SEE WHAT THE CRITICS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT 9 PARTS OF DESIRE NEW YORKER WALL STREET JOURNAL LOS ANGELES TIMES NEW YORKER THE FURY AND THE JURY by John Lahr Women, and men, make themselves heard. Issue of 2004-11-08 The first Gulf War came to us via satellite and without words. The road to Basra—the totem of that military cakewalk—was a silent spectacle of incineration. Now, in the second Gulf adventure, Americans can hear the war, but the wall of silence around the female experience of carnage remains more or less intact. War and tyranny dehumanize the enemy; silence is part of that process. To inflict pain, physical or psychic, turns us away from the world; we stop thinking and feeling. In 9 Parts of Desire (at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre), Heather Raffo’s remarkable one-woman show, which bears witness to Iraqi women’s political oppression, an expatriate named Hooda explains that, in the case of Saddam’s henchmen, “their way, I promise you—their way it’s to torture the people close to you.” She adds, “One woman I was with, they bring her baby, three months old baby, outside the cell, they put this woman’s baby in a bag with starving cats. They tape-record the sound of this and of her rape and they play it for her husband in his cell.” She asks, “How could these people have liberated themselves?” As Freud knew, when you can focus only on pain your thinking is wrecked. For more than a generation under Saddam, Iraqis lived in a state of permanent paranoia, which left them passive and mute. “Iraqis know they don’t open their mouth, not even for the dentist,” the artist Layal, who was a collaborator, and who survived by painting nudes and doing portraits of Saddam, says. The very act of giving voice to feelings is a liberation to Amal, a fat Bedouin woman who tells of her hapless love life. “This is most free moment of my life. Really I mean this,” she says, after admitting, “I have never talked this before. Nobody here knows this thing about me. I keep in my heart only.” 9 Parts of Desire, directed by Joanna Settle, is an example of how art can remake the world and eloquently name pain. Based on research and dozens of interviews conducted on four continents over eleven years, the play brings news of the psychic life of the brutalized and allows us to think about the unthinkable. The play, which manages to avoid the polemical, begins in prayer. The Mulaya—a professional mourner whose improvised verse about the dead is meant, according to the stage directions, “to bring the women to a crying frenzy”—enters, dropping old shoes into a stream. “Today the river must eat,” she says. She goes on, “This river is the color of worn soles.” Her lyrical invocation elevates the water to a metaphor not just of the lost promise of the Garden of Eden (“Where is anything they said there would be?”) but of the emotional abdications of all women (“Underneath my country there is no paradise of martyrs only water, a great dark sea of desire, and I will feed it my worn sole”). Too often, a savage world has turned men into savages—brutes, betrayers, rapists—or into physical absences. A doctor whose husband lost his legs admits that she can’t even look at him. “He’s my death sentence,” she says. Male mayhem haunts the narratives like the disappointment in the epigram—taken from the teachings of the seventh-century imam Ali ibn Abu Talib—that are the source of Raffo’s title: “God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one part to men.” Of the many atrocities that the women report, the most compelling is the spiritual mutation of Layal, whose collaboration with Saddam’s regime leaves her internally empty and morally bankrupt. She is beyond shame or pity. In her time, she has been shot by her husband for having an affair (“We never spoke about it”); a girlfriend, she tells us, was covered in honey and devoured by Dobermans in front of Saddam’s son Uday, whom she had foolishly identified as her rapist. “Here my work is well known, hardly anyone will paint nudes,” she says. “But this is us. Our bodies—isn’t it deserted in a void, and we are looking for something always. I think it’s the light.” Her way of dealing with self-loathing is to merge with the women she paints. “Always I paint them as me,” she says. “I paint my body but herself inside me.” Layal surrenders to her models; she also surrenders to her masters. “Always I run to them crying, begging, take care of me, they love me to run to them begging, so they can have me,” she says of her perverse sadomasochistic game with the regime. “If I am not afraid, then there is no feeling.” She adds, “I have been raped and raped and raped and raped, and I want more because they see me, they know me as I am, and that is freedom.” If she is nihilistic about herself, she also voices a chilling poetic prophecy about America’s destiny. “You have our war inside of you like a burden, like an orphan,” she says. “And we tether you to something so old you cannot see it. We have you chained to the desert, to your blood.” “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work,” the poet Mary Oliver has written. Certainly, 9 Parts of Desire is a triumph of meticulous observation. BACK TO TOP WALL STREET JOURNAL INVISIBLE WOMEN by Terry Teachout January 14, 2005 How do we know what we think we know about life in Iraq? After the re-election of George W. Bush, the continued fighting there was the top news story of 2004, yet the agenda-driven, visually oriented accounts of the mainstream media had little to say about the everyday existence of the Iraqi people, and told us next to nothing about their feelings and fears. It is as though we were waging a war in a land populated by stick figures—which may help to explain why it is an artist who has done what so few reporters have even thought to do, and done it with a persuasiveness that fewer still could hope to rival. 