#135 = Volume 45, Part 2 = July 2018
SPECIAL ISSUE ON FRANKENSTEIN (Edited by Michael Griffin and Nicole Lobdell)
Sinéad Murphy
Frankenstein in Baghdad: Human Conditions, or Conditions of Being Human
Isn’t life a blend of things that are plausible and others that are hard to believe? —Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad (277)
Hadi “had spent hours looking for one like it, yet he was still uneasy handling it. It was a fresh nose, still coated in congealed, dark red blood. His hand trembling, he positioned it in the black hole in the corpse’s face. It was a perfect fit, as if the corpse had its own nose back” (Saadawi 26). Such is the grisly corporeality with which Ahmed Saadawi reimagines Mary Shelley’s iconic creature in Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013, trans. 2018).1 Set in 2005-2006, Saadawi’s narrative sees Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory exchanged for the ramshackle squat dwelling of an alcoholic junk dealer named Hadi, whose collecting has extended to the body parts of human victims of car bombings in Baghdad. Suturing these dismembered limbs together to form a complete body, Hadi creates what he calls the shesma, an Iraqi Arabic word roughly translating to “Whatsitsname.” The Whatsitsname is an abject rendering of Shelley’s creature, his piecemeal body functioning as a macabre analogy for the thousands of civilian Iraqi deaths during the US 2003 invasion and the Iraqi civil war that followed. In 2014, Saadawi became the first Iraqi writer to win the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for Frankenstein in Baghdad. Often referred to as the “Arab Booker,” the award—and the broader landscape of contemporary Arabic fiction—has been dominated by realist narratives, so Saadawi’s win is a surprising acknowledgment ineof the recent surge in speculative fiction from across the Middle East and North Africa generally. Journalist Marcia Lynx Qualey claims that the accolade has had a confounding effect not necessarily on writers, but on publishers; reporting on the ceremony at which the prizewinner was announced, she contends that “as Saadawi celebrates, Arab publishers will be trying to read the IPAF tea leaves anew” (2014).2
Frankenstein in Baghdad. While living in a makeshift dwelling attached to the house of an elderly woman named Elishva, Hadi is motivated to create the Whatsitsname following the death of his friend Nahem in a car bomb explosion in Karrada. The indiscriminate savagery of warfare pervades Hadi’s narrative—he recounts, for instance, that it had been difficult to separate Nahem’s flesh from the horse he had been riding (24). The trauma of this experience drives Hadi to reconstruct a complete body “so it wouldn’t be treated as trash, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial” (27). No sooner is the Whatsitsname formed than another explosion occurs in the city, this time detonated by a Sudanese suicide bomber, and resulting in the death of a hotel guard named Hasib Mohamed Jaafar (35). The narrative moves into a fantastical mode in which Hasib narrates posthumously, describing his soul’s disoriented search for his body. Roaming the streets of Bataween, he makes his way into Hadi and Elishva’s house, stumbling upon the Whatsitsname, where:
with his hand, which was made of primordial matter, he touched the pale, naked body [the Whatitsname] and saw his spirit sink into it. His whole arm sank in, then his head and the rest of his body. Overwhelmed by a heaviness and torpor, he lodged inside the corpse, filling it from head to toe, because probably, he realized then, it didn’t have a soul, while he was a soul without a body. (40)
Unaware of the provenance of the Whatsitsname’s body, Hasib waits for its family to arrange its burial, hoping that his soul will then be at rest. Upon seeing him, however, Elishva mistakes the Whatsitsname for her long-lost son Daniel, who never returned from his military service in the Iran-Iraq war twenty years previously. Elishva is well known in the neighborhood, as “[m]any of the local people believe that, through her spiritual power, Elishva prevented bad things from happening while she was among them” (11). In similarly mystical language, Saadawi describes how the Whatsitsname is “brought to life” by Elishva: “with her words, the old woman had animated this extraordinary composite—made up of disparate body parts and the soul of the hotel guard who had lost his life. The old woman brought him out of anonymity with the name she gave him: Daniel” (53). This misrecognition connects the animated corpse formed in post-2003 conditions of war with the ten-year conflict between Iraq and Iran, gesturing to a longer history of sectarian violence in Iraq over the past several decades.
The Whatsitsname embarks on a mission to avenge the deaths of those whose bodies he is comprised of, claiming that Hasib’s soul demands retribution (129). The purpose of his mission goes unknown to all but Hadi, however, and the Whatsitsname becomes more popularly known as “Criminal X,” “He Who Has No Identity,” or “The One Who Has No Name”: “the television channels were covering the criminal almost every day, showing Identikit drawings of his face, with a caption stating the reward for anyone who provided information leading to his arrest.... The criminal was a television star, and when the brigadier caught him, he too would immediately become a celebrity” (209). Frustrated by the misunderstanding of his undertaking, and with the sensationalism it has attracted, the Whatsitsname expands his mission to include “taking revenge on people who insult me, not just on those whose body parts I’m made of” (185). At the same time, the Whatsitsname’s body begins to decompose piece by piece, and in his constant need to replace his body parts, the Whatsitsname.
realized that under these circumstances I would face an open-ended list of targets that would never end.
