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.