Tigers on the Tenth Day

How to read Syrian literature in a Syrian context

In his short story “Tigers on the Tenth Day,” Syrian writer Zakaria Tamer tells the tale of a tiger and his tamer. The ferocious, arrogant tiger is taken from the jungle and turned into “a slave.” The tiger resists at first but, little by little, the tamer uses food to train the tiger to meow like a cat, bray like a donkey, and even eat hay.

The tiger justifies his obedience by telling himself that meowing like a cat is actually kinda fun, or that the tamer asks nicely, or that it’s worth it for the food he then receives. But slowly, the terrible jungle lord is turned into a dancing monkey.

Given the author’s surname, one could interpret this as an allegory about Tamer’s own integration of his Jungian shadow. Problem is, his name also transliterates as Tamir and I have no idea whether he spoke English. Plus, the story could just as easily be about the way in which state powers manipulate their citizenry, a fitting theme for a Syrian author, which would make it a biting satire of once fierce Syrians now reduced to meowing like timid cats and eating hay.

Shame I can’t discern it, because I’m not a huge fan of the formalist New Criticism movement of Cleanth Brooks or T.S. Eliot, which claims authorial intent is entirely irrelevant. I mean sure, other things matter too, including the subjective experience each reader brings to a text, and so yes, I do think it’s misguided to dismiss any person’s takeaway regarding any given work of art. But what the author actually meant when they wrote something also matters. It’s just not either/or.

But this, like a lot of postmodernism also, is a decadent theory that allows elites to seem populist and know-nothings to seem like experts. “Yes, whatever you think it means! Forget that stuffy, old white professor’s analysis!” And why spend years studying when you can simply know everything that’s important about a text merely by dint of existing in your own skin?

Brooks was a white guy from Kentucky, the son of a Methodist minister, a Vanderbilt and Tulane grad, and a Rhodes scholar whose seminal book Understanding Poetry was published in 1938.

His response to critics who said he was ignoring the context of the poems he studied was to argue that poems have what he called “organic unity,” meaning that the historical and biographical context is somehow already baked into the verses. I suspect he borrowed this idea from the teachings of his Methodist faith, specifically the Methodist interpretation of the Protestant concept of sola scriptura, or “by scripture alone,” which says the Bible is the highest or even the only authority. All you have is the text and what you bring to it, not history books, other moral guides, works of philosophy or anything else. Just you, the Good Book, and the Lord’s saving grace.

But consider one of the poems Brooks includes in Understanding Poetry, the morbid “Out, Out” by Robert Frost, which tells the story of a boy who nearly cuts off his hand with a buzzsaw while cutting wood in the yard, then dies as a result. Here’s an excerpt:

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard

And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

You can analyze all the organic unity you want and you’ll never find the baked-in context that will tell you this poem reflects the way New England people talk nor will you detect the historic and deeply personal context that this tragedy actually befell the son of one of Frost’s close friends.

Later, post-structuralists took an even more subjective approach to textual analysis, discarding not only authorial intent but also what the text itself seems to say. It was a bridge too far for Brooks, who said they had "denied the authority of the work." He was now using the same logic to defend the text that one would use to defend authorial intent, but they had already crossed his arbitrary line, naturally, and there was no turning back.

This, however, was a line Syrians could never afford to cross. That’s the decadent part I mentioned above. Under the censorious Ottoman rule, early Syrian writers fled elsewhere, and figures like the scholar and poet Francis Marrash ended up joining al-Nadha, “the Awakening,” or what is sometimes called the Arab Enlightenment.

From there, Syrian literature was influenced by French rule from 1920-1946, the establishment of Israel in 1948, and the Six-Day War in 1967, which gave rise to Adab al-Naska, the “literature of defeat,” itself followed by Baath Party rule and the return of a censorship regime. During this time, writers like Nihad Siris and Nabil Suleiman used the genre of the historical novel just as Shakespeare had, to make veiled critiques of contemporary powers while presenting their as merely historical.

Others, like Salim Barakat, used magical realism in the manner of Gabriel García Márquez, again to make oblique critiques. Still others, Nuhad Sharif and Talib Umran, used sci-fi as the language of dissent by re-imagining the present or creating radical futures, much like the work of one of my favorite writers, Octavia Butler.

My simple point is, Syrian literature has always been a dissident form of art whose space was carved out by political influences, something quite obvious when we look at a work like “Tiger on the Tenth Day.” It did not have the luxury to be so subjective, which is why it’s almost offensive that the de-centered, anti-authorial approach has been taken up as some kind of radical, ground-up, pro-people method that pushes back against the colonial, top-down, modernist authority of older schools.

In other words, it’s a kind of proto-postmodernism that embodies first-world problems but poses as an approach bespoke for the oppressed. Except the literatures of oppressed people usually deal with issues of oppression where historical facts and context not only matter, but they mean everything, and where authorial intent is the whole point, therefore de-centering it is actually a kind of erasure of the lived experience of the author’s oppression in favor of the lived experience of the reader, who is too often a young white liberal at a prestigious university in a wealthy Western nation. Funny how that works.

But in its proper context, with Tamer’s own political views in mind, the work sings as a beautiful and radical piece of dissident literature. In an interview, Tamer once said Syrians both hate their regime and obey it, but that the Syrian revolution had united these halves into a whole that was ready to die for what they believe, a whole that, like a caged tiger, seeks only freedom.

In his mind, the revolution had integrated the Syrian shadow and let the tiger out of the cage.