Time was my enemy, because there was never enough of it to accomplish my mission, and I started hoping that the killing in the streets would stop, cutting off my supply of victims and allowing me to melt away. (153)The Whatsitsname’s “mission” quickly spirals out of control, and his required “supply of victims” slides rapidly into a production of victims who bear no connection to his original plan of vengeance. He accrues groups of dedicated followers, each of whom is eager to supplant the Whatsitsname’s mission in service of their specific ideology. A hierarchy of power develops: the three “assistants” closest to the Whatsitsname are “The Sophist,” “The Magician,” and “The Enemy,” with those less important to him being “the young madman,” “the old madman,” and “the eldest madman”—that these are caricatures rather than fully-developed characters is reinforced by their omission from the extensive list of named characters provided in the novel’s opening paratext. Saadawi's nomenclature satirizes the Ba’athists’ “clannish and personalized system” based on “the patronage and inclusion of selected individuals and groups from known communities” (Tripp 263)—an arrangement that sought to suppress any opposition to Saddam Hussein’s presidency. The violence incited by these “assistants” allegorizes the “political institutionalization of sectarian, ethnic and religious infighting” (Abu Manneh 1) following the removal of Hussein from power.
Frankenstein in Baghdad is populated by a diverse cast of characters and spends much of its time pursuing subplots surrounding Hadi, Elishva, and the journalist Mahmoud al-Sawadi. Though serving as a key point of convergence, the Whatsitsname himself is absent for long stretches of the text. This narrative strategy highlights the complex ethno-religious background against which the action takes place. Saadawi’s narrative is concentrated in the Bataween district—“a tapestry of different sects, faiths and ethnicities” that “sprawls across central Baghdad between Tahrir Square and Firdos Square, where liberated Iraqis, with an assist from American Marines, dragged down a statue of Saddam Hussein in 2003” (Arango). By doing so, Saadawi enacts what Fredric Jameson might describe as world reduction—a “radical abstraction and simplification” (271) of post-war Iraq, expressing that “the Iraqi reality itself is monstrous and irrational” (Bahoora 188).
The Living Dead and Unliveable Life. Adaptations of Frankenstein abound and vary to a significant degree, and Shelley’s original creature has been reworked as a symbol for all manner of fears and anxieties. In Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974), the sheer prominence of Frankenstein in popular culture forms a plot element of the film. Brooks’s rendering sees Dr. Frederick Frankenstein—grandson of Shelley’s Victor—make frustrated attempts to distance himself from the notoriety of his grandfather’s scientific experiments, and the horror genre itself is the subject of satire. This technique of incorporating the original novel’s celebrity into new adaptations is a feature of Saadawi’s text also—in an interview, Saadawi explains that he was not influenced by Shelley’s novel directly so much as “the vast cultural space that is called ‘Frankenstein’” (Najjar “Baghdad Writes!”). Before ever having seen the Whatsitsname, several other characters seize upon familiar iconography associated with the creature as a means of apprehending this mysterious figure. Media coverage referring to the Whatsitsname is accompanied by a picture of Robert De Niro in the Kenneth Branagh film adaptation of Shelley’s novel (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 1994), while the magazine editor Ali Baher al-Saidi coins the moniker “Frankenstein in Baghdad.” Indeed, the legacy of Shelley’s creature is so well-known that the comparison bolsters the notoriety of the Whatsitsname, while also undermining Hadi’s credibility as he regales the neighborhood with the story of its creation—as in this exchange, between an unnamed German journalist whose interest has been piqued by the tale and Hadi’s friend Mahmoud, another journalist:
“That guy [Hadi]’s recounting the plot of a movie,” she [the German journalist] said to Mahmoud as he walked her out of the coffee shop. “He’s stolen his story from a Robert de Niro film.”
“Yes, it looks like he watches lots of movies. He’s well-known in the area.”
“Then he should have gone to Hollywood,” she said with a laugh as she got into the translator’s car.
Hadi wasn’t bothered. Some people walk out in the middle of movies. It’s quite normal. (19)In a moment of metatextual self-awareness, even the Whatsitsname seems to acknowledge the inevitability of the comparison, insisting that “he didn’t want to be turned into just an urban legend” (185) like Frankenstein’s creature.
