A Study of Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad in Light of Appropriation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Through Translation and Adaptation Studies

Abstract

This doctoral thesis examines both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus (1888), and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2014) in light of adaptation and appropriation by employing the framework of translation and adaptation studies. Adaptation studies first emerged as a field of study in the first half of the twentieth century but its generalisations and arguments initially focused on text and screen; for instance, essays and texts by Vachel Lindsay (1915), Virginia Woolf (1927), and Sergei Eisenstein’s (1944) highlighted the distinctions between novels and films in general as well as the changes and transformations that the screen had brought about in the course of adaptations of texts (Leitch, 2017, p. 3). This approach established the theoretical grounds for the discipline of adaptation studies as it developed in Europe and the West in the sixties and seventies. On the one hand, this thesis aims to introduce both adaptation and translation studies into the Iraqi academia as an effort to examine Iraqi fiction, particularly Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, in parallel with the international and canonical literary works, such as Shelley’s Frankenstein. On the other hand, this research will also attempt to investigate and subsequently showcase the conclusions of the analysis of the Iraqi novel to the readership and scholarship of the British and European Frankenstein. The intersectional grey zones of the West and East, the civilisational missing links between the world and marginal literature/s, and comparisons between Shelley’s Gothic and science fiction and Saadawi’s Iraqi 2003 post-war reality will be portrayed in both of the selected novels. Therefore, this work represents the space shared by those novels to explore and discuss the various ways in which the latter work appropriates the former. Moreover, Saadawi’s work problematises several central themes also present in Saadawi’s work. For instance, Shelley’s Frankenstein considers science and scientific creation from various aspects as its central theme, while Iraqi Frankenstein depicts a brutal war iv against Iraq that turns Iraqi society into a slaughterhouse through the incorporation and intervention of Iraqi militias, sectarian terrorists, the US Army and its allied forces’ military attacks on and within the country. In other words, the Iraqi monster of Whatsitsname rising from the ashes of the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq, represents the failure of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which divided the Middle East and created new artificial borders based on the interests of the early twentieth-century superpowers such as France, Britain and Russia. As a result, adaptation and cross-cultural translation will, likewise, be employed to examine the selected texts and highlight the strong relations that connect them. It will, additionally, highlight the significance of the Iraqi Frankenstein, a work that concentrates on the post-2003 war context of marginalised Iraq by problematising some of Shelley’s main themes. Along with the various sources used in the process of undertaking this research, the current researcher conducted two interviews with the author of Frankenstein in Baghdad and its English translator into English language, which come as appendices at the end of this work. The main findings of this work revolve around the adaptation of the latter text by the former, the decontextualisation which exists in the latter, the expression of the disintegration and trauma of war, and the triumph of Saadawi’s novel as a crucial representational voice of the marginalised and repressed Iraq and its citizens.