132. Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo
A dear friend called yesterday from London. He was returning home after watching a play, “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” at the Young Vic.
He told me that it’s an unusual outlandish story that dramatizes the thoughts of a tiger roaming on the bombed-out streets of Baghdad. This is a play with an absurdist kind of magical realism.
In the play the tiger represents the confusions of a wild, primal beast and how he might start to reckon with his surroundings.
Inspired by a true story the drama is written by Rajiv Joseph who is based in New York. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Rajiv’s mother is of French and German ancestry and father is a Malayali, from Kerala.
During the invasion of Iraq by US forces a story appeared in newspapers that detailed how US bombs had blown open part of a zoo.
As the zookeepers and others fled only the Bengal tiger remained in its pen. The starving tiger was too desperate and lonely that when one of the soldiers tried to feed him out of compassion, he got his hand mauled.
Watching this another soldier shot and killed it.
After it is killed, the tiger returns as an anthropomorphic Dantean figure to interrogate the nature of God and the point of existence.
It was 2003 and the war was under way and Joseph, who was in his late 20s took the tiger’s death as the starting point for a play.
Joseph first wrote a 10-minute version which in 2009 was staged on Broadway as a full-length play. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
The play captures the brutal legacy of Saddam Hussein’s rule and the terror of the US invasion.
It would be really interesting to watch a drama being unfolded on the stage through the eyes of a dead tiger.
My friend felt very bad as the drama in no place outrightly condemns the invasion which it should have because he, like me and millions of other feel US invasion was an act of terror.
My firm view is the US’s desecration of Iraq was guided by a policy of hatred, a policy of a tyrant, a policy of someone who had inherited, almost, the throne in Washington DC.
Later it was publicly declared by a member of the inner team of Bush that the “whole reasoning of attack was fabricated as there was no mass destruction ‘item’ was found.”
However, the perception created by US and the policy it followed dictated the behaviour of a lot of young men.
My friend observed that there were some visible inconsistencies regarding the Iraq conflict, as Joseph had never been a soldier and never visited Iraq.
Although I haven’t watched the drama, I perceive that it could be Joseph’s nationality.
I am told that Joseph’s work includes Archduke, and Guards at the Taj.
And Archduke is very relevant, especially with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
My friend wrapped up by saying that these days some young men are searching desperately for the meaning of life before it ends.
Maybe, he is right, but right for America only with all those gun shootouts.
Young men outside North America are not that spoiled and philosophical.