Saturday, Witnessing, and the Cultural Logic of Rehabilitation

Toward the end of Ian McEwan's Saturday, when the protagonist Dr. Henry Perowne is operating on the man who had just earlier invaded his home and "terrorized" his family, the author describes the scene as follows:

The ending simile in the passage is deeply suggestive of Perowne's reductionist views of crime, terrorism, and violence: that, at the end of the day, they are neurobiologically determined. It is also ironic because the central drama of the novel unfolds precisely because of Perowne's earlier car accident involving Baxter, whom he would consider the resident of a bad neighborhood in an English, rather than an American, city. Indeed, Perowne's prejudice is on full display even before he meets Baxter, having at that point only identified his car: "a series-five BMW, a vehicle he associates for no good reason with criminality, drug-dealing."2 Having jumped to this conclusion about Baxter's occupation, he surmises that Baxter is pathologically violent: "Perowne is familiar with some of the current literature on violence. It's not always a pathology; self-interested social organisms find it rational to be violent sometimes... But drug dealers and pimps... settle their quarrels in their own way."3

Any careful reader of McEwan's lauded book knows that Baxter signifies more than a violent English criminal who happens to have Huntington's disease. Baxter and his two stooges, owing to the novel's exploration of the moral and political dilemmas surrounding the Iraq War, also invite comparison to radical Islamic terrorists. It is no accident that, after having completed his Saturday squash game with his American friend, Perowne crosses the "orderly grid of medical streets west of Portland Place'' and sees "three figures in black burkhas emerge from a taxi...the one in the middle, the likely invalid, whose form is somewhat bent, totters as she clings to the forearms of her companions."4 The three Muslim women exactly mirror the three "criminals," the disabled woman's tottering walk a foil for Baxter's "distinctive" gait impaired by Huntington's.5

The upshot of this comparison between petty English criminals like Baxter and a "natural ally of terrorists"6 like Iraq is that, for Perowne, both can be, or hold out the possibility to be, rehabilitated: either through surgical intervention in the brain or the surgical strikes of shock and awe. But it is also notable that McEwan's novel implicitly suggests the futility or even the dishonesty of these promises of rehabilitation. In order to pacify Baxter and preempt any violent outburst, first after the car accident in the street and afterwards in his home, Perowne falsely promises him a cure for his Huntington's disease, gesturing toward a fictional "American trial" of experimental drugs. The promise of a cure only briefly allows Perowne and his son to incapacitate Baxter, who then ends up on Perowne's operating table. The doctor is able to fix Baxter's broken skull from the fall in his house but has no remedy for his chronic illness. Similarly, it is implied, the "American trial" of Iraq's occupation may temporarily oust the evil that Saddam Hussein represents but may not permanently rehabilitate it; it, too, is a fiction. Rehabilitation, and its impossibility, discursively construct terrorism as a disability.

2021 marks the two decade-anniversary of 9/11, but it is also a decade since the American-led coalition forces withdrew from Iraq. The invasion of that country, while touted as part of the Global War on Terror, had no tangible links to the perpetrators of 9/11. And yet, like all imperialist endeavors, it was launched on the pretext of civilizational rehabilitation: that Western powers could rehabilitate Iraq from its terrorist, despotic leadership under Saddam Hussein. A cultural artifact like Saturday, published two years after Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched, is a key text for analyzing this logic of rehabilitation.

This discourse of national rehabilitation and terrorism has curiously not been investigated thoroughly through a disability studies lens. Even leaving aside for a moment the discursive production of terrorism as disability, there is also a dearth of scholarship in American circles on the disabilities sustained by people in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan from the ongoing Global War on Terror; social scientists would rather focus on the impairments of American soldiers and their rehabilitation through national outfits like the Department of Veterans' Affairs. The only exception to date has been Jasbir K. Puar's The Right to Maim, which examines the debilitation of Palestinians by Israeli armed forces.

In her earlier work with Amit Rai, Puar argued that after 9/11, the "terrorist" came to occupy a signifying chain along with the epithets "monster" and "fag," suggesting the sexual and ontological deviance that the terrorist inhabited.7 More recently, Anjuli Raza Kolb has identified a disease poetics of empire that continuously paints terrorism as a contagious epidemic.8 But implicit in these theories of the monstrousness, queerness, and infectiousness of the terrorist is the idea, if not altogether developed by the theorists, that the terrorist is a disabled individual in need of rehabilitation. The word "rehabilitation" has been used for quite some time for the "curing" of both criminals and disabled people, but rarely have counter-terrorism measures been studied as counter-disability ones, despite the fact that Michel Foucault had identified in Discipline and Punish the curious nexus of legal and medical rhetoric in the project of criminal rehabilitation: "With this new economy of power, the carceral system, which is its basic instrument, permitted the emergence of a new form of 'law': a mixture of legality and nature, prescription and constitution, the norm. This had a whole series of effects: the internal dislocation of the judicial power or at least of its functioning; an increasing difficulty in judging, as if one were ashamed to pass sentence; a furious desire on the part of the judges to judge, assess, diagnose, recognize the normal and abnormal and claim the honour of curing or rehabilitating."9  Thus, part of the project of national rehabilitation in places like Iraq was the individual rehabilitations of terrorists into "normal," law-abiding citizens. In the wake of continued political upheaval and violence in Iraq, American generals and counterterrorism experts established rehabilitation programs for prisoners in the three major Iraqi detention centers.10 These programs, often run by counselors familiar with the religious context of Iraq as well as fully trained psychologists, sought to persuade the inmates to abandon their extremist beliefs and commit to a peaceful mode of existence.

