Horror allegorizes problems; it sorts problems; it describes problems; it plays out problems. What it does not do is solve them, and this intractability is the main theme of the most gripping book of horror I have read as an adult. Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad is a triumph of the genre, but it is also one where the monster, if allegorical, is also very real. Set in 2005 in the depths of chaos and terror of the US invasion of Iraq, Frankenstein in Baghdad gives us no scientist striving to know the nature of the human soul, toying with fate, daring to play God. Its creature—known as Whatsitsname—is likewise not a science experiment, but a metonymic tour guide through a sort of magical realist house of horrors—the sort of inane horrors that could only ensue from an American invasion in the name of “democracy.” (Here, we might pause to note that the acknowledged masterpiece of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude, was also inspired by a US-backed atrocity.) The fright is not merely a fun spook on the pages, but rather a stand-in for death, rage, tribalism, pain, gore, and the absurdities of fate.
Published nearly 200 years prior, Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein was subtitled “The Modern Prometheus,” after the Greek myth about the god who, punished for giving fire to humans, was tied to a mountainside, doomed to have his liver devoured by raptors each day. The Greeks knew the liver regenerates, so accordingly this punishment would be eternal: Prometheus’ liver regrew every night. (A fair bit of body horror!) Sadaawi’s book, on the other hand, begins with a shady junkyard dealer named Hadi, whose main passions are whoring and ouzo, when he can afford them. Despite—or perhaps because of—his knowledge of his own degeneracy (is there ever really a difference?), he muses that the many dismembered body parts around town—thanks to both the US invasion and the vicious sectarian violence in its wake—deserve a proper burial.
A tinkerer, Hadi is quite handy with needle and thread, and, for those of you familiar with the source material, you can guess what happens next. Once enough body parts have been stitched together, the timely (or untimely) demise of a local security guard in an explosion renders his body a vaporous “pink mist” devoid of solid pieces, thus delivering a Shelleyan soul to the oozing, squishy, rotting patchwork of flesh. Whatsitsname is born. It’s alive!
While the original novel is subtitled for an actual god who gifted fire to mankind, the idea of human daring so sacrilege as to generate life (outside of, you know, fucking) is endlessly fascinating (like fucking). The ghost story is undoubtedly as old as camp fires, Promethean and otherwise. But gothic horror has its roots in a very particular moment in history, relevant to Shelley in a different (if also very scary) way compared with the historical context that informed Saadawi.
Apropos of fucking, the summer Mary Shelley started writing the book featured one hell of a Regency romp. After absconding to Europe in the wake of sex scandals too numerous and incestuous to list here, Mary Shelley, her new husband, Percy, and Lord Byron, among others, found themselves in Switzerland.
That climate catastrophe which gifted the world the gothic genre would also decide the fate of nations. Its global ramifications lasted for years. There was no summer of 1816. Europe, already reeling from the destruction of the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815, sank into crop failure and misery that crystallized lower class discontent into political radicalism and revolt in the coming decades. In New England, the following winter after the lack of summer was dubbed “Eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.” The region was so cold, it partly depopulated, driving the westward migration that would soon anoint itself “Manifest Destiny.” In South Asia, cholera killed at unprecedented rates, weakening empires and making way for total British conquest and greater European colonial incursion into Asia. That legacy and the United States’ subsequent 20th-century rebranding of empire set the stage for the horrors of Frankenstein in Baghdad, even if Mary Shelley provided the plot.
Caitlin McCormack
Sadaawi first published his update of Shelley’s tale, replete with djinns, genie folklore, and American incompetence, in 2013. It won a brace of major awards before Jonathan Wright translated it in 2018, winning it many more.
All that time—and still to this day—the book is wretchedly timely. Whatsitname initially seeks revenge upon evil, but that task in and of itself is a mire of gray areas and contradictions. Beyond the murky, moral ambiguity of seeking revenge in a sectarian conflict set loose by a brutal invasion, Whatsitsname is plagued by “serious putrefaction problems.” These, in turn, force it to be more indiscriminate in picking its victims simply to harvest body parts he needs to replace.
The violence literally feeds on itself and the moral imperative doubles back. The wacky plot descends into the Pynchonian (e.g., a “Tracking and Pursuit Department” becomes a focal point); Whatsitsname grows media savvy and gives the following soundbite: “Because I’m made up of body parts of people from diverse backgrounds—ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes—I represent the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past. I’m the first true Iraqi citizen.”
Though it is perhaps implied, one reason I hastened to name-check Young Frankenstein is that there is no describing Frankenstein in Baghdad without emphasizing its hilarity. The absurd premise of the book careens between horrors, but it never strays far from the sense of humor that, as the book suggests, is the next best thing to a moral compass. Sometimes, it’s all you’ve got left.
Rare is the book that will make you tear up, throw up, and crack up in a single chapter. Like Whatsitsname, it’s stitched together of too many parts to be identifiable as any single genre other than human. Whatsitsname is a metaphor for messes left behind, vendettas at tragic cross purposes, hopes of coexistence wrecked and rotting, but it is also a metaphysical mystery to behold, a sign of faith and of ruin. The “monster”’s name is dead-on.
In the original, Mary Shelley herself wrote an admonishment that could easily be applied to Western Imperialism: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow." Perhaps the United States itself is the closest thing to an arrogant mad scientist forcing both its beliefs and its hierarchies on the ancient city of Baghdad—daring to play God by wanting to remake a country in its own image and, in the process, unleashing every demon from the depths of hell.
Ahmed Sadaawi rips out the soul of a Western metaphysical classic to attempt to describe the horrors that a soulless, thoughtless Western invasion unleashed. It’s alive: The elegance and grotesque totality of the metaphor are complete.
