Frankenstein in Baghdad
September 25, 2021
Paige's Letters of Correspondence
SPOILERS!
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Manuscript: Sent
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TO: Paperbacker Podcast
From: Frankenstein in Baghdad
Dear Paige,
A terrorist in central Baghdad, blows up a hotel, killing dozens. A junk dealer sews these various scattered body parts back together again, and this body comes alive. A modern day Frankenstein, it's a hideous monster seeking revenge. The inhabitants of this city, numb to terrorist attacks, get a fresh taste of fear as a series of mysterious murders sweep the city within the shadows. This Frankenstein is a walking corpse of vengeance. But he's not to blame, not really. Soon he reaches a dilemma and things get out of control.
One such dilemma of Frankenstein or as they called him, Whatsitsname here:
The Whatsitsname was now at a loss for what to do. He knew his mission was essentially to kill, to kill new people every day, but he no longer had a clear idea who should be killed or why. The flesh of the innocents, of which he was initially composed, had been replaced by new flesh, that of his own victims and criminals. He thought if he took too long avenging the victims in whose name he was acting, the body parts he had taken from them would decompose in situ. It would be the end of him, and he would be free of this world. But he wasn’t sure this was the right choice either. He had to stay alive until he worked out what his next steps should be. And because he was an exceptional killer who wouldn’t die by traditional means, he thought he should exploit this distinctive talent in the service of the innocent—in the service of truth and justice. Until he was sure of his next steps, he would concentrate on ensuring his own survival. He would salvage the spare parts he needed from the bodies of those who deserved to be killed. It wasn’t the ideal option, but it was the best one possible for now. Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (pp. 200-201). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
My author knows much about these circumstances.
Ahmed Saadawi is an Iraqi novelist, poet, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. He is the first Iraqi to win the International Prize for Arabic Fiction; he won in 2014 for Frankenstein in Baghdad, which also won France’s Grand Prize for Fantasy. In 2010 he was selected for Beirut39, as one of the 39 best Arab authors under the age of 39. He was born in 1973 in Baghdad, where he still lives. Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (p. ii). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Translated from the Arabic to English by: Jonathan Wright in 2018 (originally 2013)
Please read my story. Before it's too late. Who knows if those deadly hands will turn to ripping apart books soon. If so, my time my be short.
Sincerely,
Frankenstein in Baghdad
[enclosed = manuscript novel]
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TO:
FROM:
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Dear Frankenstein in Baghdad,
Thank you for bravely reaching out to me about your story! My first reaction to your letter was your brilliant book cover emphasizing two aspects of yourself and your story: the body parts and the journalism. Although after that I became alarmed at what I was reading. And my first reaction was:
Why? Why would a person do that? Who would be so perverse as to sew dead rotting pieces of flesh together to create a new corpse?
And then I found some hints to this answer with Hadi the Junk Dealer, the man who sewed all those body parts together and thereby created the monster!
But there's maybe more to his story:
Can you please supply me with some more information about the events taking place within your pages?
Sincerely,
Paige
Paperbacker Podcast
What's with the Characters?
Dear Paige,
Here's a list of the characters. You should get to know some of the inhabitants of my pages before you judge my story too much.
Characters:
List of Characters
Abdullah: Mahmoud al-Sawadi’s brother, who lives in Amara
Abu Anmar: the owner of the dilapidated Orouba Hotel in Bataween
Abu Jouni: the janitor at the offices of al-Haqiqa magazine
Abu Salim: an elderly neighbor of Elishva and Hadi;
the husband of Umm Salim Abu Zaidoun: an elderly barber and ex-Baathist, held responsible for sending Daniel off to war in the 1980s
Adnan al-Anwar: a journalist at al-Haqiqa magazine
Ali Baher al-Saidi: a prominent writer, and the owner and editor of al-Haqiqa magazine
Aziz the Egyptian: the gossipy owner of the local coffee shop
Daniel: Elishva’s son, who disappeared in the Iraq-Iran war
Daniel (junior): Elishva’s grandson, the son of her daughter Hilda, who lives in Melbourne
Elishva: an elderly Assyrian Christian widow living alone in Bataween
Faraj the realtor: a small-time real estate manager who acquires properties in Bataween
Farid Shawwaf: a journalist who writes for al-Haqiqa
Hadi the junk dealer: creator of the Whatitsname
Hammu: the receptionist at the Orouba Hotel
Hasib Mohamed Jaafar: a hotel guard whose soul animates the Whatitsname’s body
Hazem Abboud: a news photographer and Mahmoud’s occasional roommate
Hilda: one of Elishva’s daughters in Melbourne; the mother of Daniel junior
Father Josiah: Elishva’s parish priest
Luqman: an Algerian man who lives in the Orouba Hotel
Mahmoud al-Sawadi: a young and ambitious journalist at al-Haqiqa
Brigadier Sorour Mohamed Majid: the head of the mysterious Tracking and Pursuit Department
the Mantis: a gangster politician in Amara
Matilda: one of Elishva’s daughters in Melbourne
Nader Shamouni: the deacon at Elishva’s church
Nahem Abdaki: Hadi’s late partner in the junk business
Nawal al-Wazir: a glamorous middle-aged film director
Ninous Malko: the head of an Assyrian family that stayed for a while in Elishva’s house
Sultan: Ali Baher al-Saidi’s personal driver
Umm Raghad: the madam at a local brothel
Umm Salim: an elderly neighbor of Elishva and Hadi; the wife of Abu Salim
Veronica Munib: a middle-aged Armenian woman who cleans the Orouba Hotel
Zaid Murshid: a journalist at al-Haqiqa
Zeina: a prostitute with a superficial resemblance to Nawal al-Wazir Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (p. vi). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Sincerely,
Frankenstein in Baghdad
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TO:
FROM:
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Dear Frankenstein of Baghdad,
Thanks!
