“Satire in War Drama, Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo”

“التّهكم في مسرحية الحرب، نمر بنغاليّ في حديقة الحيوان في بغداد

Prepared by Malak M. Assayli

Malaknour01@yahoo.com

Abstract

Rajiv Joseph’s play Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo is an allegorical tale that is considered to be a combination of satire, surrealism, theater of absurd, dark comedy and expressionism. This play, which premiered in 2009, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The main characters are dead, yet their ghosts remain onstage, unable to rest in peace as they keep asking questions about God, their existence, wars and bloodshed, but they find no answers. All of these characters have committed crimes when they were alive, so they got haunted by their victims. With his theatrical imagination, Joseph turns the ugly truth of the Iraq War into entertainment, and triggers the audiences’ minds to ask some existential questions, such as “Where is God?” In fact, God is present in most of the scenes of the play, yet Tiger, the main character, seems to be an atheist whose soul is unable to ascend to the upper world after he had killed innocent people, but this violent nature is created by God Himself, and here lies the paradox. The play satirizes wars which were legalized by the American administrations, yet these wars proved to be fulfilling some personal interests. Those who benefitted from the hostile war were some Americans and some Iraqi traitors who served the Americans. This paper discusses how Rajiv Joseph uses satire in order to reveal the ugliness and savagery of the American war in Iraq.

Keywords: satire, war, existentialism, ghosts

الملخّص

تعدّ مسرحية راجيف جوزيف “نمر بنغالي في حديقة الحيوان في بغداد” مسرحية رمزية وهي مزيج من السّخريّة والسّرياليّة ومسرح العبث والتّعبيريّة والكوميديا السّوداء. وقد رُشّحت لجائزة “بولتزير” بعد عرضها للمرة الأولى في العام 2009. معظم الشّخصيّات الرّئيسة في المسرحيّة هم أموات، ولكنّ أشباحهم لا تزال على المسرح غير قادرة على الموت بسلام ولا تنفكّ تسأل العديد من الأسئلة، لكنّها لا تجد إجابات لها. كل هذه الشّخصيّات كانت قد ارتكبت جرائم عندما كانت على قيد الحياة، لذلك تحوّلوا جميعهم إلى أشباح مسكونة بأرواح ضحاياها. وبالنّظر إلى الخيال المسرحيّ، يحاول جوزيف إظهار حقيقة الحرب على العراق بأبشع صورها، وإيقاظ عقول الجماهير كي يسألوا بعض الأسئلة الوجوديّة، مثلاً “أين الله؟” في الواقع، مع أنّ الله موجود تقريبًا في معظم مشاهد المسرحية، يظهر النّمر – وهو الشّخصيّة الرئيسة – كشخص ملحد، روحه معلّقة غير قادرة على الرّاحة الأبدية بعد قتله أناسًا أبرياء. ولكنّ التّناقض الذي يتساءل النّمر عنه هو أنّ الله خلقه بهذه الطّبيعة، فلماذا يعاقبه على قتله البشر؟ في قالب من السّخريّة، تنتقد هذه المسرحية الحروب التي شرّعتها الإدارات الأميركيّة ولكنّها أثبتت أنّها تخدم المصالح الشّخصيّة لبعض الأميركيين وبعض العراقيين الخونة الذين خدموا الأميركيين في حربهم. لذلك، يناقش هذا البحث كيف استعمل راجيف جوزيف السّخريّة والتهكّم لتوضيح الصّورة الحقيقية لحرب أميركا على العراق.

الكلمات المفتاحية: التّهكّم، الحرب، الوجودية، الأشباح

 “The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.” Victor Hugo

• Introduction

Man has always been fascinated by politics. Throughout centuries, people have tried to express this fascination through different ways; the theater, which is sensuous by its nature, was one of the most appealing. Its attraction lies in its power to transcend the written word. Back into the deep history, the Greek satirist, Aristophanes (450− 385 B.C) satirized politics and politicians. In 411 B.C., he wrote his famous anti-war comedy Lysistrata which talks about a woman’s extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnesian War. This drama has been revived many times in the modern ages.

Subsequently, playwrights in other periods and other countries utilized the theatre to support or to criticize the governments and party leaders of their own day. In the United States, plays appeared sporadically from colonial times on, but political dramas did not reach the Broadway stage in significant numbers until the last decade of the nineteenth century. Still another forty years were to elapse before this genre was produced in quantity (Nannes, ix).

