Igniting Desire
Heather Raffo's Nine Parts of Desire, which is playing off-Broadway at Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, is the playwright's moving theatrical documentary about the lives of contemporary Iraqi women. Raffo spoke with and recounts the tales of artists, wives, doctors, exiles and other women, who are members of a society long silenced by a repressive order. As a performer, Raffo has appeared off-Broadway in Over the River and Through the Woods, Macbeth and The Merry Wives of Windsor. She holds degrees from the University of Michigan, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and an M.F.A. from the Old Globe Theatre/USD Masters program. Here, Raffo talks about what ignited Nine Parts of Desire.
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When I was standing in the Saddam Art Center in Baghdad, I saw rooms and rooms of nothing but portraits of Saddam Hussein. I then wandered up some stairs and into a back room and saw a painting of a nude woman clinging to a barren tree. There was a light in front of her, like a sun, but her head was hanging, bowed. I took a photo of the painting, came back to America and over the last 10 years have been digesting this painting and what it must mean to be an Iraqi woman now.
As an American with a father who was born in Iraq, I naturally live on both sides of the issues. The first Gulf War was the most defining moment of my life. I was in school at the University of Michigan watching most of my fellow students excited about the war cheering in the bar, while I was worried if my family in Baghdad was even going to survive. Over a decade later, I think Americans are deeply questioning their place in Iraq and wondering about its history and: Who are its people? What do they want? Why are we there? Did we do the right thing?
So if you could imagine going to Baghdad and getting to overhear a Bedouin woman at her hairdressers telling her secrets about the man she loves and her heartache at why he doesn't love her in the context of the above questions, my play becomes vitally immediate.
The material I gathered came from hours of gaining the trust of Iraqi women by nothing less than loving them. An Iraqi woman will not tell you what she really feels unless she loves you like family. I had the right mix. I was half Iraqi so they opened up to me immediately, but I was also Western and outside their culture, so they felt they could express fears or secrets that might otherwise be judged more harshly by someone from their culture. And perhaps most importantly, I had to share as much of myself with them as they were sharing with me.
I very much intended to write a piece about the inner Iraqi psyche, something that would inform and enlighten the images we see on TV; however, I think the play is equally about the American psyche. Getting an American audience to lighten up and laugh, with these characters and at themselves is important. In this way I hope that the audience eventually sees these women not as the "other" but much more like themselves than they would have initially thought. Creating a safe environment for an audience to experience compassion and enjoy the play as a celebration of life, the need for feminine strength and a culture's endurance even through dire situations is important. Many of the women in my play have strong political views, but the play itself does not promote any sort of politics, it is essentially about the way different women choose to integrate their sexuality, their dreams and their needs in order to express themselves fully while surviving at the same time. Many young American girls have told me they feel that they could have been any one of these women. This is the point.