Smart Bombs
Raffo stirringly documents the 'collateral damage' in Iraq
Jorge Morales
Tuesday, October 19th 2004
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Raffo, an Iraqi American actor, spent a decade interviewing a cross section of Iraqi women in and out of the country. She plays more than a half-dozen characters in varying states of oppression—an overwhelmed trauma doctor, a giddy teen with a crush on *NSync, an anxious exile watching the nighttime raids on CNN—switching from one role to the next simply by shifting the abaya on her body. "God created sexual desire in 10 parts," the titular Islamic proverb claims, "then he gave nine parts to women and one to men." But that's not always evident here, except for Layal, a sexy, free-spirited artist who once painted monumental portraits of Saddam and now draws a student whom his goons killed: "They stripped her, covered her in honey, and watched his Dobermans eat her." In London, a hard-drinking intellectual shares similarly graphic tales of torture as proof that the current war was necessary. "How could these people have liberated themselves?" she asks her interviewer. Raffo offers no answers, only the anguished voices of a nation torn apart by decades of repression, violence, and war.
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