The Americans “have cultivated, historically and emotionally, an intensely ambivalent attitude toward the theater” (Roudané, xi), and the American dramatists as Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Tennessee Williams believed that the theater increases public consciousness. Hendin writes that “the postwar era in American culture, from 1945 to the end of the twentieth century, was especially marked by a self-conscious sense of place in the world” (40). The Americans had the idea that the twentieth century was called the “American century” because America, as all believed, was responsible for winning World War II. This conception of being victorious supported the mentality of the citizens who gained more self-confidence. However, America, the land of liberty, democracy and equality, started a malicious war against Vietnam, and massacres shocked the Americans. Later, America took the decision to start a global war against terror; Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria were the next targets. Consequently, post-war drama portrays these contradictions which had existed in the American mentality. “The American dramatic imagination seemed as varied and contradictory as the country itself. American drama since 1960 emerges as a dizzying amalgam of many voices, many peoples, and few resolutions” (Roudane, 6).

David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971) and Sticks and Bones (1972) satirized America’s militaristic nationalism and cultural shallowness… A committed political writer, Kushner often focused on public themes. His later plays included Slavs! (1996) and the timely Homebody/Kabul (2001), a brilliant monologue followed by a drama set in Taliban – controlled Afghanistan (Britannica).

• Satire in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography,” Ambrose Bierce joked.

Satire is a genre of literature that uses witty images for the purpose of social or political or moral criticism. In the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, satire can be defined as “the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices.” (https://www.osfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100442626). There are two important things about satire: It makes fun of a person, idea, or institution, and its purpose is not just to entertain, but also to inform or make people think about their own follies.

Satire is an ancient literary device, which existed along with the social injustices and problems; however, people thought that they can never talk about these problems in a direct way, so comedy was the first step to satire. By laughing at our follies, we can realize their reality. So, satire grabs people’s attention to social issues when they might otherwise ignore them. Satirists play a role of portraying the flaws of their society, trying to help people ponder things they might otherwise had just taken for granted. Therefore, satire blends a critical attitude with humor, and the satirist is conscious of the frailty of institutions and attempts through laughter to inspire a remodeling.

English Literature is loaded with examples of satire. In Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell focuses his satire on the events of the Russian Revolution. He replaces the Russian people with animals in a farm, with the leading figures of Communism represented by pigs. As the novel goes through, the pigs change to be like the humans who used to rule in the first place. The same theme is found in 1984, when Orwell talks about the totalitarian system and how its leaders treat the rebels.

Similarly, in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the great satirist, Jonathan Swift criticizes the nature of humans. The Lilliputians, a six-inch tall people, are nasty, vicious, morally-corrupt, hypocritical, deceitful, jealous, greedy, and ingrate. These tiny men represent the English politicians, and the continuous struggle between the Whigs and Tories.

Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712) is another example of poetic satire in which he focuses satire on the English upper middle class during the eighteenth century. It shows the egotism of young ladies and gentlemen and their trivial way of thinking and immature actions. For example, Pope says about Belinda after losing her lock of hair:

Whether the nymph shall break Diana’s law,
Or some frail china jar receive a flaw,
Or stain her honor, or her new brocade

These lines mock the values of the fashionable class during the eighteenth century. The silly things were considered equivalent to important things. For Belinda, the loss of her virtue becomes equal to a China jar being cracked.

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) was written shortly after the Civil War, when slavery was dominant. In this novel, Twain directs his satire into the way how people treated slaves. Miss Watson, a good Christian woman, is a slave owner who mistreats her slave, Jim.

Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (2009) is a contemporary play which is also considered a form of satire. It is a mixture of political, moral and social satire. The tiger himself proclaims that “all the great mysteries of creation could be revealed at the zoo”. In fact, the zoo does not mean that typical zoo where people keep animals, yet it is the bigger zoo where ordinary humans are transformed into killers because of their greed and savagery during war.

Twair writes that “playwright Joseph said he was inspired to write the first scene after reading a news shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq about an American soldier shooting the Baghdad Zoo’s most prized possession, a rare Bengal Tiger”. Joseph’s play, which was performed on Broadway in 2011, starred by Robin Williams (Tiger), raises diverse issues, without providing ribbon-tied answers. It is about the obscurity of life and death, the greed of the American soldiers as well as the rulers in Iraq, the moral corruption, savagery of war, suicide, cultural differences, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), religion and existence. Like Belinda’s lock of hair which caused a war, the golden toilet seat and the gold-plated pistol looted from Uday Hussein’s palace are the major causes of death and loss in this play.

