Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire reimagines Iraq for Western audiences as an exotic ‘other side of the world’ destination. It has been playing for Indian audiences for some years now in a production featuring Ira Dubey that doesn’t attempt to restore whatever native cadences may have been lost in translation in the first iteration. Part of this could be because of restrictions placed by the licensing agency, but most Indian troupes who take up foreign plays circumvent the rules to affect some kind of transformation (which in this case couldn’t have involved a translocation to Indian locales). What is perhaps more significant is the fact that although geographically Iraq is only a notional degree of separation away, the Indian world view of that country or anywhere else in the Middle East, for that matter, is shaped by perspectives offered up by international news agencies. Proximity certainly doesn’t breed the kind of insight that could allow us to interpret these kind of texts with a more localised gaze.
There is a marked self-awareness in the women that Dubey plays, that may well have been arrived at after the most extenuating of circumstances. These are nine ordinary Iraqi women mired in post-war Iraq, and Dubey plays with accents and sartorial signatures — mostly scarves and veils and robes — to weave in a narrative of immigration and dislocation so beloved in the West. This is a limiting lens, a kind of reversal of the white man's burden trope, or the ‘escape to freedom’ narrative that brings some of these women to the gates of the very civilisation that may have quadrupled the embittered state of affairs in Iraq as it stood then (the play was written in 2003), and still continues to do so. Raffo’s women are loquacious beings, well informed and full of agency, but they never seen burdened by the culture of conditioned repression they may have emerged from or continue to live in, and give off little sense of the loss of identity compounded by self-loathing that war and civil strife engineers. Why must the road to access and freedom be paved with the kind of aspiration that can only be truly realised in the civilised enclaves of America?
Dubey sincerely immerses herself in each part and works hard to assiduously unlock the material at her disposal, but her privileged posturing imbues the characters with a sameness that is sometimes one-dimensional. Her parleying with an alien tongue does get exhausting, and begs the question why an invented Iraqi accent manufactured to fall easily on first world ears should be so easily employed in India. Once again, we only have our own insularity to blame.
Raffo’s text is strong on drama, and treads testimonial territory so audiences’ sympathies are easily earned. Dubey makes some of the characters work better than others. At one point she takes on the guise of the ancient keeper of a bomb-shelter, still struggling with the memories of people being boiled alive in what was supposed to be a safe haven, the walls imprinted wit the vaporised shadows of the dead. Her measured gait is punctuated by the slow turn of her head to the refrain of an azaan in the distance, which in turn signals Dubey’s transformation into the ample personality of yet another woman, who is often thwarted in love, but is all the more resilient if none the wiser for it. Layla, a painter of nudes is another diverting presence who also functions as the piece’s de facto narrator. They are ciphers of a kind of progressiveness that are not usually associated with Iraqi women, who seem to be forever consigned to live behind the veil in most representations. With her doggedness, Dubey is able to affect a communal experience that touches many, even if the play itself remains a casualty of its own contradictions.