The heterogeneity of iterations of Shelley’s creature demonstrates that while the nuances of each adaptation may vary, the creature remains a powerfully subversive symbol, regardless of context. In terms of its physicality, the Whatsitsname is a reimagination that offers relatively little novelty, recalling some of the most well-worn characteristics of Shelley’s creature; the narrator describes a “strange man’s face—a face with lines of stitches, a large nose, and a mouth like a gaping wound” (89). What Saadawi’s text does express, however, is the fact that the longevity of Frankenstein is based in part on the malleability of its central themes and tropes—its adaptability to specific anxieties within particular sociopolitical contexts. Through the Whatsitsname, Saadawi invokes the atmosphere of anxiety that references to Frankenstein have the capacity to generate, while contextualizing this general anxiety in precise conditions of post-war instability in Baghdad.
Haytham Bahoora observes that “literary and artistic representations of the body’s violent dismemberment and mutilation are a recurring feature of post-2003 Iraqi cultural production,” and these representations are central to “narrating a terrain of unspeakable violence” in Iraq since 2003 and “the many afterlives of violence” in its wake (185-86). The Whatsitsname is, at base, a composite of those whose lives are literally destroyed by warfare; he is an entity through which death takes on the guise of debilitated life. Through the Whatsitsname’s amorphous body, his ambiguous origins, and his ambivalent relationships with the human characters, the novel explores the body as itself the site of conflict, and the manner in which contemporary warfare has given rise to forms of “living death” in Iraq. The idea of the living dead has long been a preoccupation of science-fiction writing, as evidenced not only by the multifarious iterations of Shelley’s Frankenstein, but by the profusion of symbols of the undead human, such as vampires, poltergeists, and, perhaps most ubiquitously, zombies. Indeed, the prevalence of these symbols is such that many contemporary writers and critics of science fiction perceive them to have become semiotically exhausted.3 Saadawi’s text suggests, however, that whether symbols of the undead—the zombie, the creature—may be regarded as exhausted or not, they remain necessary, as unliveable lives are created under particular geopolitical conditions of combined and uneven development.
Frankenstein and Precarious Life. The idea of Frankenstein as having evolved from a fixed narrative to become a universalized point of reference has already been noted in the context of bioethics. Jacob Brogan observes the paradox by which Frankenstein is “thick with ambiguity” even as the mere prefix “franken”—is a markedly unambiguous lexical cue, a kind of shorthand for “human attempts to meddle with the natural order.” Sheryl Hamilton states that her research on sf and biotechnology “confirms the frequent appearance of Brave New World and Frankenstein as general symbols” (269), in agreement with Patrick Hopkins:
Most people have never read Brave New World, but that doesn’t matter. The scores of references to Brave New World aren’t about the book; they are about the trope connected to the book. Brave New World is a stand alone [sic] reference, image and warning. (11)
Hamilton goes on to suggest that “these are only two examples of a broader phenomenon, that of using science fiction itself as a trope” (269). This use of sf as a motif is articulated, she argues, as in “passing references” whose “persistent presence is highly significant in terms of how the cultural meanings of biotechnologies are constructed” (270). This capacity of science fiction to function as a kind of catch-all, multivalent trope in itself is perhaps best understood through Damien Broderick’s characterization of the genre as founded on a “megatext.” Drawing on the postmodern “metatext,” Broderick posits that science fiction can be distinguished by its use of a shared intertextual reference system or array of icons, notions, motifs, themes, and patterns of interpretation, in which sf narratives contribute, but are not restricted to, “a specialised intertextual encyclopaedia of tropes and enabling devices” (Broderick xi). It is with this framework in mind that Sherryl Vint cites Shelley’s Frankenstein as a canonical example of how “certain prominent texts become dense centers of gravity, inevitably pulling the meaning of icons toward their influential formulations” (57).
Saadawi’s narrative actively contributes to this sf megatext: while reanima-ting one of its most recognizable motifs, the text also uses sf itself as a trope through which to critique the sociopolitical environment in which such a creature exists. Throughout the novel, Saadawi builds a parallel between the fantastical existence of the Whatsitsname and the surrealism of the environment in which he is created. This is established from the outset of the novel by its frame narrative—the reader is privy to a “top secret” report regarding the “Tracking and Pursuit Department” which is “partially affiliated with the civil administration of the international coalition forces in Iraq” (Saadawi 1) and which leads the hunt for the culprit of the unaccountable murders in Baghdad. The apparent earnestness of this confidential document is quickly undermined by the revelation that the department employs “astrologers and fortune-tellers” to “make predictions about serious security incidents that might take place in Baghdad and surrounding areas” (1-2); it is a revelation that contextualizes the Whatsitsname as a decidedly less anomalous entity. With this device, Saadawi shifts the focus of his narrative from the Whatsitsname as a symbol of unnaturalness to the lived circumstances in which such a being could be conceivable. Saadawi’s text demonstrates that while Shelley’s creature prevails as a “general symbol,” its effectiveness in this particular formulation is as a vehicle for critique for structures of governance and security in post-2003 Iraq.
