The journalist Mahmoud’s digital recorder highlights the difficulty of uncovering the truth (and especially a single truth) in a complex political environment, marked by social conflict. A variety of characters come into possession of the recorder. Although Mahmoud generally uses it to record his impressions of events for journalistic purposes, he later lends it to Hadi, who gives it to the Whatsitsname so that the creature can interview his own self. Later, both Brigadier Majid and the “writer” become interested in the stories the digital recorder contains. Over the course of the novel, no character interprets these recordings in the same way. Some characters believe that the Whatsitsname is real: Mahmoud, for example, doubts that Hadi could have invented such a complicated story on his own. Others, such as Aziz the Egyptian, argue that Hadi has invented everything from scratch, asking friends to impersonate the characters. The diversity of perspectives concerning the meaning and validity of these recordings underlines the difficulty of finding out the truth in a political context fraught with lies, in which storytelling can be a form of survival. The digital recorder, then, does not necessarily record a single, factual version of reality. Rather, the recorder becomes the symbol of the multiple “realities” that co-exist in a complex social world, as each character interprets events according to their own experiences and beliefs.
The Digital Recorder Quotes in Frankenstein in Baghdad
The Whatsitsname talked about the night he met the drunk beggars. He said he tried to avoid them, but they were aggressive and charged toward him to kill him. His horrible face was an incentive for them to attack him. They didn’t know anything about him, but they were driven by that latent hatred that can suddenly come to the surface when people meet someone who doesn’t fit in.
The young madman thinks I’m the model citizen that the Iraqi State has failed to produce, at least since the days of King Faisal I.
Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds—ethnicities, tribes, races, and social classes—I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen, he thinks.
I was careful about the pieces of flesh that were used to repair my body. I made sure my assistants didn’t bring any flesh that was illegitimate—in other words, the flesh of criminals—but who’s to say how criminal someone is? That’s a question the Magician raised one day.
‘Each of us has a measure of criminality,’ the Magician said, smoking a shisha pipe he had prepared for himself. ‘Someone who’s been killed through no fault of his own might be innocent today, but he might have been a criminal ten years ago, when he threw his wife out onto the street, or put his aging mother in an old people’s home, or disconnected the water or electricity to a bouse with a sick child, who died as a result, and so on.’
In his mind he still had a long list of the people he was supposed to kill, and as fast as the list shrank it was replenished with new names, making avenging these lives an endless task. Or maybe he would wake up one day to discover that there was no one left to kill, because the criminals and the victims were entangled in a way that was more complicated than ever before.
“There are no innocents who are completely innocent or criminals who are completely criminal.”
The Digital Recorder Symbol Timeline in Frankenstein in Baghdad