Sincerely,
Paige
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TO:
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Dear Paige,
Our story begins with ELishva
Background
A correspondence about people, setting, and story
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TO:
FROM:
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Dear Paige,
Chapter 1 -3
The story starts with a bomb. Dismemberment of bodies scatter Tayaran Square in the city of Baghdad.
Elishva is an old woman living in in the Bataween district in Lane 7 of Baghdad, Iraq in a seven-room house with a cat, at a time where "Death stalked the city like the plague..." and her daughters in Australia call constantsly begging her to leave and join them. But Elishva holds onto a belief that her son, Daniel, is still alive, something nobody else shared a belief in.
Death stalked the city like the plague, and Elishva’s daughters felt the need to check every week that the old woman was okay. (1)
There's a supernatural auro that people sense in Elishva, not that it's real, but she appears to have a knack for avoiding disasterous incident such as suicide bombers. A special power called baraka.
Sometimes she might exaggerate and say openly in Elishva’s presence that if it weren’t for those inhabitants who had baraka—spiritual power—the neighborhood would be doomed and swallowed up by the earth on God’s orders. (3)
Two people disagreed, Faraj the realtor, and Hadi the junk dealer. Faraj always tried to get Elishva to sell her house. Hadi, in his fifties, and always smelling of alcohol, actually lives in an attached house with Elishva and wanted Elishva to sell her antiques to him so he could sell them for more. Both greedy characters "like cheap carpets with permanent ink stains". Hadi eventually gave up. But Faraj persisted.
Nobody really listened to her when she spoke about the son she had lost twenty years ago, except for her daughters and Saint George the Martyr, whose soul she often prayed for and whom she saw as her patron saint. (2)
Memorable Quotes:
Chapter 3-6:
Sincerely,
Frankenstein in Baghdad
Perspective:
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TO:
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Dear Frankenstein of Baghdad, Let's discuss...
I'd like to address some things with you.
Is the monster: Real or Fake?
Our fanaticism of Killers, Murderers, and Violent People
The meaning behind the words, and the body parts.
Here it says they caught the man. But did they?
Mahmoud asked about the Whatsitsname, whether he was really the criminal people were talking about. Aziz said it was all a “made-up story” and then told him about Nahem Abdaki, the close friend, partner, and companion that Hadi had lost in an explosion at the beginning of the year. Hadi had lived through many disasters, but after a while he turned everything into amusing stories.
“The Whatsitsname that Hadi talks about is in fact Nahem Abdaki, may he rest in peace,” he added.
“How could it be him?” asked Mahmoud. Aziz explained that after the explosion, Hadi had gone to the mortuary to collect the body because Nahem didn’t have any family other than his wife and young daughter. Hadi was shocked to see that the bodies of explosion victims were all mixed up together and to hear the mortuary worker tell him to put a body together and carry it off—take this leg and this arm and so on.
Hadi collected what he thought was Nahem’s body, then went to the Mohamed Sakran Cemetery with Nahem’s widow and some neighbors. But Hadi was changed after that. He didn’t speak for two weeks, after which he went back to laughing and telling stories, and when he told the Whatsitsname story at Aziz’s coffee shop, Aziz and some of those sitting there knew that Hadi had written Nahem out of it and put the Whatsitsname in his place. Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (pp. 221-222). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
How could you catch a monster like this?
Sincerely,
Paige
Paperbacker Podcast
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TO:
FROM:
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Dear Paige,
Yes, the events within my pages are as fascinating as they are unbelievable. You ask how could they catch a monster like this? There was some reporting on the television, look here:
The government says this,
On February 21, 2006, the supreme security commanders in Baghdad announced they had finally arrested the dangerous criminal that official reports called Criminal X, and that the public called the Whatsitsname, along with many other names. They projected a large picture of him on a big screen and announced his name: Hadi Hassani Aidros, a resident of Bataween and commonly known as Hadi al-Attag, the junk dealer. Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (p. 278). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Sincerely,
Frankenstein in Baghdad
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TO:
FROM:
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Dear Frankenstein in Baghdad,
Clearly the monster must have been real! But Hadi? Impossible. The murders, the strength, surely Hadi was too pathetic and weak to do that. He only Then there was that old fortune teller.
