32 pages • 1 hour read
Rajiv JosephBengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Gold Gun
Throughout the play, the gold gun is a symbol of greed and power: through its original owner Uday, the rich, self-admitted torturer; through Tom, who steals it and wants to use it for his own financial gain; through Kev, who uses it to kill the Tiger and brags about having it; and through Musa, who uses it to kill Tom and to assert autonomy over his fate. The gun highlights the brutality and violence of the search for power in war; all who carry it, save Musa, end up dead.
The gun also showcases the contrast between the Americans’ stated aims in the Iraq War and their actual behavior on the ground. Tom and Kev view the gun as a trophy they have won through conquest while Musa sees it as a physical manifestation of Uday’s evil. “You have no investment in this gun, it does not mean anything to you outside of the fact that it is gold,” Musa tells Tom. “This gun has a history. But you, you’re looting so you have something, something to take home” (54).
The Topiary Garden
The topiary garden, which Musa created for Uday Hussein at his palace, has several layers of meaning. Most obviously, it represents the destruction that has befallen Iraq and its people, as the once beautiful garden is now filled with topiaries that are “ruined, burned, and skeletal” (25). To the Tiger, the garden represents hope for God’s presence; he describes the garden to the little girl as “God’s garden,” which at first feels disingenuous, but later says, “But for a second we both look up at these ruined shrubs and think, okay, Man: You work in Mysterious Ways […] And I feel this swell of hope” (41). Ultimately this dream is dashed when he meets Musa and finds that God did not make the garden, and Musa, its actual maker, has no answers. The topiary garden becomes an Eden-like space, in which humans created by God continue to live in the light of divine indifference.
To Musa, the garden has a more personal meaning. It represents his own art and existence as an artist, but also his dependence on Uday. The garden is also a wound, the place where Uday murdered his sister. By the end of the play, Musa is resolved to move on from the garden and create something new as a way to move forward with his life. Although the Tiger comes to the garden and surrenders to violence, Musa accepts the existence of violence but resolves to move beyond it.
Violence
Violence and violent acts are a recurring motif throughout the play: Tom’s loss of a hand, the Tiger’s murder (and the animal he later kills while hunting), Kev’s suicide, Hadia’s murder, Tom’s murder, etc. These incidents aren’t senseless acts of violence or inevitable acts of war; they are designed to illustrate the play’s larger themes. The violent acts are sins, physical outcomes of power and greed, and they are the turning points which catapult characters into the afterlife, transforming characters like Kev and the Tiger and forcing them to confront the limits of their knowledge.
The violence also highlights the human cost of the Iraq War and the sins of the political forces behind it. Iraqi civilians who are killed by the war, such as the little girl who becomes a ghost, are all victims of a broader, faceless sociopolitical conflict that they have little power to affect.