I argue that the fragmentary body of the Whatsitsname is a striking metaphor for the instrumentalization of human bodies in conditions of contemporary violent conflict. The Whatsitsname analogizes the physical lives at stake under such conditions, but also the processes by which such conditions are maintained—the institution of precarious life through structures of political and military power. In doing so, I follow a definition of biopolitics articulated by Judith Butler: “by biopolitics, I mean those powers that organize life, even the powers that differentially dispose lives to precarity as part of a broader management of populations through governmental and non-governmental means, and that establish a set of measures for the differential valuation of life itself” (Adorno Prize Lecture 10). This framework makes an important demarcation between precariousness as a necessary existential state, and precarious life as “a conditioned process, and not as the internal feature of a monadic individual or any other anthropocentric conceit” (Frames 23). Arguing that “there can be no sustained life without sustaining conditions, and that those conditions are both our political responsibility and the matter of our most vexed ethical decisions” (23), Butler suggests that the material conditions to sustain life are universally needed but often distributed unequally, manifesting in “the justice or injustice of the allocation of value” (Adorno Prize Lecture 11) to human lives. The “modalities of social death” (12) this inequality generates is evoked by the slippery trajectory of the Whatsitsname’s mission from one of “justice” to one of murder. “We would not have a responsibility to maintain conditions of life if those conditions did not require renewal” (Frames 24), and this process of “renewal” is not an innocuous or incidental one; the violence it entails is literalized in Saadawi’s novel as the murder and dismemberment of human characters. The Whatsitsname captures the logic of Butler’s formulation of precarious life as both inherently fragile and, at the same time, founded on a formidable combination of “a sustaining environment, social forms of relationality, and economic forms that presume and structure interdependency” (Adorno 15).
“Can we speak about bodies at all,” Butler asks, “without the environ- ments, the machines, and the complex systems of social interdependency upon which they rely, all of which form the conditions of their existence and survival?” (Adorno 14). This conception of life as existing both because of, and in other ways in spite of, intersecting social and political conditions provides a framework with which to analyze Saadawi’s narrative. The ways that these conditions interconnect to create unliveable life in particular geopolitical contexts is the concern of a number of contemporary biopolitical theorists; it is central to Judith Butler’s concept of “precarious life,” to Jasbir Puar’s analysis of “attenuated life” (particularly in the Occupied Palestinian Territories), and to Isabell Lorey’s description of “states of insecurity” and governance through precarization. It is also a key feature of Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman: invoking Michel Foucault’s critique of bio-power alongside Achille Mbembe’s conception of necropolitics, Braidotti explores how “the brutality of the new wars, in a globalized world run by the governance of fear, refers not only to the government of the living, but also to multiple practices of dying” (Braidotti 9). These scholars each address the interaction of the state of precariousness as an ontological condition of the human with precarization as an apparatus of social, political, and economic control. Saadawi’s text dramatizes this dynamic through the Whatsitsname’s “supply of victims,” connecting this to broaden the wider environment in which authority is maintained through a process of precarization.
“Republic of Fear.” Describing his home city of Baghdad variously as a “dystopia” and “hell on earth” (qtd. in Arango), Saadawi invokes the language of sf both in interviews and within the novel. While surges in extreme violence punctuate the story, Saadawi’s novel also analogizes the idea that “the 35-year role of the Ba’ath party transformed Iraq into a ‘republic of fear’” (Faily 7), as his fictionalized Baghdad is populated by “tawabie al-khouf, the ‘familiars of fear’” (Saadawi 113). These quite literal manifestations of a people inhabited by fear are perceived as “ghosts” that “slept and rested in those bodies without the people being aware of them” (113). Charles Tripp argues that “the fact that war and invasion were being considered by 2002 as the only way of dislodging Saddam Husain4 from power was a testimony, amongst other things, to the curious resilience of his regime” (250). Indeed, this regime withstood not only multiple instances of militarized conflict, but significant economic struggles, the result of thirteen years of punitive sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council and a drastic reduction of Iraq’s oil revenue. Thus, the comparative lack of organized resistance encountered by US military forces in 2003, and the sheer speed with which Iraq was occupied by the US and its allies, stand in contrast to the seeming impenetrability of Hussein’s authority. “For the Iraqi population, the pace and violence of these events had made them bystanders or victims” (274), a situation exacerbated by their sense of abandonment, as the allied forces chose to protect “their own security and stood by whilst a population long repressed and impoverished took their revenge not only on the symbols of authority, such as the many statues of Saddam Husain that crashed to the ground, but also on the whole infrastructure of the public state” (275). Saadawi evokes this atmosphere through the “ghostly figures” (Saadawi 110) that populate an economically depressed Baghdad:
Over the past decade, with the departure of many of the Egyptian and Sudanese migrant workers, these hotels had become dependent on a few customers who lived in them almost permanently.... But most of these people disappeared after April 2003, and now many of the hotels were nearly empty. (12)
“Death stalked the city like the plague” (6), and the inhabitants of Bataween are portrayed as zombie-esque, as “dead people had emerged from the dungeons of the security services and nonexistent people appeared out of nowhere outside of the doors of their relatives’ humble houses” (235). The Whatsitsname’s decomposing body is reflected in “the balconies that were collapsing and the coats of paint that were flaking off the walls” (182).
