Getting Lost in the Jungle with Tiger Stripes

Inside the caves of Lascaux is primordial darkness. Darker than dark. Fully entombed inside, one parts with the kinesthetic sense. Up and down, space and distance, and the sense of one’s own body are no longer clear. It is anatman; non-being. It is theorized that the purpose of these caves was to initiate boys into manhood. The young initiate would have to face his fear of unknowable vastness and navigate the perilous crevices, disorienting himself entirely, until he reached the womb of the cave, in which was detailed the rites of the hunt. Risking his life, severing his ego, he would emerge from this cave a man, dead to his mother and birthed anew to his society. 

Rites of passage are always an ordeal, for if there are no trials, if there is nothing to endure, then there is no impetus to change, there is no transformation. The youngster must be frightened, must be pushed, ripped from the embrace of his mother and hardened in such a profound way as to never seek it again. He may be subject to scarification, body modification, or be cast into nature alone. He might be set forth on a task to tame the earth in some way: to break an animal, to kill it, or cross treacherous terrain. All of this grand effort and energy to turn boys into men on the terms of their societies. 

But what of girls? There is no evidence of young girls being subject to the same. For a young girl’s transformation is not a voluntary act; she does not make a choice to sublimate herself to her community. It happens to her. With her first menstruation, she is unwittingly transformed, and the extent of the ritual is usually that she must retreat and meditate on the fact that she has lost her volition and is now a vessel. In ancient and prehistoric societies, and in vanishingly few cultures today, the event of menses would bring the young girl into the fold of a community of women. But in modern times, this is almost always something she must navigate alone.

Zaffan, the young protagonist of Tiger Stripes is introduced to us on the cusp of her transformation. Hiding in the bathroom of her all girls school in rural Malaysia, her friends record her dancing freely, giddily, a little coquettishly. She begins a strip tease, but it’s an innocent one meant to amuse her friends. She’s a ham and her friends eat it up. When she pulls off her shirt to reveal a bra, they squeal and beg for a turn at it, but a knock at the door by a teacher cuts their mania. The other two girls hide in a stall and Zaffan, clearly the ring leader of the group, taunts her teacher and throws the door open so the girls can make a quick escape. It’s pure, childish glee.

Zaffan’s village is not small, but it is surrounded by jungle and feels deep within it. It feels cut off. A looming threat of encroaching tigers circulates on social media. But on their walks home from school, the girls are carefree; they stop to wade in edenic streams and waterfalls, and their sense of nature is instinctive. They do not fear it, they delight in it. In flowing white school uniforms, these nymphs flit through the woods and through traffic slapping stickers on lampposts and bus shelters when nature drops a metaphor down from the heavens onto Zaffan’s shoulder: a caterpillar.

That night she receives another visitor. She jolts up bleary eyed and confused, and is horrified to find blood on her sheets. She screams for her mother who offers no comfort and no explanation. She simply drags her by the arm to the shower. When she pulls off Zaffan’s soiled clothes and says, “You’re dirty,” she’s referring to the moment at hand, but it feels very loaded. The next day at school, Zaffan is excluded from prayers. She claims to be happy about getting to skip, that prayers are boring and her friends should be jealous, but it’s evident that something has shifted. There is a message in the exclusion and the girls have internalized it. Zaffan is dirty.

The jungle is an organism. It is always creeping, growing new tendrils. It eats away at the structures people erect within it. It is something that must constantly be kept at bay. At night, when fauna emerge, untraceable snarls warn against efforts to tame it. But a tiger on the streets is a challenge, a confrontation that riles the men of the town. Zaffan’s father patrols the village perimeter at dawn with a shotgun. He does not yet notice that his daughter is being eaten alive by the jungle. What first appears to be insect bites turn into rashes that migrate all over her body. The hair on her head begins to thin, and she plucks thick, stubborn hairs from her upper lip. Her sense of smell becomes acute and takes hold of her, it drives her to violence. She gets caught in furies she cannot control. She grows claws.

Tiger Stripes is an entrancing tale of a young girl’s rejection of her community’s demand that she shed her nature and turn inward. It is a call to feral womanhood. The debut feature from director Amanda Nell Eu, it won the Critics’ Week Grand Prix at Cannes. It is in turns realist, fantastical, tense, and wildly funny. Performances by all of the young girls, but particularly by the captivating lead Zafreen Zairizal, are natural, effortless, and joyous, overflowing with youthful exuberance. 

We need more women doing body horror. We need more films examining the horrors of having a body under patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system diametrically opposed to visceral embodiment, and Tiger Stripes expresses all of the attendant frustrations, fears, and anguish with the knowing wink of someone who has experienced them and who knows the folly and the futility of stifling oneself. It is an invitation into the jungle, into the darkness, the vast, unknowable id. Go. Get lost. You may come out transformed.