Heather raffo's solo performance 9 parts of desire : the traumatic story of war

Abstract EN

Heather Raffo's play 9 Parts of Desire (2004) weaves together the stories of nine Iraqi women, the portraits of which are all based on interviews conducted by the author.

Thus, by focusing on the personal, 9 Parts of Desire draws attention to the commonalties of women who are both the subjects of, and witnesses to, trauma.

Thus the aim of this paper is to show how in 9 Parts of Desire, Raffo explores the effects of war and trauma on the women of Iraq.

Raffo presents her characters' memories within a nonlinear framework spanning several decades of unrest - from the Gulf War to the beginning of the United States' engagement in Iraq after September 11.

Therfore, the paper attempts to illustrate how Raffo demonstrates, within the complexity of these connections, the trauma of a single person transcends its specificity to create a communal experience of events.

This narrative collectivity does not minimize the significance of each individual's trauma, but rather forms a completely separate account of cohesive and/or conflicting details that can be judged on its own, a whole distinct from the parts with which it was created.