In this decimated environment, “fear of the Whatsitsname continued to spread” (268) and the Whatsitsname gradually becomes a focal point for a more heterogeneous and unspecific feeling of vulnerability: “the definitive image of him was whatever lurked in people’s heads, fed by fear and despair. It was an image that had as many forms as there were people to conjure it” (168). This process reflects the manner in which Shelley’s creature developed into “a general symbol” well beyond the context of the original text, and which could be recast to express an ever-expanding breadth of fears and anxieties. The instability of this 2003-2005 period is reflected in elements of form; the narrative oscillates from an omniscient third-person perspective to the first-person accounts of the Whatsitsname and “the author.” The novel progresses in a fragmentary and digressive way, drawing in an expansive network of characters—a structure that expresses the very real situation of escalating violence and civilian casualties in Iraq during the US invasion, and the civil war which ensued.5 Toby Dodge notes that the incomprehensibility of the scale of human life lost is reflected in the unreliability of the data itself and that civilian deaths are “one of the most common but statistically disputed approaches to judging the stability of Iraq” (16).
The Baghdad envisioned by Saadawi is one in which “soothsayers and fortune-tellers” are normalized as employees of the allied forces: it is a grim satire of the reality that “the US occupiers were not clear about the requirements and resources needed for Iraqi nation-building” (Faily 13). Frankenstein in Baghdad opens with the bombing of the al-Askariyya mosque in 2006,6 an incident that marked the beginning of a period of such severe violence that Nicholas Sambanis, an expert on the causes of civil war, has described it as “so extreme that it far surpasses most civil wars since 1945” (qtd. in Wong 2006). Saadawi’s text estranges these events through fantastic narrative devices and Gothic tropes while also confronting the reader with memorable dates, real place names, and references to instances of significant mass casualty. This technique conveys the magnitude of the violence in Iraq throughout the period, but in a “dispassionate narrative style” which expresses “the disturbing way that such horror can become routine” (Bahoora 194). Hadi’s ambivalent description of the Whatsitsname points to the tragic anonymity of individual casualties when lives are lost to this degree; he claims that “it wasn’t really a corpse, because ‘corpse’ suggested a particular person or creature, and that didn’t apply in the case of the Whatsitsname” (84).
Governance through Precarization. “Conditions have to be sustained, which means that they exist not as static entities, but as reproducible social institutions and relations” (Butler, Frames, 24), and Saadawi’s novel schematizes these “institutions and relations” through various individual characters, demonstrating how precarization becomes an instrument of control in discrete but intersecting social, political, and economic structures of inequality. Faraj the hotel owner, for instance, analogizes non-state actors who “had taken advantage of the chaos and lawlessness in the city to get his hands on several houses of unknown ownership,” repurposing them for his own profit (Saadawi 12). Although Faraj capitalizes on the vacuum created by a lack of political stability post-war, he recognizes the contingency of his economic advantage:
Although he had clout in the neighborhood, he was still frightened by the Americans. He knew that 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. (68-69)
Arguably the foremost of these examples is the Brigadier Sorour Mohamed Majid, director of the Tracking and Pursuit Department. The Bridgadier is understood to be responsible for a special information unit set up by the Americans and so far kept largely under their supervision. Its mission was to monitor unusual crimes, urban legends, and superstitious rumors that arose around specific incidents, and then to find out what really happened and, more important, to make predictions about crimes that would take place in the future: car bombings and assassinations of officials and other important people. (75)
This nebulous brief makes for an easy slippage into the surrealism of outright fortune-telling to which the Brigadier turns in strategizing his department’s activities. Life for most Iraqis under such governance takes the form of an algorithm of security and risk in which the management of entire populations is founded upon projections. It is a style of governance ruthlessly critiqued in the novel, ascribed to the hunches of psychics—the Chief Astrologer is depicted as having a “flamboyant appearance: he had a long white pointed beard, a tall conical hat, and flowing robes” (112). Although the Brigadier is parodied for his reliance on the arcane intuitions of astrologers, fortune-tellers, and soothsayers, the reader is constantly reminded of the genuine power he possesses; his office is described as smelling of apples, a gesture to the odor of chemical weapons used by the Ba’athist Party.7
