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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The first Gulf War came to us via satellite and without words. The road to Basra--the totem of that military cakewalk--was a silent spectacle of incineration. Now, in the second Gulf adventure, Americans can hear the war, but the wall of silence around the female experience of carnage remains more or less intact. War and tyranny dehumanize the enemy; silence is part of that process. To inflict pain, physical or psychic, turns us away from the world; we stop thinking and feeling. In "9 Parts of Desire" (at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre), Heather Raffo's remarkable one-woman show, which bears witness to Iraqi women's political oppression, an expatriate named Hooda explains that, in the case of Saddam's henchmen, "their way, I promise you--their way it's to torture the people close to you." She adds, "One woman I was with, they bring her baby, three months old baby, outside the cell, they put this woman's baby in a bag with starving cats. They tape-record the sound of this and of her rape and they play it for her husband in his cell." She asks, "How could these people have liberated themselves?"
As Freud knew, when you can focus only on pain your thinking is wrecked. For more than a generation under Saddam, Iraqis lived in a state of permanent paranoia, which left them passive and mute. "Iraqis know they don't open their mouth, not even for the dentist," the artist Layal, who was a collaborator, and who survived by painting nudes and...
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