Frankenstein in Baghdad Study Guide

Ahmed Saadawi grew up in Baghdad, Iraq, during a time when books were scarce. Due to the Iraqi state’s censorship of many books, along with international sanctions on the country from 1990 to 2003, Saadawi had access to very few books while growing up. Despite these difficult circumstances, he developed an intense passion for literature. Throughout his life, he has found various ways to express this passion for storytelling: in addition to working as a screenwriter and documentary film maker, he is the author of a volume of poetry and three novels. While working as a journalist in Iraq, including during the period of the Iraqi Civil War (2006-2008), he became committed to relating the horrors of this period to the public. This led him to write Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013). He felt that a novel was better capable of communicating characters’ life circumstances and emotions than journalistic reporting. In this novel, Saadawi sought to criticize the disastrous consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 by focusing on its impact on the local population. The novel was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize and won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014. The book has since been translated into a variety of languages and has received international acclaim. Ahmed Saadawi currently lives in Baghdad.

The events in Frankenstein in Baghdad take place in a period of intense political tension and conflict in Iraq. In 2003, an international coalition led by the United States invaded Iraq in order to remove Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party from power. The U.S. accused the Iraqi dictator of producing weapons of mass destruction and of cultivating ties to terrorist organizations. Although the Iraqi government did use weapons of mass destruction in the past—for example, against the Kurdish population during the “Halabja massacre” in 1988, as part of the Iran-Iraq War—these two hypotheses, which drove the U.S. invasion, were later discredited. The U.S. invasion succeeded in capturing and executing Saddam Hussein, who was convicted of crimes against humanity. Afterwards, the U.S. set up the Coalition Provisional Authority, in charge of administering Iraq before the organization of democratic elections in 2005. This launched a period of intense sectarian violence, in particular conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, which ultimately escalated and gave way to the Iraqi Civil War (2006-2008). Violent conflict in Iraq caused a variety of humanitarian crises: nearly one million children became orphans in the country, and over four million Iraqis were forced to flee as refugees.

Frankenstein in Baghdad is based on Mary Shelley’s classic gothic novel Frankenstein (1818). It also bears the influence of a modern adaptation of this novel: the movie Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), starring Robert De Niro. Like Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein, the character of the Whatsitsname seeks to punish humanity for its cruel deeds. Frankenstein in Baghdad also bears similarities with the work of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), an author who blends realism with fantasy in order to denounce the absurdity of war and political repression. In a local, Middle Eastern context, Saadawi mentions other sources of inspiration: the works of Iraqi novelist Mehdi Issa Saqr, as well as Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Men in the Sun (1962), which examines the difficult lives of Palestinian refugees and denounces political corruption in different Arab societies.