawi’s narrative of the supernatural interpolates and blends into the cultural and political history of the city of Baghdad in the period after the US invasion of Iraq. I will argue that the supernatural interacts with the memory of the city, piecing together its tumultuous past with the equally volatile and violent present. By doing so, I wish to show that the supernatural here is not merely a product of fantasy but an alternative method of recreating the history of a city riddled with the politics of violence.