9 Parts of Desire, [written by Heather Raffo], directed by Joanna Settle and now playing Off Broadway at Manhattan Ensemble Theater, brings us closer to the inner life of Iraq than a thousand slick-surfaced TV reports. Yet the beautifully shaped one-woman play is a play, not a stodgily earnest piece of documentary theater, and therein lies its singular force and compulsion: It is persuasive precisely because it is beautiful. FULLY BELIEVABLE Ms. Raffo’s enigmatic title is explained in her epigraph, a maxim of Ali ibn Abu Taleb, founder of the Shiite sect and fourth leader of the Islamic world after Muhammad: “God created sexual desire in 10 parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.” The nine characters are based on a large and diverse group of real-life women—a doctor, a painter who ran the Saddam Art Center, a left-wing political exile living in London, a young girl who loves the music of ’N Sync—whom she interviewed over the past decade. I know nothing of Ms. Raffo’s political views. In any case, they are not her subject matter (though the Iraqi-American in 9 Parts of Desire appears to be at least a partial self-portrait). Some of her characters support the war, others oppose it. Most express no settled opinion about it. For them, violence has always been an inescapable part of their lives—especially their lives as women in an inconceivably repressive culture—and it is simply not possible for them to envision a world without it. Time and again they utter phrases that illuminate the blasted landscape of their native land like flashes of lightning. No critic, however eloquent, can do better than to quote a few of them: • “I did a painting once of the young woman who was eaten by Saddam’s son.” • “My husband, he sits at home without his legs. He can’t make money sitting at home—what’s left of the man—I can’t even look at him now—he’s my death sentence!” • “Why don’t we count the number of Iraqi dead?” • “The mistake is not this war. The mistake was supporting Saddam all his life.” • “Now they steal women for money or to sell them. I try to tell momma she won’t get stolen. Her hair is not that nice.” • “I think only mens have real peace. Womans cannot have peace. What you think?” Already extended three times by popular demand, 9 Parts of Desire is now playing on an open-ended basis. See it soon. See it tonight. BACK TO TOP LOS ANGELES TIMES A MOVING PORTRAYAL OF IRAQI WOMEN by Steven Oxman Theater is a lens you look through: Think of going to the theater like putting on a pair of eyeglasses. If the play and performance are good, you’ll be taken someplace revealing, maybe see something you haven’t seen before or see it more clearly. Most of the time, you take the glasses off at the end of the play and your vision returns to normal, the fleeting but enjoyable effect of entertainment. 9 Parts of Desire [written by Heather Raffo, is] an exquisite, passionate and penetrating one-person show about the women of Iraq, is an example of a rarer occasion. This is the type of play in which the lens likely won’t evaporate; after the show is over and the metaphorical eyeglasses are removed, one’s vision will almost certainly remain altered. Familiar images—say, a newspaper photo of an Iraqi woman wrapped head-to-toe in black, crying over a devastating loss—will take on added dimensions, evoke greater curiosity or simply seem far less distant than before. The images, Raffo is telling us, are closer than they appear. Raffo’s play, a hit in London and New York, depicts nine women, a varied gallery representing different experiences and perspectives. Inspired by interviews Raffo conducted during and following her visit to Iraq in 1993, these are not journalistic reports but structurally calibrated dramatic monologues, often with poetic but always sincere touches. Raffo returns most often to a seemingly free-spirited artist with many layers of contradictions to peel away. Popular during Saddam Hussein’s rule for painting public portraits of him, the artist survived the dictatorship, but at great cost. Now, she questions the meaning of liberation. Not all of the segments are so nuanced. Others tell blunt, deeply disturbing facts of war. There’s the Western-trained doctor who details the symptoms of strange cancers that are showing up. And there’s the woman who has lived next door to a bomb shelter destroyed during the first Gulf War. In an unemotional monotone, she points out the spot where a woman’s silhouette appears on the wall, a relic of when the intense heat of the bomb killed hundreds. While providing plenty of fodder for those who may oppose the war, Raffo’s play purposely does not take that kind of stand. It’s an “antiwar” play only in the sense that it looks without blinking at the suffering caused. If the play can’t be called hopeful, it does affirm the full power of the theatrical form to take us places the news cannot, and to make us look again at the images we see with fresh perspective, knowing there are real people involved, not so very different from ourselves. BACK TO TOP