In "Animal Crackers," Sri Lankan poet Richard de Zoysa tells a harrowing story from Black July, the 1983 riots in which Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority attacked the Tamil minority after Tamil militants bombed a Sinhalese military convoy. During these riots, the poem's speaker tries to distract a three-year-old child by drawing animals. But those animals—the lion and the tiger, symbols of the Sinhalese and Tamil contingents respectively—only remind the speaker of the horrors going on outside the window. The poem's speaker laments a horrific moment in Sri Lankan history while uneasily wondering if violence might simply be part of human nature. "Animal Crackers" was collected in de Zoysa's posthumous collection This Other Eden (1990).
A child asks the speaker, "Draw me a lion." So the speaker does, producing a cuddly, slow-moving, yellow creature.
The child asks the speaker: "Does it bite?" The speaker tells the child that the lion might bite sometimes, but only if you pester it by pulling its tail or insult it by saying it's no more than a cat. Usually, though, it's a lazy, obedient creature, just soaking up the sun and feeling proud of its long lion history.
Meanwhile, the speaker notices that outside of the house, the light seems hazy, and you can hear a far-off roaring sound, like the sound of a pride of lions angry to have been woken up.
The child then asks the speaker: "Draw me a tiger." The speaker thinks of an animal inspired by William Blake's famous Tyger and the stories of Jim Corbett (a hunter who tracked man-eating big cats). Its black and orange stripes, the speaker thinks, are Nature's warning sign.
Now the child shouts "DRAW!" like a gunslinger and points a toy gun at the speaker. The speaker reflects that even a three-year-old gets the principle that the most powerful, violent person wins. As the child pulls the gun's trigger, something horrible happens outside: the sky seems to be burning, tiger-striped with fire.
A voice seems to scream to the speaker: NO TIGERS ALLOWED HERE, LIONS ONLY.
The speaker imagines wolfish people running wild and shouting, making everyone they pass go crazy. Meanwhile, the grand old Elephant (a symbol of Sri Lanka's ruling government) rests in a shady spot under the trees, frowns just a little, and considers doing something about the outbreak of chaos—but worries that if he did, he'd burn his feet in the fire.
The speaker tells the child to put the gun down and be good, and they'll draw an elephant, and explain why it's important to understand it.
They warn the child: don't look out the window!
The noise, they tell the child, is just a party down the street—a party with a bonfire and fireworks, where they're burning, not a tiger, but just a cat.
“Animal Crackers” laments a Sri Lankan tragedy: Black July, a 1983 massacre that marked the beginning of a decades-long civil war between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese ethnic majority and its Tamil minority. These two groups had long been in conflict, but violence exploded after a militant group known as the Tamil Tigers attacked a group of Sinhalese soldiers in late July of 1983. The Sinhalese majority responded with violence against the whole Tamil community. Thousands of Tamil civilians were murdered, tortured, and assaulted, and hundreds of thousands were displaced. The poem records the ethnic and political violence of Black July with deep horror, suggesting that some of the violence could have been avoided if the government had been willing to stand up against it. The self-interest of all parties involved, this poem implies, is a big part of what made Black July as horrendous as it was.
This poem’s speaker is an adult trying to distract a child from the Black July riots as they rage outside the window. When the child asks the speaker to draw a lion and then a tiger, the speaker’s response reveals something about how they see the Sinhalese and Tamil factions in relation to the Black July riots. The “lion,” in the speaker’s eyes, is usually just an “indolent, biddable” cat—a lazy creature that has been suddenly and alarmingly roused to violence as if angry to be “awakened / from long, deep sleep.” The “tiger,” meanwhile, is a powerful beast with stripes like “nature’s warning sign”—an allusion to the violence of the militant Tamil Tigers. When these two big cats clash, “all hell breaks loose.”
