WUNRN
Video of Play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLfcGo4TlfI
Iraq - "Nine Parts of
Desire" - Play of Women's Stories
The
Iraqi premiere of the play "Nine Parts of Desire" by Heather Raffo
opened painful war memories. For players, the playwright and the audience it
was a chance to face the past together, in a safe place, and share the benefits
of healing catharsis.
SULAIMANI,
Iraq (WOMENSENEWS)--Images of faces rhythmically pound the wall
projected as a visual drum. Lea Hariri calls out their
names, one by one, all 46 of them, tears spilling down her face.
The
18-year-old was on stage for the first time playing the role of an
American-Iraqi woman in New York, far from the 1991 bombing of Baghdad, evoking
the names of her Iraqi family.
Hariri was
one of five actors in the Iraqi premier on
April 28
of "Nine Parts of Desire," a play about Iraqi women by Heather Raffo. Characters
told stories of a divorcée looking for love, a mother who lost her daughter in
a bomb raid by U.S. forces, a doctor treating diseases linked to depleted
uranium and an exiled politically-active intellectual.
Written in
2003, the play's world premiere was in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was initially rejected by
American theater companies due to the sensitivity of the issues until 2004,
when it sold out for nine months in New York City. Since then it continues to be
performed around the world.
In Iraq,
such stories are not easy to hear, talk about or perform--by an all-female cast
of Arabs and Kurds--in a patriarchal country marred by horrors from generations
of war. But the play provided a powerful catharsis for the playwright and the
cast.
Raffo sat in
the front row of a theater for about 300 people to watch the young women
appropriate the play in her country of origin. She laughed, cried and at times
covered her face with her hands as if taming the maelstrom of emotions during
the two performances.
Hariri's
tears were not part of the script. As she played her part she channeled her
character's grief at a deeply personal level, remembering the deaths of her own
loved ones since 2003.
"It's
just that feeling of losing someone, or of not knowing what's going to happen
to them. It drives you crazy," she said in an interview following the
performance.
Three months
of rehearsal, of living for the play and in the play, brought the cast closer
to each other, to their pasts and complex identities, said the cast members,
all students at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani.
'Too
Young to Remember'
They were
still children in 2003 and too young to remember the trauma of sanctions and
previous wars. But that didn't matter to them.
"I feel
like we've witnessed every war that happened to Iraq," Hariri said.
Danger,
violence and death became part of the cultural fiber, determining language
patterns; when Hariri goes out in Baghdad, upon leaving her friends the words are
always the same: "We don't say 'See you tomorrow.' It's always like 'Call
me when you get home.' I still have that fear. I'm afraid I might lose my loved
ones."
Hariri grew
up in Baghdad before starting college in Sulaimani. During the war she lived on
Haifa Street, known as "the street of death," where fresh corpses
lying between buildings were a common sight.
The five
women in the cast were themselves a microcosm of Iraq: Kurds, Arabs, a mixture.
It can be an enriching or a combustible blend.
Cast member Mina
Bassam Attar, 21, grew up in Baghdad but left
when she was 10, just before 2003. Some of her fellow Kurds frown
at her mingling with Arabs. "What happened was not because of Arabs. What
happened was because of Saddam," said a frustrated Bassam in reference to
the systematic killings or deportations of Kurds during the former regime.
"I think it would be better and nicer if people would learn to get along,
because we have bigger problems to think about."
Actors who
lived in the much safer Kurdish area found themselves dealing with detachment
from Baghdad-like realities. Kazho Muhsin, 20,
said she hadn't experienced the stories told in the play or even those
recounted by her Kurdish family.
"Most
people I know they're like 'Oh it brings back bad memories I don't want to
hear,'" Muhsin said. But for her, the play brought the stories to life and
made her appreciate her relative good fortune and the hardships of so many
women.
Sleepless
Nights
Her
character is based largely on an Iraqi female artist who painted thousands of
portraits of Saddam
Hussein but who was surrounded by rumors that numerous sexual
affairs fueled her success.
"Whore"
is one of the words Muhsin yells out on stage. That word alone caused her many
sleepless nights. She feared she'd be ostracized for saying it aloud in public.
But the audience understood; applause broke at the end of her powerful scene.
"They
linked her bravery to me," Muhsin said. "Her lines became part of me.
She made me more powerful."
For some of
the actors, such as Minatullah Amer, the play helped her handle her own
traumas. Amer's Baghdad childhood dream was to go live in Disneyland where
everything is "shiny" and happy. Though her parents tried to shield
her as much as possible from the war, she felt the pressures, heard the sirens,
nearly died in an explosion. The nightmare culminated when her brother was
kidnapped. Though released after two days, he was scarred for life. The play
brought the pain she'd always tried to escape, to the surface.
"I
started accepting my past," Amer, 20, said. "Even though we try to
forget about it, we have to face it at some point. Acknowledge that that's who
we are."
Actor Sahar
Jamal, 22, said the play was a
springboard for her to be a more active woman, to help facilitate dialogue:
"The power of community will be derived from having all the genders, both
genders, in the society working together."
As the
curtain fell and a loaded silence gave way to roaring applause, Raffo was
pulled onto stage into a giant hug by her heroines-turned-students-again.
"What I
have discovered here is their voices have been empowered," Raffo said.
"I feel like just 'get out of the way.' Let the process that I always
dreamed could happen, happen. The process of Iraqis talking to each
other."