Throughout the novel, Saadawi sustains a critique of the Brigadier’s treatment of human lives as mere data through constant references to the fragile corporeality of the Whatsitsname and the vulnerability of the other characters. Within this form of governance—comprised of risk assessment, prediction, and damage control—shortcomings are not defined by lives lost, but by lives lost in an unforeseen manner. This is made clear during an episode in which a rumor spreads amongst a group of pilgrims crossing Imams Bridge that there is a suicide bomber in their midst; the rumor “had caused panic, and some of the pilgrims were trampled to death while others threw themselves into the river and drowned” (110-11).Though it was considered “a big disaster, the biggest disaster that had struck Iraq so far, as Abu Anmar put it” (122) and the supposed perpetrator had escaped arrest, the government spokesperson “came out smiling as usual to announce that an attempted suicide bombing on the Imams Bridge had been prevented” (122), arguing that many more people would have been killed had the suicide bomber succeeded in detonating an explosive device. Those in authority in this fictionalized Iraq—like the Brigadier—perceive the Whatsitsname as a disruptive force rather than a destructive one; that the Whatsitsname is regarded as a dangerous murderer is of subordinate importance to the Brigadier’s inability to predict his movements. A level of violent conflict is repeatedly normalized by government officials, and the Whatsitsname is considered an uncontrollable variable that upsets the “equilibrium of violence ... without it, there won’t be a successful political process” (178). The notion of a political process maintained by an “equilibrium of violence” can be read as a critique of “fierce personal and ideological rivalry within various branches of the US government, as different agencies laid claim to the future of Iraq” (Tripp 272).
All this is ridiculed by Saadawi, as the novel repeatedly emphasizes the flaws in the Brigadier’s strategization. Prior to the incident on Imams Bridge, for instance, the narrator observes that “the brigadier had some suspicions that the fortune-tellers and astrologers had confused these ghostly figures with the people who for the past two days had been setting off from various parts of Baghdad and heading for Kadhimiya for the ceremonies celebrating the anniversary of the death of the imam Musa al-Kadhim” (Saadawi 110). The confusion of living humans for “ghostly figures” speaks to the institutionalization of living death under the Brigadier’s leadership. Despite the significant number of civilian casualties, however, that result—and the revelation that “it is clear that the department had been operating outside its area of expertise” (1-2)—the Brigadier endures no more than a transfer to a different position.
The differential valuation of human life as an entrenched aspect of the sociopolitical landscape can be seen in the Whatsitsname’s self-perception as “the sinews of a law that isn’t always on the alert” (143). The Whatsitsname’s wavering conviction regarding his “mission” underscores much of the intrigue of the plot—it is central to the “moral ambiguity” that piqued the interest of the IPAF judges (Lynx Qualey), and to the positive reception of Saadawi’s text as “a novel that suspends moral judgement” (Najjar “A Golden Piece”). As the Whatsitsname requires more and more new body parts and his victims multiply accordingly, he remains keen to avoid regenerating himself with the “illegitimate” flesh of criminals. This method of differentiation is key to the Whatsitsname’s moralizing logic, through which he excuses himself from any accountability for his actions: “my head was swimming with conflicting thoughts, ” he narrates, “but I held firm to the idea that I had only hastened the old man’s death. I was not a murderer: I had merely plucked the fruit of death before it fell to the ground” (Saadawi 162). If “precarity denotes the striation and distribution of precariousness in relations of inequality, the hierarchization of being-with that accompanies the processes of othering” (Lorey 12), then the Whatsitsname renders explicit the violence entailed by these processes of striation and othering—the fact that “we are different in our common precariousness” (Lorey 172). The Whatsitsname is a figure through which to consider social fragmentation, destabilization, and profound vulnerability arising from circumstances of warfare and violent conflict—and to understand that such large-scale violence results not only in death, but in debilitated and unliveable life. As such, Saadawi’s novel focuses not on the frontier between human life and death, but on the “unequal distribution of vulnerability” (Butler, Adorno Lecture 15), through which human lives are differentially valued in an effort to control entire populations through political power derived from the institution of collective insecurity and fear. The Whatsitsname is as much an abstraction of the “environments, the machines, and the complex systems of social interdependency” (Adorno Lecture 14) that have created conditions of unliveable life in Iraq as he is a metaphor for the actual civilian Iraqi victims of the violent conflict of the early 2000s.
