Absolutely engaging graphic journalism based on oral history interviews the author/artist did with vets from the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars and--perhaAbsolutely engaging graphic journalism based on oral history interviews the author/artist did with vets from the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars and--perhaps because she is a woman--she works hard on representation, including gbltq vets. 12 stories from a woman cartoonist who was born on an Air Force base herself, covered in about 170 pages and what's the central takeaway? That war trauma is generally permanent, you suffer the rest of your life from it in certain ways. Invisible wounds, as the title says, though some of the wounds are also visible.
Some vets here are much more functional than others, but the US Military does not do nearly enough to address the needs of its vets. High suicide rates, and everything else you may be aware of from the news. The effect is to care very much for what these folks have gone through while we have mostly lived our lives without acknowledging the wars just went on and on.
The book concludes with an interview with Phil Klay, the author of a collection of Iraqi war short stories, Redeployment, but she also talks to a person who became an artist for the military. This is an anguishing collection, but we need to make war trauma--and mass murder--personal to help us non-soldiers fully understand what is being asked of our young people on our behalf. ...more
“The king ordered that the saint be placed in the olive press until his flesh was torn to pieces and he died. They then threw him out of the city, but“The king ordered that the saint be placed in the olive press until his flesh was torn to pieces and he died. They then threw him out of the city, but the Lord Jesus gathered the pieces together and brought him back to life, and he went back into the city”—The Story of St. George, the Great Martyr�
Frankenstein in Baghdad is an amazing novel that clearly assumes you at least know about Mary Shelley’s work, which it riffs off in a political/spiritual landscape set in the ongoing nightmare wreckage of Baghdad, Iraq, a place we all know as a site of suicide bombings, car bombs and terror more than its historical relation as the cultural mecca it remains. So it’s horror—as is Frankenstein—featuring a monster, but it is also an anguished love letter to and lament for the author’s beloved city. Filled with lyrical writing, honoring the dead there, it also possesses one of the darkest veins of black humor I have ever read. Fitting to use horror, surrealism, magical realism when there are just no words in the vocabulary of realism for the emotional effects of a terrorist act.
Hadi, a junk dealer, gathers body parts from the wreckage of unending bombings so he piece together a whole body and can give his friend Nahem a proper burial. Elishva too, wants to properly mourn her son, Daniel, killed in the Iran-Iraq War, though Elishva doesn’t yet quite accept he is dead. Hadi finds body parts where he can, from a range of humans attached to sects, good folks, criminals, whatever. And presto! We have a material representation, a map, of the body politic of Iraq, a deeply sad if macabre rendering of a body of fragments that fall off and need to be replaced all the time by the body parts of newly dead..
“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, he (the Whatsitsname) thinks.�
But one day this body, this Whatisname, walks away and begins to take revenge on those he sees as responsible for what has happened to the collective him and his country. Revenge, you ask? I thought this was poetry, a national tragedy! What about the need to heal? Well, this is Frankenstein territory, which means it is horror, in a world gone very very wrong. Macabre? Right, but also surprisingly lyrical and elegiac and tragic and sad even as it is sometimes bizarrely funny. For instance, in the process, Elishva claims Whatisname as Daniel, her son, returning as promised by St George!
How to get at the humor? Well, there’s a certain kind of rage and tenderness that attends Hadi’s job of stitching together bodies but its also outrageous comedy. And religion is part of what heals us but also divides and sometimes destroys us, so some of what we read acknowledges its importance and sometimes it is just flat out satire. And there’s this tender aspect of caring about the material body and in another light it’s a ludicrous act of desecration. It’s surreal, this act, impossible, and yet hopeful, giving hope in one instance to a mother who thinks her long lost son has come back home, not dead at all.
There’s so much I am not getting at here. The stories that people tell both sustain and obfuscate: Hadi was a well-known liar. Can we even believe his story of whatisname? What about all these djinns and apparitions and saints?
Frankenstein in Baghdad was originally published in Arabic in 2013. In 2014, it was awarded the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (sometimes known as the "Arabic Booker"). And I think it is a masterpiece I'll never forget, and will need to read again to better understand. ...more
Wow. Former cop and military consultant Chris Henry is hired to solve a murder in Baghdad. And from the first, this proves to be an absolutely brutal Wow. Former cop and military consultant Chris Henry is hired to solve a murder in Baghdad. And from the first, this proves to be an absolutely brutal task. Former CIA King would seem to know the territory, and as a storyteller is able to convey well the layers of complexity. Who is responsible? What is the right thing to do? We are in a kind of chaos in 2003 Iraq, one we who were not there have barely read anything about on this level.
