Close Reading Character

“The book Frankenstein in Baghdad explores the worlds of many different characters throughout the novel. I would say that this is the most amount of semi-main characters I have ever seen in a novel. This fact is important to bring up because in this discussion today I will be focusing on one character, Elishva "The Madwoman". The way the locals describe Elishva, "some of the locals believed that, with her spiritual powers, Elishva prevented bad things from happening when she was among them" (Saadawi 5). This aspect of her character was important to me because it showed her character in the eyes of the people around her. Another main quote that was mentioned, "The two daughters knew their mother clung to the memory of her late son in order to go on living. There was no harm in humoring her" (Saadawi 8). This is another aspect that I believed to be eye-opening about her character because I believe it will be brought up throughout the whole book. This is something that the audience can pick up on that will end up defining her character in some parts. In a story such as this, I believe that a character such as Elishva will add a desperate longing for her son back that will drive her to go along with the crazy ideas that will be shown throughout the book.”

Blocked Mourning & Psychical Trauma 

Blocked mourning is Freud's term for the inability of an individual to complete, what he calls, "the work of mourning" (i.e. the process of going through one’s memories and feelings about the lost love object in order to weaken the ego's emotional attachments to it), accept the loss, and move on to new objects. For Freud, blocked mourning has its source in ambivalence towards the object (feelings of love and hate) and the feelings of responsibility for the death of the object that the negative side of ambivalence gives rise to (a sense of responsibility in phantasy that goes beyond any true responsibility). Nevertheless, there's no reason to think that this would necessarily be the only cause of blocked mourning. Indeed, the blocked mourning that the characters experience in Frankenstein in Baghdad does not seem due primarily to ambivalent feelings about the lost loved one. Leaving aside the question of origin, Saadawi's novel focuses more on the effects of blocked mourning. These effects resemble the symptoms of psychical trauma. We will invoke the idea of psychical trauma in this module in a way that shouldn't be confused with the contemporary medical diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), even if they are historically related ideas. (Arguably, the closest we've come to encountering something like PTSD depicted in one of our readings was in Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.) In Frankenstein in Baghdad, psychical trauma is the experience of an overwhelmingly painful loss that results in the repeated attempt to master that experience through in some way rectifying the loss. Inasmuch as these attempts at rectification involve some degree of magical thinking, wherein the force of desire itself is imagined to be capable of overcoming material circumstances, they are doomed to failure, preventing the traumatized person from moving on from this loss and from completing the work of mourning.

Iraqi War & Its Aftermath

To help contextualize Frankenstein in Baghdad, please have a look at the timeline on the war and its aftermath put together by the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), a non-partisan think tank. Although it's an American institution with a American perspective, it gives a useful overview of the situation in Iraq during the years in which Frankenstein in Baghdad is set.  Here is a link to the timeline.  (Links to an external site.) According to CFR, from the start of the war in 2003 until American troops withdrew in 2011, over 100,000 Iraqis died violently due to the invasion and subsequent paramilitary conflicts and terrorist attacks.