At least some of this horror could have been prevented, the speaker observes, if “My Lord / the Elephant” had bestirred himself to step in. The elephant, here, symbolizes the United National Party (or UNP), the party in control of the Sri Lankan government when Black July broke out. Scornfully, the speaker observes that this ineffectual “Lord” isn’t willing to do anything about the battling lions and tigers because he’s afraid he’ll “burn his tender feet.” Symbolically speaking, in other words, the UNP wasn’t willing to intervene in Black July because it feared political consequences for itself. Hundreds of thousands suffered terribly as a result.
The poem’s fable-like vision of Black July thus makes a real-world political point. When ethnic and political violence breaks out, the poem suggests, governments can’t necessarily be trusted to do much about it at all—whether because politicians fear harm to their careers, or because (as some have suggested of the UNP on Black Friday) it actually serves their purposes.
All through “Animal Crackers,” the speaker is trying desperately not to let the three-year-old child in their care look out the window and see what’s going on around them: a terrible massacre motivated by ethnic and political divisions in Sri Lanka. But the poem hints that the speaker’s efforts to preserve the child’s innocence might be too little, too late. Perhaps, this speaker fears, violence is just a part of human nature, bound to come out sooner or later.
For a while, the speaker tries to distract the child from the massacre outside by drawing pictures of animals. But the child asks for ferocious beasts, the lion and the tiger, that symbolically link to the warring factions outside (the lion representing Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority, the tiger the Tamil minority that the Sinhalese turned against during Black July, a deadly series of 1983 riots). Already, there seems to be bleed between the dangerous world outside and the evidently safe indoor world where the speaker tries to shelter the child.
What’s more, the child gets bored with the speaker’s drawings pretty quickly—and as soon as they’re bored, they pull out a toy gun and point it at the speaker, shouting “'DRAW!'” like a gunslinger in the movies. This moment, the speaker reflects, proves that even “three-years-old understands force majeure.” In other words, this sweet little kid somehow already gets the principle that the strongest, most violent person rules the roost.
By juxtaposing a (mostly) innocent little kid with bloodshed, war, and mayhem, the poem grimly suggests that in this world, innocence doesn’t last long—if it ever exists at all. An appetite for violence and power might be as natural a part of human nature as a taste for red meat is to a big cat.
“Draw me a ...
... of ancient pride.
“Animal Crackers” begins with a dedication: “to Dimitri, when he is old enough to understand.” This poem, then, is an attempt to explain something difficult to a child. That’s just what seems to be happening in the poem’s world, too. In the first line, a child tells the speaker (with a tone of believable little-kid imperiousness): “Draw me a lion.”
The speaker, apparently trying to keep this child entertained, obliges with a picture of a “lazy, kindly beast” colored a cartoonish yellow. This lion doesn’t seem too ferocious. Indeed, the child’s next asks, “Does it bite?” Only when provoked, the speaker answers: “if you pull its tail / or say that it is just another cat.”
This lion, then—though it’s mostly “indolent” and “biddable,” lazy and obedient—has the potential to “bite” if someone either invades its personal space or insults its “ancient pride.” So far, this just sounds like a fable the speaker is telling the child in their care, a mild personification of a lion that draws on traditional ideas about the King of the Beasts. But over the course of this poem, the lion will come to symbolize something bigger and more frightening.
The speaker will recount their day drawing all-too-significant animals over 46 lines of free verse, without a regular rhyme scheme or meter. Every so often, though, the lines resolve into iambic pentameter (that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “or say | that it | is just | anoth- | er cat”). These intermittent moments of metrical regularity help to drive the poem forward.
(Outside, the sunlight ...
... long, deep sleep.)
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... bars on gold.
“DRAW!” ...
... ARE ONLY LIONS.
And their jackals ...
... his tender feet.
“Put down that ...
... some silly cat."
All of the animals in this poem symbolize specific players in Black July, the 1983 riots in which Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority attacked the Tamil minority, kicking off a civil war:
These creatures all also have their own symbolic weight:
In linking the political symbolism of these animals to their more general symbolic meanings, the speaker makes a broader point: ethic and political discord can bring out the worst in otherwise noble creatures. The big cats' pride and strength turns to beastly bloodthirstiness; the elephant's calm turns to self-interested dithering.
