Mixing the past and present: the ruins of the Iraqi embassy in Berlin could easily be any Iraqi building after the 2003 invasion. Omar Dewachi. All rights reserved.
In his award-winning novel, Frankenstein in Baghdad, Iraqi author Ahmed al-Sa’dawi offers us an insight into the convolutions and ambivalences of violence and terror in Iraq in the wake of the 2003 US occupation. Set in the winter of 2005, several months before the outbreak of the so-called 'civil war' in Iraq (2006-2007), the novel captures the everyday absurdities of the occupation project and its production and management of 'unruliness' under the guise of the 'war on terror'. While it is a vivid commentary on the depth of human experience under that war, the novel further undermines simplistic notions of justice through dissecting an anatomy of everyday violence and retributions.
The novel tells the story of Hadi al-Attag, a rag-and-bone, inebriated street-seller, who embarks on a “noble” mission to collect body remains from the daily explosions that hit Baghdad prior the outbreak of full-scale civil war. Troubled by the inability to give these body parts a proper burial, al-Attag attempts to stitch together his finds into a single corpse. His latest procurement is a nose, collected after a suicide attack of a garbage truck targeting a five star hotel in the capital. In the midst of the chaos of the explosion, al-Attag finds the nose remains on the side of the street, puts it in his sackcloth bag, and returns to his run-down home in the old Jewish cemetery in al-Bataween district–a religiously and ethnically mixed working-class neighborhood in eastern Baghdad. al-Attag stiches the nose into the oozing hodge-podge of flesh to complete his corpse, which he calls the shisma or the "what’s-its-name".Next morning, the shisma disappears, coming to life after a “lost soul”, whose body was completely decimated in that same explosion, finds a home in the stitched-up corpse.
