A Study Guide for Heather Raffo's "Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Heather Raffo's "Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535824644

Book preview

10

9 Parts of Desire

Heather Raffo

2003

Introduction

Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire is a one-act, one-woman play that expresses the collective experiences and identities of Iraqi women in the context of Iraq's troubled history. Over the course of an hour and a half, nine characters tell their stories, share secrets, and divulge politics, all expressed by a single actress on a set littered with props used interchangeably by the characters. Raffo, an Iraqi American woman, was inspired to write this play following a visit to family in Iraq in 1993. She spent the next ten years interviewing Iraqi women. This work eventually coalesced into Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire.

Raffo's title comes from Geraldine Brooks's nonfiction book about Islamic women, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, which in turn draws its title from a recently recovered text by Imam Ali, an important Islamic leader from the seventh century. He wrote, God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men. Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire was first produced in August 2003, with Raffo performing, at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland, and has since been produced in London, New York, and Washington, DC. It is available in a 2006 edition from Northwestern University Press.

Author Biography

Raffo was born in Michigan in the early 1970s to a Christian Iraqi father and an Irish Catholic mother. In 1974, at the age of four, Raffo traveled with her parents to Iraq to visit her father's family, a trip that she recalls as being full of magic and wonder. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 1993 with a bachelor's degree in English and spent that summer backpacking around Europe before making her way to her relatives in Baghdad, Iraq. It took her seventeen hours by bus to reach Iraq from Jordan, but once she arrived, she was warmly embraced and entertained by her family. Her experiences there, including a trip to the Saddam Art Center, where she saw Layla al-Attar's inspiring painting Savagery, were the inspiration for Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire, which she began writing in