Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Faith or Madness?

I find it possible to read Frankenstein in Baghdad with or without irony. It flows just as well either way - as an edifying symbolic story of courage and the will to survive in modern Iraqi reality; or as the precise opposite, a condemnation of the symbols which constitute that reality.

Saadawi uses an established literary reference to create this ambiguity - the monster formed by chaos. Saadawi’s monster is assembled and refreshed from the body parts of bomb victims. It is enlivened by prayers directed to St George - as it happens the patron of England, a ‘coalition partner’ in the Iraqi occupation. Similar ironies pop up and annihilate each other like particles of matter and anti-matter throughout the text.

Saadawi’s story takes place amid the profound spiritual as well as social dislocation of war. The monster of Frankenstein, the man constructed by man out of decaying remnants from the past, is the perfect trope for representing the reconstruction of civilization. Just as compelling, Shelley’s story of the monster has its roots in the Eastern European Jewish legend of the Golem, a creature formed through mystical prayer whose function is the protection of the community during just such a period of extreme stress.

The principle plot device used by Saadawi, therefore, is that of miracle-working. A classical example of the genre is the Book of Signs in the Gospel of John. The allusion seems apt since the Frankenstein character Saadawi portrays is a combination of a devout Christian woman and a superstitious junk dealer living next door in ‘the Jewish house’.

Like Saadawi’s story, John’s gospel uses the factual and the mystical interchangeably in order to connect a new appreciation of the world with a past that seems to have lost its relevance. Another fleeting irony: John’s gospel is the most anti-Semitic of the four Christian narratives of Jesus; it was written after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the Jewish house is a ruin.

The Book of Signs demonstrates how the technique of writing about miracles works. It contains reports on each of seven miracles performed by Jesus. All of these miracles can be interpreted either as factual or allegorical, or, in fact, as both simultaneously. For example, the first, and probably best known, miracle of the changing of water into wine at the wedding of Cana can be taken literally as testimony about the transformation of a physical substance. On the other hand some exegetes believe it is not the account of an event but primarily represents a symbolic claim by Jesus to be himself the new wine which will nourish the world. The symbolism further suggests Jesus as the new Moses, who changed the water of the Nile to blood. Which interpretation is the more accurate? Or more important? Or more faithful? Or, for that matter, more superstitious?

Miracles are the presumed suspension of the physical laws of the universe by divine action. But, as in the Golem and Shelley’s and Saadawi’s monsters, they are theologically problematic - not just because of their literary functions but also because their mere possibility is a scandal for religious faith. On the one hand, miracles are seen as evidence of God’s power; on the other hand, they are equally clear evidence of God’s profound arbitrariness. If miracles do occur, they are the result of actions by a patently capricious deity who has the power to relieve the suffering of creation but generally chooses to permit, and even cause, such suffering. Miracles therefore tend to get out of hand conceptually.

Miracles also demonstrate the rather tenuous link between faithful devotion and divine assistance. Some of John’s miracles, for example, depend on very specific faith in Jesus’s abilities; others on faith in a more transcendental and abstract divine power; and others have no connection with faith whatsoever but are apparently random demonstrations of divine whimsy. Therefore, even believers may not want to press miracles too seriously as factual events, as more than allegorical. St. Paul himself counsels against looking for signs as proof of divine action. Saadawi’s female protagonist has her prayer miraculously answered after decades of fervent prayer but in an obviously distorted and unexpected way.

So Frankenstein in Baghdad can be read as a tale of the power of religious faith in a time of profound disruption; and simultaneously as a story of the self deception in which everyone involved in war participates. It is a literary optical illusion which captures the essential ambiguity created by human violence in its obscene destructiveness and its bizarre creativity. Religion is part of the problem as well as the solution to conflict. It is necessary to survive but at a cost. Religious belief persists but it is itself transformed as its benign and malicious effects are actualized.

It appears, then, that Sophocles was correct: ‘evil appears as good in the minds of those whom the gods lead to destruction’. The same might be said of miracles, which can be, equally, symptoms of human madness or transcendental faith.

Postscript: For more on the problematic theology of miracles, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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