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ESSAY: Nine Parts of Nine Parts: Part I Layal

07.11.07
Part one of an essay series based on the theatrical production of 'Nine Parts of Desire' by Heather Raffo.


Nine Parts of Nine Parts: Part I Layal

By
Amy C. Cheatle
Mark Edward Grimm

This essay is in nine parts. It is based loosely from the play “Nine Parts of Desire”.

Nine Parts of Desire is a work so compassionate, so heartbreaking, so soul-shatteringly human, that it promises to change forever the way you'll think about the women (indeed, the people) of the Mideast.

A portrait of the extraordinary — and ordinary — lives of a whole cross-section of Iraqi women, this solo work lifts the veil on exactly what it means to be a woman in the age-old war zone that is Iraq.

Each part of this writing is based on ideas presented by each of the nine women that the play represents. We do not wish to state a narrative or ‘review’ of any sort but to convey ideas that we feel necessary to address, ideas that need unpacking and contemplation in order to be properly grounded in new ideas that may spring forth.

Part I: Layal

“God Created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.”
Ali ibn Abi Taleb, husband of Muhammad's daughter Fatima and fourth Caliph of the Islamic World after Muhammad. Revered as the first Leader of the Shi'a sect of Islam, his shrine is in Najaf, Iraq and is a major place of Shi'a pilgrimage.

And Layal states:

That is me. My phlosophy!
These stories are living inside of me
Each women I meet her or I hear about her and I cannot separate myself from them
I am so compassionate to them, so attached – la, la, it’s the opposite
Maybe I am separate, so separate from the women here
I am always trying to be part of them.
I feel I could have been anybody if I looked different.


We are all inseparable from each other yet also contain and retain our individualistic capacities. It is easier to feel pain that is close than to feel pain that is distant. We, across the Atlantic, are removed from direct contact with the territorial geography that is defined as ‘Iraq’.

To not only acknowledge the suffering of others, but to refuse to become subjugated by it.

To deny the voyeuristic nature (Sontag 2003) of consuming images of pain.

To deliver it to the rest of the world perhaps with the hope that by experiencing, for a moment, some portion of another’s suffering we might become transformed into creatures that actively oppose those who will instigate pain in others.

Some who experience these removed accounts of pain, loss, suffering, will become students of this conceptual pain, comrades of distant martyrs who were once just people like we are just people, involved with our day-to-day lives - understanding how art can have a greater effect on psyche than the photo documentation of a war… or just acknowledging or bearing witness to another’s pain- you did live, you did die.

You did interact with your environment and your surroundings and your environment and your surrounding interacted with you.

Traveling with families in tow, dinner digesting, passing intact shopping districts with lights blazing into the night and buyer-friendly pre-selected music played for its soothing effects on the equilibrium of an individual’s addiction to consumption and accumulation, into the theater where the simulation of another reality is before us - one of bombed out buildings, annihilated infrastructure, children, husbands dead and gone, torture and rape, deliberate environmental contamination, the purposeful destruction of shared cultural artifacts and history- and yet still the strength to live- is this hope or determination?

Thus, this is a transformation from one reality to the next, a movement from the theater of everyday life to the theater of a projected reality – an assemblage of desire, nine parts from variations in space/time assembled as a singular instance. Assembling the…

…individuals that have compassions developed by seeing, if not experiencing, the suffering of others.

And as the theater lights die and return - 'A Call to Prayer' is heard 5 times a day: at dawn, at midday, in the afternoon, at sunset, and finally when the sky becomes dark and daytime is over. ‘The Call’ is like eating. It is like breathing. It is exercise. It is thought.