     Satire in this play is directed towards war and killing among people as well as beasts. The main difference is that the tiger kills innocent children because he is hungry; he declares that, “Basic primordial instinct isn’t cruel; it’s lunch. I’m guilty. That’s why I’m stuck here. And I caused untold misery to the parents of those children. But what can I do? I’m a tiger,” (p. 33). Tiger then wonders “what if my very nature is in direct conflict with the moral code of the universe? That would make me a fairly damned individual” (p.34). On the other hand, Uday Hussein, supposedly a human being, and Cosey, who is only a head in a bag, are good examples of predators; they are sadistic men who considered torturing others an entertaining pastime when they were alive, and even as a ghost, Uday finds pleasure in torturing Musa and reminding him of what he (Uday) had done to Musa’s sister before killing her.

Both of the tiger and Uday are ghosts who are stuck in limbo; they are roaming in the streets of war-torn Baghdad, which can also be Hell. Both of them are not allowed to rest in peace because they had committed bad crimes when they were alive. The satirical twist in this comparison is that the tiger, the animal, becomes a wise ghost who wants answers for his questions, while Uday’s ghost never questions why he is there; he just enjoys his sadistic narcissism, and declares, “I am Iraq”, by which he means that terror is found everywhere, as he himself is found everywhere.

Eric Marchese (2015) writes that “the play’s Iraqis offer portraits of confusion, dismay and volcanic anger toward the American occupiers.” Musa is first fascinated by the new−immoral− words that he hears the American soldiers saying. He wants to know exactly why they use the word “bitch” which is a female dog when they talk to each other. However, later on, Musa is haunted by Uday’s ghost who scolds him for helping the American conquerors. Musa gets lost and he thinks to shoot himself (using the golden gun), he is not able to decide anymore; Uday, and the Husein family, were savage, and the American soldiers are also criminals and greedy. Musa decides in the end to shoot Tom as he was in the middle of the desert embracing his precious golden toilet seat. Musa is a symbol of all the Iraqis who were not able to face the old as well as the new tyranny. Musa says one of the most powerful lines in the play, “You Americans, you think when something dies, it goes away” (p.37). Musa tries to evoke the patriotic feelings in the Iraqis in order to defend their homeland. Death must not stop them.

“A hungry animal, two bored men: The trappings are all there. All the story needs is for someone to do something stupid” (Mak, 2013, par.2). Despite the fact that the Tiger says that “when [he] gets hungry, [he] gets stupid”, but it is Tom who starts the stupid action and teases the tiger. The story takes place in Bagdad shortly after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. In a post-Saddam Bagdad, violence and chaos are daily routines, and the one who dies is not actually gone. Two young American Marines, Tom and Kev are protecting the zoo. When Tom teases the Bengali Tiger, the tiger eats his hand, and accordingly, it is shot by Kev who uses a golden plated gun looped from Uday Husein’s palace. The tiger haunts Kev and leads him to suicide, while Tom, who returns from USA with a prosthetic arm, wants to restore “his” gun and the golden toilet seat, but he is shot by Musa, the Interpreter, who uses the same golden gun.

Bengal Tiger at the Bagdad Zoo is a play haunted by ghosts. There is a tiger that talks to the audience and whose ghost haunts his murderer, there is a ghost of Uday, the son of Saddam Hussein, there is the ghost of Hadia, a young girl raped and murdered by Uday, and there are two American soldiers, one of them dies in the middle of the play and becomes a ghost. Thus, it is part ghost story, part war play, part satire, and part theater of the absurd where questions about God and existence rise but no answers are given.

The director of the play, Moises Kaufman, does not bother himself to dress his main character, the tiger, an animal costume with a tail. He is just wearing shaggy clothes with a long beard. Through Tiger, the audience is able to know the main purpose of the play. First, the hidden purpose of the war, and who the victims are, “After all, lunch usually consists of the weak, the small, the stupid, the young, the crippled. Because they are easier to kill”. He embarks on a spiritual journey, restlessly wandering the streets of Baghdad, which are still burning with the American bombs, and haunting the young soldier who has killed him. He finds a ruined topiary garden, which was done by Musa, who used to work at Uday’s garden, but now he is the interpreter. Tiger looks at the beauty of the garden and thinks he might be in heaven, and ponders, “All my life I’ve been plagued, as most tigers are, by this existential quandary: Why am I here? And now that I’m dead, I’m a ghost, it’s why aren’t I gone?” At this moment, the tiger’s satire lies in his questions: if God had created him a predator, why is He punishing him for eating innocent people? But Tiger finds no answer. However, in the last scene of the play, Tiger roams in Uday’s garden and is fascinated by the beauty of the trees. He reaches a conclusion that he “will become a plant, then. I’ll cut away all the pieces of me that offend the cosmos. I’ll escape my cruel nature. But cruelty echoes all around me. Even in the ruined garden. And so I wonder if there is any escape” (p.52). This quote is a satire against the savage and merciless human nature. There is no escape from human-beasts who are scattered everywhere.

