Reimagining Occupation and Futurity in Iraq: A Feminist Decolonial Perspective on the Script and Stage Adaptation of Falah Shaker’s The Wild Wedding

Abstract: The subject of rape has attracted the attention of a plethora of playwrights, both on the realistic and symbolic levels. On the symbolic level, which is the focus of this article, it denotes a type of rape that falls under the concept of collective violation of homeland. Based on its central theme of rape during the US war in Iraq in 2003, the concept of rape as a collective violation of the homeland is directly relevant to the 1991 play The Wild Wedding by the Iraqi playwright Falah Shaker. In so doing, the play serves as a prophecy of the atrocities of war in Iraq in 2003. However, presenting the play as a reading text is quite different from its performance on stage. Unlike the playwright, the director adds, recreates, and modifies the play script to address the vital issues of a particular country visually. Thus, this article examines the differences between Shaker’s depiction of the raped mother and the director’s depiction of the mother within a postcolonial reading of the mother-son relationship. It contends that Ahmed Hassan Musa’s direction of the play reveals other dimensions that are far from the playwright’s authorial intent. Here, the personal rape is expanded to include all Iraqi cultural values, such as honor and dignity, that the colonizers unsuccessfully tried hard to obliterate. However, the core argument of this article is to show how Shaker and Musa present two variations of de(colonial) intent in their practice of writing and directing a play. Through a feminist lens, our discussion reveals that although Iraqi women are presented in both versions, the play script and performance, as victims of war they can stand again. In the staged play, unlike the written script, the mother confronts her conservative society and entombs her son in an iron box before using her father’s igal (headband) to hang herself. Her death heralds a new spirit of resistance and resilience against invasion. The mother and her son forge a powerful form of resistance, defiantly opposing all forms of colonization and asserting their agency and identity.