Earliest television memories were of coming face to face with children our own age, on the other side of the world, suffering from famine. Looking into faces we felt a strong sense that here was another form of us. If we had been born to another family that might be us… years later on TV George Bush “the first” announcing a war with Iraq and our crying- at 14… then ash covered witnesses of the fall of the World Trade Center who would, a few hours after seeing them on TV, be walking, still in shock, under our Manhattan apartment window… Hurricane Katrina and crying men and women begging for relief as family members were dying of heat stroke, lack of medication, lack of water… a baby in her mother’s arms that would not wake up…

We hear the 'call to prayer'. It is within a theater. The theater is within a theater. The theater is within the theater of the spectacle. Theaters are always within other theaters – theaters are part of assemblages. They re-enact histories and create new desires. They create new concepts within their walls. They highlight instances of external theaters and create new instances of them – a re-appropriation of spectacle. A theater creates a spectacle within a spectacle - though through its re-appropriation an art form is assembled and maintained extending throughout a given time duration.

That the suffering of others, the deaths of their loved-ones, will not go unnoticed by the rest of the world. We may very well belong to a society that is oversaturated with images and accounts of pain, suffering, destruction, and it may desensitize some and activate others, while others still may become media-recluses, dropping out of the media game by putting an end to newspaper subscriptions, to internet news, to television. As a citizen of the United States is it our responsibility to bare witness to what evils our elected government enacts upon others, and in our name? Can accounts of suffering reach a critical mass that will demand an end to its cause?

A critical threshold is often reached that tips the balance of social bodies and organization. Theater is not a 'television'. It is not a 'machinic enslavement' insofar as the “television viewers are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly “make” it, but intrinsic component pieces, “input” and “output”, feedback or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as to produce or use it.” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987 p.458) The theater breathes – it takes breaths. It assembles briefly and then disassembles after a certain amount of designated time only to reassemble again in a new altered form.

Unlike electronic media that is reproducible bit-for-bit and culturally replicated as perfect clones of itself for the mass component parts, the theater operates within the theater of mass cultural replication but is a temporary autonomous zone within the larger assemblage where variation is its strength. Each day the assemblage comes together a variation on the machine take place. The machine is the theater itself but it never runs the same way twice.

A performance is a re-enactment of jumbled bits of information re-assembled in a new form, a synthesis of externals. It is not pre-recorded but still alive as an ecology that grows as time extends its duration to the end.

Have we as a civilization become accustomed to images of war and suffering - become desensitized to imagery of complete destruction? To have the voices, to hear the stories of a part of a population rendered all but silent, to cry with them and experience their suffering - to raise our fists in solidarity from the comforts of our own warm living-rooms, or the mediated environment of the theater, empowers or awakens us and- is a powerful reminder that we are all still human.

A theater within a theater: nine parts is a theater within the “theater of militaris.” (Virilio p. 108)

Iraq is at the center but its projections are global. It plays out in variation over and over again. Iraq is its own theater – Bagdad is its stage. The television is a simulation of unreal events – the television is the American social assemblages 'portal' into that external theatrical event called 'Iraq': it is the viral extension of the external. Iraq is a theater of variation – each breath of life and death are different than the previous. We have created a theater of our own to give theatrics to the external theater of Iraq – a different theater where the stage is everywhere and the patrons are collaborators in its production. This is the invasiveness of territory.

The stage is open to narrative – there is always a story to internalize and leave with. A memory is pasted down through subsequent generations and triggered by externals and internals in relation to the body in question. The body in question is a becoming – one that becomes its surroundings…

…and those who have become women can become other things as well – artists, painters, creators.

Layal, the Iraqi artist and painter, is alive on stage and breathing the breath of herself through the actress that she is represented by - who in turn is representing Layla al-attar, the artist and creator of the “Bush is Criminal” mosaic at the Rashid hotel. The narrative does not necessarily have to be historically correct because the documentation of facts do not directly correspond with the narrative of the theatrics yet we do not necessarily mind because the flow of memory and reproducibility through the system of the Iraq social network is intact. The singularity of mind becomes a by-product as art. And art materializes as a physical demonstration of that singularity:

The mosaic, an unflattering portrait of Bush [The First] with his teeth bared in a scowl, was installed later in 1993 right in the Al-Rashid's doorway complete with a caption in Arabic and English: "Bush is criminal.