It is not just the Tiger who feels trapped. Whether in life or the afterlife, all the characters, American soldiers or Iraqi rulers or citizens, find themselves caged in tough circumstances. They cannot find answers for their situations. They are fighting to get rid of their burdens, yet they are stuck, some of them are alive while others are in Limbo.

Satire in this play is multifaceted. Every single detail can be ironic. Tom, an experienced and compassionate Marine loses his arm, as he was giving chicken kebab to the tiger; he replaces it with a prosthetic one, yet he worries about the masturbatory conundrum that he faces. He needs Musa, the interpreter, to translate his desires to the Iraqi prostitute who asks for $20 in return. When he returns from US, he forgets about his friendship with Kev who is haunted by the ghost of the tiger. Tom only cares about the golden toilet seat which will be the base of his fortune. His greed is overwhelming until the moment he is shot by Musa. The comic moment is that he dies hugging the toilet seat in the middle of the desert.

Kev, who is originally a naïve, antsy, gung-ho, racist, insensitive and goofy Marine, kills the Tiger as a revenge for Tom’s hand, and is accordingly haunted by the tiger’s ghost. The paradox is that the tiger’s ghost is more aware of the facts than Kev himself. Kev came to Iraq, like most of the American soldiers, not to accomplish the worldwide peace, but in order to steal the golden treasures found in the rulers’ palaces. However, Kev does not gain perception except when he himself turns to be a ghost. As Kev’s spirit was rising from his body, his wisdom directly pops onto the stage; he is holding his hand, as he was trying to cut it and give it to tiger in order to get rid of him. Kev addresses the audience,

I never knew about this stuff before. But now I do. I am understanding how things relate. I’m just saying, think about the physiology of the wrist! We are put together so well! And that tiger tore off Tommy’s hand in about two seconds! With just his mouth… how quickly you can lose a part of yourself. We have a psycho problem now, Me and Tiger. And I’m gonna figure it out.

Kev now knows Arabic, and he knows that there is

some sort of relational algebraic equation that three of us [Kev, God, and the tiger] can factor into and solve our problem. Algebra was even invented here, you know? In Baghdad, by this dude, Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khawarizmi. How do you know this? I know, right? I’m like a straight-up brainiac in the afterlife.

Kev also recognizes that the golden toilet seat and the golden pistol− which never glitter on stage− maybe considered as a sign of the illusory goals that had made the American soldiers carry on the war. Kev, also like most American soldiers, suffers from a post war trauma; when the tiger was talking to him, he became hysterical as he yelled, “You know what man? I wrote to my brother about you. He said you’re just a figment of my imagination and shit. He said you were just one of those f…d-up things about being in war. So what’s up now? You don’t even exist, bitch! Except for me! Except for me”. This trauma vanishes soon when Kev dies and recognizes things from a wider perspective than when he was alive.

Therefore, satire in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo overwhelms all the actions, all the characters and all the perceptions. Willing to reform, Rajiv Joseph shows the ugliness of war, loathsomeness of greed, and the futility of the declared goals; world peace. It is a play which aims to provoke reflection on the nature of war, and its aftermath. Wars break out to fulfill some individuals’ interests, but end up with overall chaos, and soldiers who grapple with remorse and trauma.

Works Cited

Anonymous. Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. (https://www.osfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100442626).

Bigsby, C. (2004). Modern American Drama 1945-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge U P.

Blair, W. (2016, 12 8). American Drama. Retrieved 12 8, 2016, from encyclopedia Britannica: https// www.britanica.com/art/American- Literature/ Drama

Hendin, e. J. (2004). A Concise Companion to Postwar American Literature and Culture. New York: Blackwell P.

Joseph, R. (2011). Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc.

Mak, L. (2013). War, Death and Gold-plated Guns at the Baghdad Zoo. The Collegian, 25.

Marchese, E. (2015). Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo pounces on war and other weighty issues. Ibplayhouse.org, 31.

Nannes, C. H. (1960). Politics in the American Drama. Washington 17 DC: The Catholic University of America P.

Roudane, M. C. (1996). American Drama since 1960: A Critical History. New York: Twayne Publishers.

Twair, P. M. (2009). bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. New Yorker, 16.

عدد الزوار:109