When the subaltern speaks: solo narrative performance in Heather Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire and Issam El-Yousfi’s Tears with Alcohol

Abstract

Drawing on the critical framework of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, this essay investigates the representation of Iraqi and Moroccan women in Heather Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire and Issam El-Yousfi’s Tears with Alcohol. This investigation serves as a cultural comparative study by decoding the tropes, traces, and marginalizations to probe the protagonists’ subjectivities. It also aims to find the ways in which Iraqi and Moroccan women are subalterns. Furthermore, this essay attempts to find answers to these overriding questions: how does the solo narrative performance become a tool that breaks the silence of the subaltern? How does it pave the way for the rise of post-dramatic theatre? How do the boundaries dissolve between the dramatic and the post-dramatic theatre in the plays? How does the protagonists’ solo narrative performance bear a great resemblance to Scheherazade’s? How do costumes, role-reversal, and movement sequences of dancers free the protagonists from the shackles of patriarchy? This study provides insights into the female subalterns’ reactions to infidelity, religious fanaticism, and corruption.

Keywords:

• Nine Parts of Desire
• solo narrative performance
• subaltern
• Tears with Alcohol Casablanca

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Nine Parts of Desire is a semi-documentary play that showcases protagonists’ lives through a series of interviews. The play combines real interviews with fictional stories and chronicles the successive stages in Iraq’s history since 1963.

2 Iraq and Morocco are two poles of the Arab world: one is in the East and the other is in the West. The first had been colonized by the British, and the second by the French. Iraqis and Moroccans resisted linguistic and cultural imperialism and kept their Arabic language as their mother tongue. The two plays lend themselves to the argument best because they have achieved tremendous success and share solo narrative performance as a technique. Furthermore, protagonists in both plays encounter common enemies: patriarchy, fundamentalism, and corruption.

3 Abdel-Mohsen (2015) refers to the similar plot structure of Waiting for Godot and Tears with Alcohol:

The play takes place in no time and place, with characters waiting for something that changes their lives to the better; all these elements make the play very close to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot but in a Moroccan way. (16)

4 In the Holy Qur’an, adultery is prohibited: “Do not go near to adultery. Surely it is a shameful deed and evil” (17. 32). Adultery, or Zina in Arabic, is premarital or extramarital sex that is punishable by flogging (for the unmarried) or by stoning to death (for the married) in Islamic sharia law. However, this punishment is not imposed in all Islamic countries. Adultery is also very difficult to prove, since it requires four witnesses of good character who saw the deed taking place.

5 Hereafter, the translation of Tears with Alcohol is mine.

6 The character of Layal came to Raffo when she saw a painting named “Savagery” by the renowned Iraqi painter Layla Al-Attar, who was assassinated in an American airstrike on Baghdad in retaliation for drawing a portrait of George W. Bush Sr. on the doorsteps of Al-Rashid Hotel. The painting portrayed a nude woman clinging to a tree and facing the sunset. The woman withstood all the dark smoke, the dirty ground, and the wasteland around her. Her feet were blurred, but she remained steadfast, as if her feet were roots going down into the soil. Despite the desolation and the despair, the woman, just like a tree, rid nature of its pollutants and evils.

7 Sartre’s existential play No Exit was written in 1944 and opens with three characters waiting in a mysterious room for eternity. The message of the play is that hell is other people.