Episode 5: Heather Raffo
In this episode, Pauline Homsi Vinson interviews Heather Raffo. Raffo is an award winning Iraqi-American playwright and performer. She discusses her various works such as 9 Parts of Desire, Fallujah: The First Opera about the Iraq War, and Noura. Raffo discusses the impact of her work on American audiences, such as the portrayal of Iraqi women as more than victims in 9 Parts, the non-linear and open-ended nature of Noura and Fallujah, and "ultimately, following the rhythm" of her own heart.
Heather Raffo is a singular and outstanding voice in the American theater whose work has been championed by the New Yorker as “an example of how art can remake the world”. Having helped forge a new genre of Arab American theater, she’s spent her career writing and embodying stories of Iraq: from the lives and dreams of Iraqi women in her seminal work 9 Parts of Desire (2003), to the suicidal ideation of an Iraq war veteran in the opera Fallujah (2012), to the restless longings of an Iraqi refugee architect, in Noura (2018). A multi award-winning writer and actor, she’s toured nationally and internationally: from the Kennedy Center to The Aspen Ideas Festival and from London’s House of Commons to the U.S. Islamic World Forum. Her newly released anthology, Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays: The Things That Can’t Be Said, brings together two decades of her most groundbreaking contributions to the American theater and speaks to the bravery required to be at the forefront of a movement. Her newest Migration Play Cycle, her most ambitious theatrical imagining in scale and scope, situates themes around migration and the global economy. Being raised in the Midwest and the daughter of an Iraqi immigrant, Raffo has committed her artistic practice to working across all kinds of borders: on mainstages and in rural communities; with the military and in the Arab world; in swing states and in refugee facilities. She is uniquely positioned to explore what migration means for an ever-evolving American and global identity.