A dark, witty pun in the fifth stanza warns that the distance between childhood innocence and adult cruelty might not be so very great.
All through this poem, the child the speaker is taking care of has one repeated request for them: to “draw” something. First, the child asks for a drawing of a lion, then a drawing of a tiger. The speaker fulfills these requests, but their mind is elsewhere: the lion and the tiger are the traditional symbols of the Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic groups, respectively, and at the very moment that the speaker draws these creatures, the groups they represent are murdering each other outside.
The speaker might be particularly startled, then, when the child barks “DRAW,” but with a different meaning: now they’ve pulled out a toy gun, and like a gunslinger in a Western, they playfully tell their caretaker to pull their own toy weapon. This imaginary violence hits a little too close to home for the speaker, who pleads with the child to “Put down that gun.”
By making a sudden, alarming leap between drawing a picture and drawing a weapon, this pun suggests that the speaker is more than a little uncomfortable with the thought that the innocent child they’re trying to protect might easily grow up to be one of the murderers and looters rampaging past outside.
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Obedient.
“Animal Crackers” is written in 46 lines of free verse divided into 10 irregular stanzas. Without a standard meter, rhyme scheme, or stanza form, the poem changes shape emotively and spontaneously, matching its rhythms to the speaker’s observations and mood.
That said, there are a few patterns here. Over and over again, almost as a refrain, the three-year-old child the speaker is taking care of tells them to “draw” something: first a picture of a lion, then a picture of a tiger, and finally (and punnily), a toy gun. The surprising violence of that bang-you’re-dead pun betrays one of the speaker’s anxieties: that even a three-year-old can “understand[] force majeure,” the brutal principle that the strongest person wins.
This poem is written in free verse, so it doesn’t use a regular meter. Instead, it creates rhythm through changing line lengths and stanza shapes. For example, when the three-year-old the speaker is caring for pulls out a toy gun in line 23, they do so in a line of only one short sharp word: ‘“DRAW!”’ The grimly funny pun cracks out like a gunshot.
The poem does, however, dip into iambic pentameter from time to time. Moments of this familiar old meter (built of lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “Outside, | the sun- | light seems | a tri- | fle dulled”) give the poem some nervous momentum, creating a rhythm that the speaker can shatter with jagged lines like “BUT HERE THERE ARE NO LIONS / HERE THERE ARE ONLY TIGERS.”
This free verse poem doesn’t use a rhyme scheme. It makes music in other ways, like repetitions (such as the echo of the word “draw” throughout the poem) and evocative assonance (as in the /a/ sound that makes “jackals,” “panting,” and “rabid” all gape open like toothy mouths in lines 32-33).
The poem’s speaker is an adult trying to entertain (and distract) a three-year-old child in their care. Most of all, the speaker doesn't want this child to notice what’s going on outside: the infamous 1983 Sri Lankan massacre known as Black July, during which a clash between the country’s two warring ethnic groups led to riots, assaults, and bloodshed.
Drawing images of lions, tigers, and elephants to keep the child from looking out the window, the speaker reflects that people are beastlier than these creatures ever could be. They worry, too, that the kind of violence swirling around them might be baked right into human nature: even the three-year-old (who playfully pulls a toy gun) seems to understand “force majeure,” the dreadful principle that the person with the greatest brute strength wins.
The speaker’s allusions to other artists—William Blake, Jim Corbett—suggest that they’re a thoughtful, literary type (and one whose education has been influenced by British colonialism: both those writers are English). Readers might even imagine that this speaker is a voice for Richard de Zoysa himself, who was a passionate political commentator and journalist, and who would die in a politically motivated murder not long after he wrote this poem. The “Dimitri” in the dedication (“to Dimitri, when he is old enough to understand”) seems likely to be the inspiration for the little kid in the poem.
