Gothic Politics in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013)

Abstract

The present article examines a narrative of darkness to illuminate the rhetoric of haunting and monstrosity. Gothicity evokes a sense of indeterminateness and it dramatizes disruptive incorporeal occurrences as interrogated in Ahmed Saadawi’sFrankenstein in Baghdad, a war Frankenfiction. It stages horror to chronicle national disintegration through the rise of a sewn-together zombie to mark the appalling arrival of the Iraqi dissenter. The new twenty-first-century monster is a zombie to defy marginality and to associate monstrosity with deviance and abnormality. Within this rationale, the present study investigates the aesthetics of Postcolonial Gothic politics to examine the use of the supernatural, the grotesque body, the monstrous abject, and the haunted ruins to depict a dismembered nation through the deployment of eerie motifs and surreal techniques. My premise fleshes out the Frankenstein hubris to dismantle the US political culture in Iraq. The aim is to reframe the modern Gothic monster as an emblem of reverse colonialism to defy the imperialist ideologies and to articulate past trauma through the rhetoric of bodily horror, haunting and ghostly fear.