Kanchan Ujjal's play Nine Parts of Desire featured real stories of Iraqi women during the Gulf War. It didn't look at women as victims but as survivors. By Iknoor Kaur
Even in today’s world, women cry their hearts out with the desire to be free, liberated of thought, expression and intellect. There is a sea full of sob stories, but is pity what these women are looking forIJ Or is it support and faithIJ Kanchan Ujjal’s recent theatre production, Nine Parts of Desire was a collective portrait of nine Iraqi women during the time of the Gulf War. Based on the one-woman play by Heather Raffo, it didn’t look at women as victims but as survivors.
Kanchan described the act as a collage of desires of all the women in the world. She said, “These nine women have very different perspectives about what they desire. Their desire is for justice, peace and freedom. It is about female artistic and intellectual aspirations, and with compassion and dignity depicts the struggle of women to survive war and other forms of universal violence.”
The play opened with the Mulaya, traditionally the name for a woman hired for funerals whose goal is to make mourners cry. Her success is measured by the tears she evokes. Kanchan called her the thread that travels through all of the characters. “She is the eternal and spiritual representation of Iraq. She feels that it is her duty and obligation to mourn the dead, so she carries dead people’s shoes and puts it in the river as a tribute to them,” she explained.
To set the mood of the play, Mulaya entered the stage with an anguish gush in her face, carrying shoes of the dead people. She put them in the river and while doing so narrated her unkempt desires. She questioned the audience on what has happened to Iraq which at one time was a beautiful country. Kanchan elucidated, “Iraq was considered the place where, they say, the Garden of Eden was. So she says that ‘We were promised so much, what has happenedIJ Why is the river blackIJ Why is everything so disheartening nowIJ’ She mourns for her country and says, ‘I don't want to walk, I have holes in my shoes, but I want to swim. So give me back the waters I grew up in.”
The characters of the play varied from a 15-year-old Iraqi child whose mother doesn’t want her to interact with anyone to a 70-year-old shrewd woman called Nanna who has learned to survive by selling stolen objects of the dead people. The play at no point showed the nine women interact. However, their thoughts flowed in one motion. There was a scene where a lady-artist called layal is painting, an American lady who is Iraq-based is shown on the couch and Huda, a communist, is in the background. All of them say their dialogues one by one, but they all seem connected. Kanchan said that she used the river as a muse. “There is a river on stage and all of them use this water as their only expression. So, it is like a symbolism for the feminine thread,” she added.
According to Kanchan, the highlight of the play are the issues it covered. She shared, “We may be globally connected, but we are so negligent about people all over the world. People who are like us and whose issues are like ours. We can say we are very modern, but we have our own issues which are identical.”
layal’s monologue in the play justified that statement. She said that she would be called a whore for being free in her expression (while she painted nudes) anywhere — be it in Iraq or US, it is the same story.
Kanchan felt that the story of these nine women was important to tell because people have so many inhibitions and wrong misconceptions about Iraqi women. “I always thought that Iraqi women must be bound in themselves, without knowledge or desires. But somewhere within the play I realised that desire has many forms of coming out.”
Islamic leader Ali ibn Abu Taleb had once said, “God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.” The play encapsulated that very philosophy to the fullest.