Trauma and Testimony: Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire (Critical Essay‪)‬

This article analyzes a recent play, 9 Parts of Desire (2003) by Heather Raffo--an Iraqi American--which deals with the tragic conditions of Iraq as expressed by nine Iraqi women of different backgrounds and age groups. The performance of the play, often featuring one actress playing the nine roles, was successful in the US. The author finds parallelism between Iraqi trauma marked by repression, sanctions, and wars, and narrated by women, and other catastrophic events and testimonies. She links staged discourse with traumatic syndromes and dramatic theory. The article raises issues related to representation of the Other and identification. **********