Governance through precarization relies heavily on projections, and entails apprehending “the traces of the future in the present” (Hamilton 271; emphasis in original); the lived reality of precarization itself, however, “means living with the unforeseeable, with contingency” (Lorey 1), and this dynamic is embedded within the form of Saadawi’s novel. Characterized by instances of prolepsis and ominous asides about what “would” happen, the novel exudes a sense of foreclosed possibilities from its outset. As the novel vaults from one character to another, there is a growing sense that the “large-scale forms of social and political regulation” (Butler qtd. in Lorey iii) that dictate daily life are impenetrable by individuals, capturing the idea that in a style of governance based on the management of risk, “the present becomes an outcome, not of the receding past, but of the emerging risks of the future” (Hamilton 267). Butler argues that within this framework, certain lives are expendable to the point that they are “not quite lives’”:
[They] are “lose-able,” or can be forfeited, precisely because they are framed as being already lost or forfeited.... [W]hen such lives are lost they are not grievable, since, in the twisted logic that rationalizes their death, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of “the living.” (Frames 31)
The concept of ungrieveable life as “not quite life” is captured by Hadi’s perception of his own life as unrecognizable until it is a death: “why did he see other people dying on the news and yet he was still alive? He had to get on the news one day, he said to himself. He was well aware that this was his destiny” (Saadawi 105).8 Even those in a position of relative power and security are morbidly fixated upon the circumstances of their deaths. The Brigadier observes that there was one topic common to all the high-profile politicians who would come to consult him and his “soothsayers”: “‘When and how will I die?’ It usually came at the end of an exhausting list of questions, to give the impression that it was just one of many” (210). This collective mood is captured by the journalist Farid, who argues 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.… [Al-Qaeda] has created a death machine working in the other direction because it’s afraid of the other. (123)
Narrating the Not-New. Isabell Lorey states decisively that “precarity is nothing new” (165): as new forms of precarity continue to develop, however, so too must new ways develop through which to render the dynamics and experience of precarious life explicit. Shelley’s creature is a well-established symbol with a long legacy; through its numerous revisions and adaptations crossing geopolitical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries, Shelley’s Frankenstein can be considered a piece of world literature.9 The “worldly” cultural cachet of Shelley’s novel is further reinforced by the longlisting of Frankenstein in Baghdad for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize—making Sadaawi one of only a handful of Arabophone authors ever to be so listed, among such illustrious company as Amos Oz and Naguib Mahfouz. The creature is, then, a highly appropriate symbol for precarious life as a combined and uneven experience—one which exists on a global scale, but which is iterated differently in specific national and regional contexts. Extrapolated from a highly recognizable motif, the Whatsitsname is sufficiently novel to estrange and critique the urgency of the specific circumstances depicted in the novel, while at the same time incorporating that sense in which governance through precarization is an entrenched and systemic structure—one that, like Shelley’s creature, we have encountered before, and that is now somewhat normalized.
While the precariousness that the Whatsitsname represents is perhaps not new, he symbolizes a striking generic development as Shelley’s original creature is redeployed in a considerably different context from the horror and emergent sf with which it is associated. Saadawi’s adaptation of the creature is emblematic of speculative fiction’s keen emphasis on social and cultural change more than on scientific or technological anxieties; it captures the “examination of the irrational and affective dimensions of experience as well as logical extrapolation” (Vint 90) in which speculative fiction is generally interested. Through its suggestion of the potential for semiotic and generic novelty through the revitalization of some well-worn sf symbols, Saadawi’s text gestures to “the rise of an exuberant new fiction that actively rejects traditional genre boundaries: the so-called post-genre fantastic. Distinguished by “a rapid hybridization between horror, Gothic, science fiction and … ‘dark fantasy’” (Luckhurst 22), this new direction has revitalized sf at a time when some of its most ardent and respected supporters are concerned by its rather moribund state” (Rhys Williams 617).