The poem is set in Sri Lanka during a violent 1983 clash between the “lions” and the “tigers”—that is, the Sinhalese (the majority ethnic group in Sri Lanka) and the Tamil (a minority group), warring factions who took these animals as their respective symbols. The specific incident the poem alludes to is known as “Black July,” an overflow of tension that began when a militant group known as the Tamil Tigers sprung an ambush on some Sinhalese soldiers. The Sinhalese retaliation overflowed into riots in which Sinhalese soldiers and civilians alike assaulted and killed thousands of innocent Tamil civilians.
More specifically, the poem takes place inside while violence erupts outside. The poem’s speaker tries to distract a three-year-old child from what’s going on in the country around them, drawing cheery (but ominously symbolic) pictures of lions, tigers, and elephants while people (more beastly than these beasts) murder each other outside. “DON’T LOOK OUT THE WINDOW,” the speaker warns the child in line 43: through visions of the simpler animal kingdom on the paper in front of them, they attempt to distract this sweet kid from the horrors they’ll one day have to grow up and reckon with.
Richard de Zoysa (1958-1990) was a noted Sri Lankan actor, writer, newsreader, and journalist. A popular public figure in his home country, his promising career and young life were brought to a violent end when he was murdered in 1990, only a few years after the events this poem describes. While de Zoysa’s murder has never been officially solved, he was almost certainly killed by a death squad under the pay of the Sri Lankan government, which would have seen him as a dangerously well-liked left-wing figure likely to foment rebellion.
The poet was born to a Tamil mother and a Sinhalese father. Educated in a school system inflected with British colonialism, de Zoysa studied Shakespeare and Blake (whom he alludes to in this poem) but developed his own distinctly Sri Lankan poetic voice.
Richard de Zoysa’s story has inspired many artists who came after him. The 2022 Booker Prize winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, for instance, features a character modeled on de Zoysa, as does Rajiva Wijesinha’s 2005 novel Limits of Love.
This poem was written from the middle of an atrocity: the 1983 riots known as Black July. In this clash, members of Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese ethnic majority took revenge against members of its Tamil minority after a militant group known as the Tamil Tigers attacked a group of Sinhalese soldiers. This attack became the flashpoint for large-scale ethnic violence committed by and against civilians. Sinhalese people rioted in Tamil neighborhoods, burning Tamil homes and business and assaulting and murdering innocent Tamil people.
This violence didn’t come out of nowhere. Tensions between the Sinhalese and the Tamil had been high since the era of British colonialism in Sri Lanka. The Sinhalese felt that Sri Lanka’s British colonizers were unduly favoring the Tamil minority, offering them better jobs and educations. Attempting to rectify this imbalance, the Sinhalese majority (which controlled the government) passed a variety of anti-Tamil laws; the Tamil protested, and militant groups like the Tamil Tigers began to form. Violence between the Sinhalese and Tamil was nothing new by the time that Black July rolled around, but Black July was a crisis of a new order of magnitude. Thousands of people died, hundreds of thousands were displaced, and a 26-year civil war began.
Richard de Zoysa’s own murder came in the wake of this violence and the political uproar that followed. A prominent and popular public figure—and one who may have had links to a leftist group known as the JVP, which planned to rebel against Sri Lanka’s authoritarian government—de Zoysa found himself in the political crosshairs, and then the literal ones. He was abducted and murdered by government forces in 1990. (The JVP themselves were known to abduct and murder journalists; Sri Lanka was in the throes of a major human rights crisis at the time, the effects of which still reverberate today.)
Richard de Zoysa's Death — Read an article discussing de Zoysa's assassination.
Richard de Zoysa's Legacy — Read an essay in memory of de Zoysa written by his niece.
Black July — Learn more about Black July, the massacre this poem commemorates.
Background on de Zoysa — Learn more about de Zoysa's life and read another of his poems.