I believe it was fake. They had to arrest someone, so they chose Hadi. Just like people do in our everyday lives, we look for scapegoats. We look for what's believable than for what's true.
The fortune teller says this:
During his slow death throes on the desolate street, he would be wholly convinced that it was a composite face, made up of faces from his distant past. It was the face of his own personal past, which he had thought had no face or features. Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (p. 258). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Then, the monster's attitude about his role as a killer was interesting as well:
“There are no innocents who are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal.” Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (p. 214). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
“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. He didn’t want to perish without understanding why he was dying and where he would go after death, so he clung to life, maybe even more than others, more than those who gave him their lives and parts of their bodies—just like that, out of fear. They hadn’t fought for their lives, so he deserved life more than they did. Even if they knew they couldn’t prevail against him, they should at least have fought back. It wasn’t honorable to surrender in battle, and what a battle! It was a battle to defend their lives, the only battle worth fighting in this life. Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (pp. 267-268). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
What I believe, dear fellow book... The monster was real, and also a figurative reality or representation of one. In a city full of bombings and death on a seemingly weekly basis, with all the conflict, it seems the creature is a constantly morphing reflection of ourselves. A victim becomes a criminal and therefore then the criminal becomes the victim. Revenge fueled the monster and the people. And while we all want to blame this monster, it's in fact nothing on it's own. It's in fact all of us. We create the many disasters and pain and suffering in our world. If the monster let the revenge go, the victims lay and rests, then his cycle of victim/revenge would have eventually ceased to exist.
The monster was us.
He told her it 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. Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (p. 227). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Once he got there, he noticed his reflection in the mirror above the sink. The fire had completely disfigured him. He had realized this days earlier, when he came out of the coma and saw the pattern on the skin after the bandages had been removed, but he had expected his face to be in better condition. He was a horrible creature, and even if he made a full recovery he would never look the same as before. In shock, he wiped his hand along the surface of the mirror to make sure it was really a mirror and then leaned in to examine his disfigurement. He wanted to cry, but all he could do was stare. As he looked closer, he detected something deeper: This wasn’t the face of Hadi the junk dealer; it was the face of someone he had convinced himself was merely a figment of his fertile imagination. It was the face of the Whatsitsname. Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (p. 267). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This Frankenstein had fanatic followers
We're talking cult status.
Could it mean, we worship or praise the strong killers of the world. Because often a killer is only the killer in the eyes of those being killed. A soldier is a hero to others and killer to some. And indeed, like a good soldier, he operates mostly on orders and the desire to understand himself and life.
How many examples do we see of people loving criminals, or dangerous men in the world? Leaders, ufc fighters, serial killers, they all get their fans. We applaud violence in our movies but cringe when it’s instead sex and nudity then spew “it’s sexism” rhetoric, Game of Thrones for example. Yet violence and sex are both equal in our lives. And both create effects just as strong as the other. So why do we favor one over the other?
Maybe we love violent men because they seem to control a thing none of us have control over. Chaos. Or our death.
And for our characters in Baghdad, it can come at any moment, from a sudden suicide bomber, the hands of government officials, or even from the hands of a Frankenstein monster.
What's with the body parts?
Dear Paige, speaking of hands...
“And I want the playing cards you were using to search for me. And I want those hands of yours as well.” Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (p. 257). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
There's a focus on hands at some points throughout this book.
I find it curious the monster takes the hands of that fortune teller, the one who does see the future by using his cards, since it’s hands that held the power and why the monster wanted them. And there's the hands of a suicide bomber whose hands are on the button. While the first set told the future, the second set here took it away. They erased it through death. So hands have the power to do both, to shape our future, or end the possibility of our future, a.k.a. death. Let's notice the monster’s favorite killing style is strangulation. And Hadi as well as the monster’s followers use their hands to sew body parts back onto the monster. No hand is innocent in this book.
What's the deal with all these hands?
um...
We all "have a hand" in the problem?
Haha! Too easy. But it is repetitive that “we created this” is mentioned in the book about the Frankenstein. So maybe the use of hands is an important motif for some of those reasons.
Takeaway Chapter 1
A bunch of people vs. people.
Faraj vs. Abu Anmar. Realtor vs. Hotel. Hadi and Elishva, the junk dealer trying to get her antiques vs. Elishva who hereself is almost an antique. Terrorists bombing the city making it a terrorists vs. the city. There seems to be battles raging in every corner.
Faraj is the biggest douchebag of the lot.
Faraj had taken advantage of the chaos and lawlessness in the city to get his hands on several houses of unknown ownership. He turned these into cheap boardinghouses, renting the rooms to workers from the provinces or to families displaced from nearby areas for sectarian reasons or because of old vendettas that had come back into effect with the fall of the regime. (4)
No one in this chapter appears to be doing well. And the violence in the area only makes it worse.
(1) Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (p. 6). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
(2) Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (pp. 7-8). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
(3) Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (p. 9). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
(4) Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad (p. 12). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.