[post_title] => The Monster Mash of Imperialism
[post_excerpt] => Some spooky seasonal appreciation for Ahmed Saadawi’s "Frankenstein in Baghdad."
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The writer's new memoir is a feast, exploring how food can be both deeply personal and impacted by forces much larger than ourselves.
Our appetites are deeply personal, a reflection of our idiosyncratic tastes. They’re shaped, too, by what our communities feed us, by what’s available or accessible or shared. Growing up in New England, you might develop a love of fried clams; raised in Hong Kong, you might hunger for congee; spend enough time in France and you’ll probably become a pastry snob. In every extended family lies one recipe that’s an instant passport to time spent with a beloved matriarch, or a meal that feels like home. And who doesn’t have a dish they’ve sworn they’ll never eat again because it reminds us too much of an ex?
Food writer Alicia Kennedy knows these contours well. In her writing—including in her fantastic history of vegetarian eating, 2023’s No Meat Required—she explores how our relationships to food can be deeply personal, yet impacted by forces much larger than ourselves, from local climates and family histories to global supply chains and government policies. Her work illuminates the ethical and sociopolitical elements of what we eat and why, yet sacrifices none of the thrills our appetites expose us to. And her latest, On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites, is a feast, exploring her personal relationship to food and cooking as she journeys from an adolescent gourmand to vegan baker to established food and culture writer.
In her new memoir, Kennedy organizes each chapter around a specific food—beans, lamb, bread, pumpkin, and more—tying each to a moment in her life. She writes about developing culinary preferences via the plentiful apples of Long Island, where she grew up; about the Proustian power of a box of Entenmann’s doughnuts. When she goes to college, her coursework inspires her to think more critically about the systems of power that ensnare us all, and naturally, this leads her to consider how the food she loves has made its way to her plate.
She begins with a childhood obsession. “Chocolate, the first true object of my longing and love,” she writes, “was the way I learned about exploitation in the global food system.” When she reads about the enslaved child labor and exploited farmers up and down the cocoa supply chain, she starts seeking out fair trade-certified chocolate—then bananas, and sugar, and coffee. She goes vegan, then falls in love with baking, and stumbles into running a vegan bakery out of her home kitchen alongside her day job as a copy editor. As Kennedy traces her winding path to meatless eating, she continually challenges the reader to consider food as an extension of our ethics. But her clear moral stance—her assertions that one’s choices around food ought to reflect one’s principles—never feels didactic; instead, it offers a blueprint for self-interrogation that can help lead the reader to their own conclusions.
When a long romantic relationship dissolves in the face of her ambition, she shuts down the bakery and moves to Brooklyn. There, she immerses herself in the city’s vegan food scene while picking up assignments as a freelance writer, endeavoring to normalize vegan coverage in the world of food journalism—an especially difficult task given its love of meat and masculinity. After several reporting trips bring her to Puerto Rico, she decides to move there—in part, because she’s fallen in love with her now-husband, whom she meets by chance while reporting on a rum distillery.
From Puerto Rico, she tells the story of their romance through wine. She walks through the island’s sugarcane fields, considering the crop’s relationship to slavery and colonialism. In her chapter on plantains, she also reflects on her own Puerto Rican heritage: Her paternal grandmother was born on the island, but rarely spoke about her childhood, forcing Kennedy to negotiate her understanding of her identity after she moves there. “Here, in my Puerto Ricanness, was something I couldn’t disappear into,” she writes; “this was something I had to seek in order to claim.” In part, she ultimately achieves this via her relationship to food, incorporating the island’s seasonality and culinary history into her kitchen.
Writing many years and miles removed from her childhood, Kennedy also finds newfound perspective on her home and the food that grows there—and the indelible way it has shaped her. Most of all, she grows to appreciate Long Island’s oysters, which she devours in a period of mourning following the death of her younger brother: They had been his least favorite food. “Maybe that urge for an oyster, and all the urges after it, were a way of reclaiming my appetite from the immense sadness,” she writes. “A way of saying, ‘I’ll live, and I’ll live enough for both of us, but because I’m mad at you, I’m going to eat the food you hated most.’” Her grief rips a hole in the metaphysical center of the book, a wound she can’t repair but which colors the way she looks at everything—eventually prompting a renegotiation of the strictures of her veganism to allow for her newfound craving.
Much of Kennedy’s work evokes the complex systems and philosophical concepts underpinning how we nourish ourselves; her writing about grief—and love—offers a moving reminder of the deeply personal, human scale of these choices. We ought to consider how far food traveled to get to our plates, Kennedy argues; we should know how much work it takes to grow crops, to slaughter animals, to cut down sugarcane. But these are not merely ideological considerations—nor are they simply a setup for a joyless life, a way of prioritizing our principles over our pleasures. To truly consider our own appetite is a way of connecting us to ourselves and to each other. Seen through that lens, the ethical choices we make about our food aren’t a burden, but a gift.
The day after I finished reading On Eating, I made dinner for my sister and her husband, who had just welcomed their first child. They’re omnivores; meanwhile, I haven’t eaten meat in over a decade, drawn to vegetarianism’s respect for animals and the planet. I worried, as I cooked, whether they’d enjoy the meat-free, bean-centric dish I was preparing. But as I made it, I also kept thinking of Kennedy’s belief that “inevitably … cooking becomes care: for self, for others”—her insistence that the delights of a well-made meal and our responsibility as stewards of this planet are inseparable. Food is a means of tending to our own bodies; it’s something we share with those we love; it’s a way of putting our values into practice. Her words echoed in my head as I cooked, feeling nourished by each of these overlapping versions of care, and the many appetites we feed when we embody them.
[post_title] => Book of the Month: "On Eating" by Alicia Kennedy
[post_excerpt] => The writer's new memoir is a feast, exploring how food can be both deeply personal and impacted by forces much larger than ourselves.
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