Chris is joined as main characters in this one by Nassir, a shady ex-cop, and Sofia, a smart and tough diplomat. We alternate their stories throughout. There’s an interrogation scene that is as tough to read as it is amazing in getting at the moral complexities and near-impossibility of truth-telling here. There’s also a meeting with suspected terrorist Abu Rahim that is powerful and complicated. How can we know what is going on? How can we know the truth? How can we know what to do here?
Mitch Gerads' artwork is excellent, real and sketchy. Why is it history can’t be written and depicted with this kind of gritty honesty? This story succeeds because it preserves all the complexities. Everyone is flawed. A great series; hard to read and see in places, but if you want to know “how it was,� this is one team’s way of showing you. This series has to be on a list of the Literature of the Iraq Wars. ...more
This is brutal, just brutal, a set of snapshots of the chaotic situation in Iraq, post Gulf War II, 2003, Saddam reign over, and no one in control. NoThis is brutal, just brutal, a set of snapshots of the chaotic situation in Iraq, post Gulf War II, 2003, Saddam reign over, and no one in control. No one. It is not some fun shoot-em-up war story, trust me it is an ugly war story/police procedural focused on Christopher Henry, a former cop turned military contractor trying to do a little bit of good. Touches of tenderness, but mostly raw. Henry is training the new police force and trying to figure out how one of the cops got killed. Why bother? It's his job. Amidst absolute chaos, random bombings and killings. He's in the "US-controlled" Green Zone and it feels like we get an idea of what it's like being there: Insanity.
Other main characters emerging are Sofia, an American-raised Iraqi, and Nassir, a former cop and investigator. Why investigate this crime? Why even stay there? Whose interests are being served? We have no idea yet, but these characters develop together interestingly.
So it's not easy to read, as there are--as there were--a lot dead bodies, a lot of killing. Tribal warfare. Complicated theological divisions. We know all this but we get to live it for awhile, through this comic, we get to feel it. King is former CIA, has been there, knows the range of human response to all the horror. The dialogue and scenes feel real, stripped down and dirty. Frightening. Mitch Gerads' art is solid here. I feel off-balance reading it, as the stories of the three main characters intertwine as they develop, so the storytelling helps to feel what Henry and all those present must feel. I am in, yikes, real life horror....more
I have been a proud anti-war protestor all my life, from Vietnam through the Iraq wars. The Vietnam draft ended just as I was supposed to go. I am a pI have been a proud anti-war protestor all my life, from Vietnam through the Iraq wars. The Vietnam draft ended just as I was supposed to go. I am a pacifist, which a vet might say is a luxury not everyone can afford, but I support vets; as they might say, they fought to give me the option to be a pacifist. Like almost everyone, I have lost family members to various wars, and mourn and salute them for their sacrifices. That said, I did not initially really want to read this graphic novel in part developed from the author's online popular work. Especially a work that is written by an artist popular with active combatants and veterans everywhere. I was a little worried it was going to be macho justificatory in some way. Some comics are like that, and they are entitled, but see above, I'm a pacifist. And as it turns out I really really liked this and was moved by it and learned a lot about the various perspectives of combatants I would otherwise not have known.
Uriarte is an Iraqi war vet, who knows what he is writing about, and it shows. The story he tells is of a guy who enlisted and was bored not to see much action for months, and then saw it, more than he ever would have wanted to see, and it traumatized him, major ptsd. In the light of what we know about vet depression and suicide, it was good and important to read this story. Every line of dialogue feels real, and as a guy who never served, I learned a lot about how it might have felt to be there, the complications, the boredom, the anxiety, the fear. It's not political work, it's more psychological, to help us understand what it is like to be there. And we get multiple views, from long term combatants, and newbie "boots." Tough guys and people probably more like me, guys who are ambivalent, not career soldiers, let's just say. Very vulnerable. So I was pretty moved by it. I suggest you check it out.
Then I was also impressed by this review from my good buddy ŷ friend and also vet sud666, who writes this passionate response to the book, seeing it from a vet angle I could not of course have seen, and also learned a lot from:
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