Frankenstein in Baghdad

Ahmed Saadawi

4 ideas

1. Junk dealer stitches bomb victims' remains

   In 2005 Baghdad, Hadi al-Attag, a junk dealer in the Bataween district, gathers body parts left after car bombings and sews them into one complete corpse so that at least one victim can receive a proper burial. When a hotel guard, Hasib Mohammed Jaafar, is killed in a truck bombing, his wandering soul enters the stitched body and it gets up. The creature, called 'Whatsitsname', sets out to kill the people responsible for each death that supplied one of its parts.

2. Revenge that consumes the innocent to continue

   Each time the creature avenges a part's owner, that part rots and falls away, so it must replace it with flesh from new victims to stay alive. Its mission for justice therefore produces more of the violence it was created to answer. Eventually it cannot tell victims from criminals, which shows how a cycle of retaliation turns avengers into perpetrators.

3. Composite corpse as the fractured nation

   Because the creature is built from victims of every sect, ethnicity and class, it is described as the first true Iraqi citizen. This is a nation that can only be assembled from its dead. The body is a political allegory: a unity made of grievances, held together only by the shared demand for vengeance, and falling apart as each grievance is satisfied.

4. Security apparatus that fabricates its culprit

   A state tracking department cannot catch the real killer, so it relies on astrologers and fortune-tellers and chases rumors. When public pressure demands a result, it publicly names a scapegoat as the criminal. Occupation-era authority is shown producing the appearance of order through superstition and blame rather than investigation, while the actual source of the violence keeps operating.

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