8.+Raffo

//Please discuss this statement in GROUP 2 discussions ONLY.//
Susan Russell (Penn State University)

=Heather Raffo's //9 Parts of Desire//=

= = The central fact for me is, I think, that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than produce them), to be someone who cannot be easily co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violation of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously. Edward Said, //Representations of the Intellectual// (1994) Iraqi-American playwright Heather Raffo wrote an “intellectual” play. Raffo dared to ask questions, present hidden views, and pull rugs away to reveal very dirty floors. The thinking behind //9 Parts of Desire// consciously transcends mainstream American playwriting in order to insight cultural transformation, and I have seen people transformed by //9 Parts of Desire// at New York’s Manhattan Ensemble Theatre and at Penn State University’s Pavilion Theatre. The edge to this play is two-fold: this play holds two governments responsible for the destruction of Iraq, and this play positions theatre as a viable voice for a hidden population. Transformation is most certainly not the goal of mainstream American theatre writing, and transformation is certainly not the desired response from a mainstream American audience member. As an insider/outside in the business of corporate theatre, which became the template for mainstream American theatre production in the 1980s, is threatened by transformation because transformation comes with questions and questions are the byproduct of thinking. When presidential candidates can be “accused” of thinking and university professors can be threatened because of the thinking that defines them, a play such as //9 Parts of Desire// illustrates the possible outcome of a thinking population. //9 Parts of Desire// is dangerous to more than corporate production: //9 Parts of Desire// is a danger to all of the discourses that work to control an American citizen.

//9 Parts of Desire// is an epic engagement with the epochs that created Iraq and the era that has destroyed it. Since its publication in 2006, //9 Parts of Desire// has been translated into four languages and Raffo has been interviewed by organizations ranging from the BBC to Al Jazera to //Oprah Magazine//. After moving from The Edinburgh Fringe to London’s Bush Theatre in 2003, //CurtainUp//’s Liza Zapol wrote: “This is just the kind of artistic response we need right now to understand the human elements of war.” After its New York debut in 2004, John Lahr of //The New Yorker// said, “//9 Parts of Desire// is an example of how art can remake the world and eloquently name pain.” In order to remake the world by naming pain, Raffo places herself squarely between her two cultures and tells a story about the people inside the byproducts of political choices. Raffo positions herself as a human embodiment of purposes, privileges, perspectives, and prejudices, and the impact of her chosen role creates an audience that can see beyond the green screens that have masked the most vulnerable victims of the war: the female population. Raffo becomes the women of all ages who live through the bombs the sexual assaults, and the cultural disparity, and the females that emerge from this play prove not only the resilience of a population of citizens, but the resilience of the women who must continuously rebuild a society over the ages.

//9 Parts of Desire// reads like a collection of poetry as each Iraqi woman expresses individual cultural truths and reality through individualized poetic meter. Eight different poetic languages for eight different Iraqis uncover the diversity within a country that has been made to appear divided into Sunnis, Kurd, and Shi’a only. Diverse poetic meters are in keeping with the Iraqi culture, where “Every man thinks he’s a poet, and everything is a turn of phrase” (Raffo). Raffo pairs poetic writing with a resistance to the chronological and postmodern time that defines the US. Free to explore difference, she wrote a play containing

thoughts that could live on three levels at once, and not mean only what we think they mean, but mean a lot of things underneath them. This was important to me because I knew that I had a very short amount of time and wanted to say a lot about Iraq. (Raffo)

Contemporary U.S. theatre practices dictate that she comply with a two-act show that runs for ninety minutes with an intermission; however, she credits a “classical” lens for allowing her to travel through contemporary borders. Raffo studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and received her MFA in acting from The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. This template of education along with her life as an Iraqi-American informed her choice of style:

I have always been drawn to magic realism, a sense of the myth and the magic, and that is something that is found in classical theatre [. . .] I love spirituality, and the mythic, and the divine. I think this is what theatre does best. [ . . .] I love the sense of multi-times, old places, ancient places, and I think when I came to writing, I wrote the way I wrote because it was the only way I knew how to write. [and] I think the reason it came through me the way it came through me was because I was constantly dealing with Shakespeare. (Raffo)

Her choices as a writer reveal not only a line of demarcation between American, classical, and Iraqi writing styles, but also reveal an avenue of translation that can offer insight into the way the Iraqi citizen “thinks.”

Like an Iraqi citizen, //9 Parts of Desire// does not collaborate with linear time. The play is written to evoke an ever spinning spiral of time that represents the Arabic culture, and Raffo reveals that her approach to time is part of a cultural conversation that represents a culture rooted in a Matriarchal system. The personal impact of cultural time affected an audition for David Hare’s //Stuff Happens//, but the experience solidified the importance of time in //9 Parts.// “It was incredible for me to audition for Hare’s play. It’s an absolutely linear approach to the situation in Iraq [which] is a completely male approach [. . .] It’s a male outside looking in. Mine is a female inside looking out, and mine is looking from the view of an Iraqi.” The structure of //9 Parts of Desire// created challenges for the first U.S. production. Raffo and her director Joanna Settle fought for the play’s nonlinear structure at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre. Raffo won, but she understands the ever present danger of Westernizing her Iraqi conversation. If the play is interpreted through a Western lens, not only will Iraq disappear back inside the green screen, but the Iraqi female will be absorbed by two cultures who view the female as subjugated citizens. The erasure of the female empties out the play because //9 Parts of Desire// is not about “fixing the war, or fixing this thing, but getting at this inner sacred space, that white space that is left empty in [Layal’s] painting. It’s the river, the holistic center of something that if you fuck that up you can never go back.” (Raffo). = =