The chief theorizers of these programs themselves admit to the ableist underpinnings of this endeavor in Terrorist Rehabilitation: The U.S. Experience in Iraq: "Derived from the Latin word rehabilitare, rehabilitation is 'to make fit, after disablement, illness, or imprisonment for earning a living or playing a part in the world' (The Wordsworth Concise English Dictionary, 1993, p. 838). Consequently, criminal and terrorist rehabilitation is about reengaging, reediting, and reentry of those who have deviated from the mainstream back to society. Those exposed to, and convinced by, terrorist ideology do not lead normal lives."11  More troubling than this pathologizing approach to terrorism is the fact that these programs were often also used as pretexts for intelligence gathering. Rehabilitation and surveillance of the "abnormal," as we have learned through Foucault's work on carcerality, went hand in hand.

This nexus of surveillance and rehabilitation is also readily apparent in Saturday, a novel in which the modality of the visual -- especially in the form of the clinical gaze -- reigns supreme. Scholars like Debjani Ganguly in This Thing Called the World have extensively commented on vision and spectacle in the novel. According to Ganguly, such a visual aesthetic in contemporary novels mimics the "posthuman neovisuality" of our "current age of witnessing," an age in which major catastrophes are readily available to spectators through the proliferation of new media technologies.12 The planes flying into the Twin Towers on 9/11 was the quintessential harbinger of this age of witnessing, a spectacle that McEwan reminds us of in the beginning of the novel when Perowne wakes up in his house and witnesses the crash of a Russian cargo plane. He avers that, in the wake of 9/11, "there gathered around the innocent silhouette of any jet plane a novel association. Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed."13

A novel of "witnessing" Saturday may be, but not many commentators, including Ganguly, have reckoned with the curious meeting of political witnessing and the medical gaze in the novel. Their convergence can be explained through the collapsing of political and medical rehabilitation in the novel. Even as Baxter's disability is a phobic trope for violent Islamic terrorism, Perowne's hegemonic clinical gaze is symptomatic of a Western perspective that surveils, generalizes, stereotypes, and reduces individuals of the Islamic world into a monolith. Hence, we have the colonial gaze: "Radical Islam hates your freedom"; and "It's not just Iraq. I'm talking about Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, a great swathe of repression, corruption, and misery."14 As well as the clinical gaze: "Once a patient is draped up, the sense of a personality, an individual in the theater, disappears. Such is the power of the visual sense. All that remains is the little patch of the head, the field of operation."15 This flattening "field of operation" may as well signify American-led coalition operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the visual sense also manifests as unmanned aerial vehicles. As I have argued elsewhere, like the generalizing clinical gaze, the gaze of a surveillance or armed drone cannot distinguish between combatant and civilian, erasing all personal individuality to disastrous ends.16

Perhaps the biggest irony in Saturday is that, for all of Perowne's positivism and his regard for the visual and the "objective," his sympathy for the Iraq War is based not on fact but on conjecture. As his daughter Daisy reminds him, neither was there any evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda, nor was there any proof of WMDs. There is a moment in the text where, through free indirect discourse, McEwan lets his reader know Perowne's disparaging views of magical realism: "Please, no more ghosts, angels, satans or metamorphoses. When anything can happen, nothing much matters. It's all kitsch to me."17 And yet, the lies concocted by the Bush administration to justify the Iraq War, especially by the recently deceased Donald Rumsfeld, were nothing if not fables wrought of magical thinking (or outright fantasy).

The kind of vision that Perowne champions is inherently liable to contamination by the fantastic. This is because he would rather gaze from far away, an act of looking not unlike the generalizing, abstracting gaze of the clinician or the drone: "Catastrophe observed from a safe distance. Watching death on a large scale, but seeing no one die. No blood, no screams, no human figures at all, and into this emptiness, the obliging imagination set free."18 The "horror of what he can't see" is part and parcel of Perowne's so-called objective witnessing, a vision necessarily incomplete because of its safe and distanced vantage point.

The prospect of rehabilitation thus appears rosy from a distance. Which is why I shall conclude by placing Saturday in conversation with a text that takes you into the thick of the "horror of what [you] can't see."  Iraqi author Ahmed Saadawi's novel Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013; translated 2018), I would argue, can be read as a complete inversion of Saturday in that it jettisons McEwan's realism for the fantastic and more explicitly debunks any optimism about bodily or political rehabilitation. Briefly, it follows a junk dealer named Hadi who collects the body parts of Baghdadi citizens killed by bombs, stitching them together to create his own version of Frankenstein's monster, whom he calls the "Whatsitsname." Hadi's Frankensteinian project, in some ways like Perowne's, is one of bodily and political rehabilitation. As the Whatsitsname says in one of the most celebrated passages of the novel: "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."19 The Whatsitsname therefore becomes a corporeal allegory for the nation-state itself, composed of people with multifarious identities. If the war in Iraq had destroyed and debilitated the national fabric, Hadi's creature rehabilitates the nation within his own stitched-up body. And unlike McEwan's text, which focuses on the visual over all other senses, Saadawi's text is pure, visceral embodiment. If Perowne sees "no blood, no screams, no human figures at all," Saadawi makes us see and feel them all, and some more.

The Whatsitsname first sets out as a vigilante, bringing the oppressors of Iraq to justice by avenging

It is in the body's disability or debility, and not in its rehabilitation, that the real witnessing takes place.

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Bassam Sidiki is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Michigan with a certificate in Science, Technology, and Society. His scholarly work, at the intersections of postcolonial studies, health humanities, and disability studies, appears or is forthcoming in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Literature and Medicine. Find his other writing at bassamsidiki.com and tweets at @_super_bass. 

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