Through its depiction of armed conflict in Iraq, Frankenstein in Baghdad explores the difficulty of achieving justice in the midst of savage destruction. The Whatsitsname initially provides a ray of hope for the community: claiming to speak in the name of innocent victims, the creature seeks justice for those who have been unfairly harmed. However, as the Whatsitsname conflates justice with murderous revenge, he soon proves just as criminal and reckless as those he aims to punish. The novel ultimately suggests that, in a context of such extreme violence, the boundaries between innocence and criminality are blurry. Innocent or not, all Iraqis are forced to endure the same fate: unpredictable bloodshed and destruction. Frankenstein in Baghdad bleakly concludes that, among so much lawlessness, justice is impossible to achieve. Instead, one must simply accept the unfair, arbitrary nature of violence, and strive to survive as best one can.
In the beginning, the Whatsitsname presents itself as a victim seeking justice in an unfair world. When Hadi the junk dealer first gathers body parts from the victims of car bombings in Baghdad, his goal is to denounce the state’s incapacity to protect their own citizens—people who are reduced to a mix of anonymous body parts. Similarly, when this corpse comes to life and becomes the Whatsitsname, the creature’s goal is to achieve justice: he seeks retaliation for the innocent victims whose murderers went unpunished. One of his first targets is Abu Zaidoun, a member of the Baathist Party responsible for sending young men to war, where many of them—including Elishva’s son, Daniel—died. The Whatsitsname understands Abu Zaidoun’s death as a form of punishment: this man’s cruel deeds justify his own murder.
However, associating justice with murderous retaliation turns the Whatsitsname into yet another criminal: he, too, takes part in unjustified violence in order to survive. Indeed, the Whatsitsname conflates justice and revenge. Instead of seeking to reform criminals and to promote peace, he chooses to kill them, thus supposedly ridding the city of evil. Through these methods, however, he takes part in—and thus perpetuates—the very same violence that he seeks to eradicate.
This leads the Whatsitsname to reflect on a central ethical dilemma: who deserves to live and who should die? Ultimately, the Whatsitsname realizes that no one is wholly innocent or entirely criminal: for example, some people who suffer violent, inhumane deaths might have inflicted harm on others in the past. In addition, the Whatsitsname begins to kill people for selfish purposes: he uses their body parts to replace those that are currently rotting in his own body. His killings thus start to diverge from his supposed pursuit of justice. Although the Whatsitsname sees himself as a savior, endowed with superpowers to bring justice to humanity, the purpose of his survival ultimately proves less aimed at helping others than, simply, at allowing him to live as long as he can.
In an atmosphere of chaos and destruction, justice fades in the background: death, then, should be seen as arbitrary and survival as a matter of luck. Mahmoud the journalist initially develops a theory concerning three types of justice: “legal justice, divine justice, and street justice.” He believes that, sooner or later, all criminals are bound to suffer from one form of justice. This theory helps him explain what happens to a noted gang leader in Amara, the brother of the Mantis. Although this man is initially arrested, “legal justice” soon fails: the criminal is released after a couple of days. Yet a few days later, the gang leader is assassinated in the street. This series of events seemingly confirms Mahmoud’s theory: the criminal has succumbed to one of the three types of justice, “street justice.” However, after witnessing so much death and destruction in Baghdad, Mahmoud no longer believes that justice and violence go hand in hand. He knows that innocent people are killed every day just for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. As a result, Mahmoud concludes that the country has dissolved into anarchy: anyone—criminal or not—might die in a violent way. It is wrong, the journalist concludes, to equate justice with death, since the circumstances of one’s death reveal nothing about one’s moral worth.
Rather, in a context of widespread insecurity, justice and fairness lie beyond human control. As a result, Mahmoud argues, one should accept the role that luck and randomness play in life. When brutality is rampant, death is arbitrary, and punishment is unjustified, survival becomes nothing more than a matter of chance. Instead of seeking to inflict violence on others, the novel concludes, one should try to coexist as peacefully as possible. The use of force, on the other hand, only leads to greater cycles of destruction and harm.
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Good vs. Evil 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.
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.
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.
Honestly, I think everyone was responsible in one way or another. I’d go further and say 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. The groups that have given shelter and support to al-Qaeda have done so because they are frightened of another group, and this other group has created and mobilized militias to protect itself from al-Qaeda. It has created a death machine working in the other direction because it’s afraid of the Other. And we’re going to see more and more death because of fear. The government and the occupation forces have to eliminate fear. They must put a stop to it if they really want this cycle of killing to end.
“It was the Sudanese suicide bomber who caused his death,” Hadi said confidently, trying to exploit the situation to his own advantage.
“Yes, but he’s dead. How can I kill someone who’s already dead?”
“The hotel management, then. The company that ran the hotel.”
“Yes, maybe. But I have to find the real killer of Hasib Mohamed Jaafar so his soul can find rest,” said the Whatsitsname, pulling up a wooden crate and sitting on it.
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.
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.’
The Mantis’s brother had led a small gang that terrorized the locals until he was arrested and detained. The news of his arrest was greeted with great joy by many, including Mahmoud, who then wrote a newspaper article about the need to enforce the law against this criminal. He philosophized a little in the article, saying there were three types of justice—legal justice, divine justice, and street justice—and that however long it takes, criminals must face one of them.
Publishing the article won Mahmoud points for courage and for embodying the journalistic ideal of enlightenment in service of the public interest.
He turned to Mahmoud and said, “Brigadier Majid is one of the people you’ll have to get used to dealing with.”
Mahmoud said nothing but waited for further explanation because he didn’t plan to see Brigadier Majid and would try as far as possible to make sure that kind of meeting didn’t happen again.
“There are people like him in our world,” said Saidi, “and we have to learn how to deal with them tactfully, how to get along with them, how to accept that they exist.”
Yes, for a year or more he’s been carrying out the policy of the American ambassador to create an equilibrium of violence on the streets between the Sunni and Shiite militias, so there’ll be a balance later at the negotiating table to make new political arrangements in Iraq. The American army is unable or unwilling to stop the violence, so at least a balance or an equivalence of violence has to be created. Without it, there won’t be a successful political process.
Anyway, the best way to protect yourself from evil is to keep close to it. I humor him so he doesn’t stand in the way of my political ambitions, and so he doesn’t put a bullet in the back of my head, fired by one of those fat guys with shaved heads, in response to an order from the Americans.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Mahmoud thought back to his theory about the three kinds of justice, but he wasn’t convinced it was valid. It was anarchy out there; there was no logic behind what was happening. He took a deep breath and gave a long sigh. What mattered now was that he had broken free of a worry that had been weighing heavily on him.
