In Frankenstein in Baghdad, Iraq’s capital city is presented as an economic center that’s disintegrating: the city is on the verge of turning into a full-blown war zone. These circumstances create a dilemma for Baghdad’s inhabitants, who must decide whether they are willing to stay or whether they prefer to immigrate to more peaceful areas of the country or the world. Those who choose to stay are condemned to a degree of loneliness, made all the more acute by the constant danger for friends or family to die in a terrorist attack. At the same time, they also benefit from networks of solidarity, as bonds between people attempt to compensate for the widespread insecurity. Ultimately, though, multiple characters realize that solidarity is not enough: the most meaningful bonds in their lives are those associated with a sense of home, which is itself a combination of memory and family. This definition of home helps explain why some people stay in Baghdad, while others—whose true “home” is elsewhere—prefer to leave.
Different characters in the novel initially seem condemned to solitude. Alone in her house, Elishva seems bound to spend the rest of her life waiting for her dead son, Daniel, to return from the war. Only Elishva’s daughters, Hilda and Matilda, currently living in Melbourne, still listen to their mother’s fantasies. As a result, Elishva resigns herself to living alone in her apartment, accompanied only by her cat, Nabu, the image of Saint George the Martyr, and Daniel’s memory. Other characters, such as Hadi, have an even smaller support network. Since the death of his work partner, Nahem Abdaki, Hadi believes that his only friend left is Aziz the Egyptian, owner of the local coffee shop. He concludes, despondently, that no one would truly miss him if he died.
Other characters compensate for their solitude by retreating into a fantasy world of human connection. Aware that his love for Nawal al-Wazir—a woman believed to be his boss Saidi’s lover—will probably remain nothing but a fantasy, Mahmoud hires a prostitute, Zeina. He wants to pretend that Zeina is Nawal, so that he can feel like he’s making love to Nawal. Ultimately, however, Mahmoud ends up behaving aggressively toward both women. He behaves aggressively toward Zeina when she refuses to be called “Nawal,” and later, he kisses Nawal against her will. These actions reveal a dark side of Mahmoud’s personality: a selfish focus on his own desire, combined with a certain lack of empathy, keeps him from seeking reciprocity. He prefers to impose his desire on these women instead of respecting what they actually want.
Despite this sense of desolation, the novel also suggests that people are not always as isolated as they believe. After Iraqi security forces beat Hadi up in his home, his neighbor Abu Salim, who has witnessed the scene from afar, comes over to help. Abu Salim calls out to different men in the neighborhood. Together, they buy medicine and bandages to heal the junk dealer’s wounds. This surprising moment of solidarity reveals that underlying networks of protection run through the neighborhood. Even someone as isolated as Hadi can benefit from his neighbors’ protection. This suggests that people are not always as lonely as they believe they are: they are integrated into a fabric of human interactions, part of a social world that can provide protection and comfort.
However, the spread of violence ultimately forces people to rely on the most stable tie of all: their notion of home, which the novel suggests is based on a combination of memory and family. Despite Elishva’s skepticism about her daughters’ commitment to take her out of Iraq, Hilda and Matilda actually do come to rescue their mother. They use Elishva’s grandson Daniel—who looks just like Elishva’s dead son Daniel—as an emotional tool: they want Elishva to be moved by the sight of her grandson, so similar to the son she has lost, in order to agree to follow him back to Australia. The plan works: although Elishva knows that this young Daniel is not her son, she still feels comforted by his presence. Ultimately, she realizes that this family bond is the most important thing in her life. The old lady’s agreement to leave Iraq suggests that she has finally found a way to reconcile her memory of the past with her current family: through her grandson Daniel, she recovers both the memories of her lost son and the concrete bond with family members in the present.
Other characters choose similar paths, fleeing the violence in Baghdad to return to their prior home. For example, Abu Anmar, owner of the dilapidated Orouba Hotel, leaves the city after 23 years to return to his hometown in southern Iraq, where his nephews currently live. Similarly, after losing his job, Mahmoud returns to his family in Amara. These characters’ decision to leave reflects not only the escalation of violence in Baghdad, but also the comfort and strength of their attachment to a notion of “home.” Home, these characters conclude, is where their family and their most cherished memories are. This justifies their decision to leave and allows them to make the bold leap to rebuild their life in a new environment.
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Family, Friendship, and Home Quotes in Frankenstein in Baghdad
With her veined and wrinkled hand, Elishva would put the Nokia phone to her ear. Upon hearing her daughters’ voices, the darkness would lift and she would feel at peace. If she had gone straight back to Tayaran Square, she would have found that everything was calm, just as she had left it in the morning. The sidewalks would be clean and the cars that had caught fire would have been towed away.
Elishva no longer shared with anyone her belief that Daniel was still alive. She just waited to hear the voice of Matilda or Hilda because they would put up with her, however strange this idea of hers. The two daughters knew their mother clung to the memory of her late son in order to go on living. There was no harm in humoring her.
The shock of Nahem’s death changed Hadi. He became aggressive. He swore and cursed and threw stones after the American Hummers or the vehicles of the police and the National Guard. He got into arguments with anyone who mentioned Nahem and what had happened to him. He kept to himself for a while, and then went back to his old self, laughing and telling extraordinary stories, but now he seemed to have two faces, or two masks—as soon as he was alone he was gloomy and despondent in a way he hadn’t been before.
“I wanted to hand him over to the forensics department, because it was a complete corpse that had been left in the streets like trash. It’s a human being, guys, a person,” he told them.
“But it wasn’t a complete corpse. You made it complete,” someone objected.
“I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as trash, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial,” Hadi explained.
Sitting in the coffee shop, he would tell the story from the beginning, never tiring of repeating himself. He immersed himself in the story and went with the flow, maybe in order to give pleasure to others or maybe to convince himself that it was just a story from his fertile imagination and that it had never really happened.
If the argument was interrupted, Elishva would argue with herself instead or grab hold of one of the women in the church to listen to her fiery sermon about how she refused to leave her home and move to a place she knew nothing about. Father Josiah encouraged her to stay, because he saw it as a religious obligation. It wasn’t good that everyone should leave the country. Things had been just as bad for the Assyrians in previous centuries, but they had stayed in Iraq and had survived. None of us should think only of ourselves. That’s what he said in his sermon sometimes.
Although he had clout in the neighborhood, he was still frightened by the Americans. He knew 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.
She looked at the picture of the saint hanging in front of her, his lance raised and the dragon crouching beneath him. She wondered why he hadn’t killed the dragon years ago. Why was he stuck in that posture, ready to strike, she wondered. Everything remains half completed, exactly like now: she wasn’t exactly a living being, but not a dead one either.
There were people who had returned from long journeys with new names and new identities […]. There were people who had survived many deaths in the time of the dictatorship only to find themselves face-to-face with a pointless death in the age of “democracy”—when, for example, a motorbike ran into them in the middle of the road. Believers lost their faith when those who had shared their beliefs and their struggles betrayed them and their principles. Nonbelievers had become believers when they saw the “merits” and benefits of faith. The strange things that had come to light in the past three years were too many to count. So that Daniel Tadros Moshe, the lanky guitarist, had come back to his old mother’s house wasn’t so hard to believe.