Through the Whatsitsname, the novel articulates the complex and intertwined relationship between precariousness as an ontological condition and precarization as a set of social and political conditions. The novel ends, however, in irresolution, suggesting there is no straightforward manner in which to envision a society in which vulnerability and precariousness are alleviated. This ambivalence is, I propose, an important element in locating the Whatsitsname within the speculative fiction genre. “We no longer treat sf,” Istvan Csicsery-Ronay argues, “as purely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but rather as a kind of awareness we might call science-fictionality, a mode of response that frames and tests experiences as if they were aspects of a work of science fiction” (2). The Whatsitsname facilitates just such a means of “framing and testing experiences” and lived realities that demand a specific “kind of awareness” of contemporary Iraq.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Warm thanks to my PhD supervisor Dr. Anna Bernard, for very insightful comments on an early draft of this article and for her support.NOTES
1. References to the novel in this article are to the English translation by Jonathan Wright. The original Arabic-language text by Ahmad Saadawi, Frankinshtayn fi Baghdad (فرانكشتاين في بغداد), was published in 2013 (Baghdad/Beirut: Manshurat al-Jamal).2. Indeed, although there is a broad consensus amongst scholars and reviewers regarding the primary themes of the novel, there is a notable lack of concordance on the generic identity of the novel and the nature of its narrative mode. Rabeeba Saleem claims, for example, that the story “seamlessly moves between the surreal and the intensely real” while Robin Yassin-Kassab describes it as follows: “realism may not be able to do justice to such horror, but this darkly delightful novel by Ahmed Saadawi—combining humour and a traumatised version of magical realism—certainly begins to.” Similarly, scholarly criticism of the text features an array of critical approaches. Haytham Bahoora studies the novel as an example of “the postcolonial gothic,” while Mahmuda Arb explores its use of magical realism, and Bushra Juhi Jani argues that it is an expression of Kristeva’s conception of abjection. What we can suggest, I argue, is that Saadawi and other authors such as Sinan Antoon and Hassan Blasim represent a collective and unprecedented shift away from the realist literary styles that have dominated Iraqi fiction since the “1950s generation” (see Caiani and Cobham). It is an emergent trend which has yet to be precisely defined; the lexical mélange we observe in the reception of the novel is symptomatic of how often significant literary developments are always more accurately characterized in retrospect. This latter idea is explored by John Rieder in his recent book Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System n and his earlier article “On Defining Science Fiction, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History.”
3. The symbolic value of the zombie in contemporary literature and film is the subject of a debate that exceeds the scope of this paper. A useful perspective on the matter in this context, however, can be found in Eric Cazdyn’s The Already Dead (2012), which addresses the topic in its discussion of the undead, “unsaveable life,” and the “twice dead,” arguing that the exhaustion of the zombie figure relates to “[t]he problem of allegory itself that seems to need updating” (202). He goes on to argue that “[a] new visibility has emerged that necessarily shifts the work of representation. Do we really need a zombie to shock us into recognizing that we are killing ourselves or that we feel exhilarated when we take a crowbar to the head of something that wants to destroy us?” (203). Cazdyn’s analysis focuses on the idea that the “zombie film allegorizes how the collective of the modern nation (with the United States as the paradigmatic case), in order to sustain itself and manage its own contradictions, required a homicidal other to fight against. And the real horror is that the collective itself produces this enemy, by the very social system that brought the collective into being” (202). Another perspective is offered by Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz in Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture (2011), who explore how the serial repetition of zombies in interconnected sequels across different media is at such a scale that Jennifer Cooke describes it as “episodemic” (see Boluk and Lenz 3). It is a coinage which captures the proliferation of the figure while also conveying the notions of contagion the zombie connotes.
4. Tripp's transliteration of this surname differs from the one I employ; both are broadly accepted transliterations.
5. A 2011 report by Iraq Body Count makes some harrowing observations regarding the scale of civilian casualties over this period, noting that “Over half of the civilian deaths caused by US-led coalition forces occurred during the 2003 invasion and the sieges of Fallujah in 2004.” On a per-day basis, the highest intensity of civilian killings over a sustained period occurred during the first three “Shock and Awe” weeks of the 2003 invasion, when civilian deaths averaged 319 per day and totalled over 6,716 by 9 April, nearly all attributable to US-led coalition forces. Iraqi casualties reached 7,427 by the time of President G.W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech of 1 May 2003. At recent, much lower levels of overall violence in Iraq, it has taken nearly the past two years of violence (resulting in some 8,000 deaths) by all parties to exceed the coalition-caused invasion civilian death toll of those first weeks of the conflict in March-April 2003 (“Iraqi Deaths”).
6. Dodge observes that “after the al-Askariyya bombing, estimates based on anecdotal evidence placed the number of Sunnis murdered in extra-judicial killings in Baghdad at 1,000 per month, with 365,000 Iraqis forced from their homes” (16-17).
7. For example, in the Kurdish town of Halabja, in 1988. See especially Karin Mlodoch.
8. Hadi’s words foreshadow the conclusion of the novel: the Brigadier sends two officers to interrogate Hadi about the Whatsitsname, and he endures a brutal beating at their hands. Left with a disfigured face in its wake, Hadi is subsequently charged for the unexplained murders which have occurred throughout the city. The other characters are left struggling to believe “that this frightening criminal had been living among them, but what the government said must be true” (279). It is a conclusion that reflects how “Frankenstein” has, over the course of many reanimations and reinterpretations, come to reference both Victor and the creature itself, to an almost interchangeable degree.
9. I am using the term “world literature” in the sense of David Damrosch’s definition which encompasses all literary works “that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language ... a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (4).
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