In Arab culture, putting the soles of the feet to ones face is a grave insult. Patrons that walked into the hotel walked over the commissioned 1993 mosaic and wiped their feet on it. The notion of Iraqi feet trudging over George Herbert Walker Bush’s face was thus particularly appealing after the 1991 Iraq invasion. The hotel had been heavily trafficked by foreign guests and the base of journalism operation during the 1991 Gulf War.

The face – the bust: portraiture is not a face anymore than it is a pipe. Yet the memory of reaction, action and experience is long. An occurrence of visualization (the dream) has a forceful power to create new building blocks for intensities. The intensity becomes field for new intensities to be sown. Image power is intensified greatly when it becomes participatory and interactive. Dead images hang on walls. Living images are those that we touch, smell, hear, see and walk upon. This image has a breath in its ability to create vibrations and oscillations through populations. Its power is in the nature of its physical projections as much as in its mental projections giving no preference to either one or the other.

Some notables who have purportedly walked over the floor mosaic at the Rashid Hotel:

- U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on the upper lip.
- Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky on the Adam’s apple.
- Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter made a point of sidestepping.
- U.N. weapons inspector Hoans Blix over the shoulder.
- International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohammed El Baradei over the shoulder.

Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Rick Schwarts
Thursday night, April 10th, 2003, U.S. soldiers, wielding hammers and chisels dug out the mosaic replacing it with a portrait of Saddam Hussein – no photographs are available.

We know the power of removing a central feature of a system in order to disrupt the over-all ecology that is present. A desert ecology, for example, is very fragile. Biotic and abiotic factors interact supporting a diverse community of plant and animal life that has “evolved resistance to and methods of circumventing the extreme temperature and arid conditions” Plant, animal, and bacterial population interact with latitude and longitude, soil and climate. As in any ecology, the system can be highly disrupted by removing an integral part of the over-all assemblage OR by introducing a new part.

Social organization acts also as an ecology or assemblage and when one part of that social organization is disrupted consequences can not only be devastating to that ecological formation but also create a new less-than desirable aftermath containing within its genetic makeup the possibilities for regional, national and even global ramifications.

An occupation is a territorial one; it is an infestation that is highly invasive.

To occupy ones territory one must first erase ones cultural history, replacing the offensive imagery with ones own. That is how territory is marked and remade in the conquerors image.

We have imported a breeding population. We arrive. We survive. We thrive. The ecosystem in question has now suffered a disturbance; this disturbance changes the fundamental nature of the ecosystem (Byers 2002). Cultural histories have been thrown in disarray.

…and around the same time, the Baghdad museum of art was looted.

As Layal states:
“My sister wants me to come to London… If all the artists leave, who will inspire the people?”

The loss of culture is the first step in domination. To destroy ones history first is to destroy the retention of memories (Diamond, J. 2005). A place open up, there is a hole just waiting to be filled by an invading species, and invading culture – the ground become fertile for this invasive species to take root.

The real Layal, Layla al-Attar, was killed on June 27, 1993 by a missile attack on Baghdad ordered by US President Bill Clinton.

And Layla states:
“Why would they bomb a painter?”

Our own theater is distant and removed to the point that the invasion cannot be controlled or contained from a distance. There cannot be any distant projection to pull itself back because the weight of the invasive species is too strong to stop itself from trying to root. In it’s trying to survive though, native species develop other ways to retain their territory. The performance in this theater is immediate because pre-planning has no barring on performance art other than a ‘rough sketch’ of possibilities - but nothing as machine-like as our own theatrical needs.

…the suffering of others is not amplified by distance so it must be amplified in some other way. Theatrical means, artistic means can create singular instances that have breeding potentialities – a reproducibility that can replicate itself quickly throughout a small system. An invasive species always folds back upon itself because it facilitates the destruction of the ecology that allowed it to survive in the first place.



References

Byers, J. E. (2002) Impact of non-indigenous species on natives enhanced by anthropogenic alteration of selection regimes. Oikos 97 (3): 449-458.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed. New York: Penguin Books.

Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Virilio, P. (2006). City of Panic. Berg Publishrs.

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