Rawan's Middle Eastern Fiction Reading Group

Welcome back lovers of Middle Eastern Fiction! This Reading Group will explore powerful and complex voices from the Middle East, both contemporary and classic, from a region that has an ancient rich literary tradition. We will delve into novels that illuminate issues of identity, exile, resistance and belonging, told by authors whose work challenges and enriches our understanding of the Middle East and its people.

This December, Rawan has selected Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad, which was the winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2018.

This novel is a satirical reimagining of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein set in the ruins of the Iraq War. The protagonist, Hadi, collects miscellaneous body parts of corpses from the rubble-strewn streets of Baghdad and stitches them together to complete a disfigured body that was murdered in an act of sectarian violence. He claims to do so for the government to recognise them as real people and thus give them a burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps across the city. Residents live in fear of grotesque looking, flesh-eating monster that cannot be killed, who initially targets the guilty but eventually attacks anyone who crosses its path.

Frankenstein in Baghdad captures the horrors of the illegal American invasion of Iraq, and the wave of sectarian violence that it sowed in its wake.

‘I wanted to hand him over to the forensics department, because it was a complete corpse that had been left in the streets like trash. It’s a human being, guys, a person,’ he told them.

‘But it wasn’t a complete corpse. You made it complete,’ someone objected.

‘I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as trash, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial,’ Hadi explained."