User:Zuhui//Drafts/Do Tigers Melt Like Butter in the Forest?

This question has been pulled from the children’s book written in 1899 in the UK, The Story of Little Black Sambo. Until not long ago, this book was quite popular in some countries like Korea and Japan and can still be found on bookshelves today. But the book has long been criticized for being blatantly racist due to its illustrations, nonsensical setting, and the naming of its characters. Over time, as different editions were published by various publishing houses, some of them attempted to sanitize the racist implication of the content. But the core story remain unchanged.

The story goes like this:

A young Indian boy named Sambo, goes for a walk through the forest. There he encounters several tigers. Instead of eating him, they take turns robbing him of his clothes, shoes and umbrella, each tiger demanded his belongings in exchange for sparing his life. Eventually, Sambo has nothing left to give. But just as he faces the risk of getting eaten, the tigers get caught up in their own greed and start arguing over who looks the most impressive, and the argument escalates trying to fight over what they already took from Sambo. In their frenzy, the tigers chase each other around a tree at such high speed that they melt into a pool of butter. Later Sambo collects the butter, brings it home, and his mother uses it to make pancakes for dinner. He eats a lot of them.

In the story, the tigers are multiple things at once. They embody a fearful, primal force of nature: a generic symbols of chaos or savagery, and also a predator shaped by the logic of colonial anxiety and imperialist expansion: The tigers’ greed is not driven by the natural instinct, it reflects the mechanism of colonial exploitation—the restless need to take more, to be more impressive.

The interesting thing about the story is the way how it resolves this greed. It doesn’t get resolved by any external force. The tigers don’t get tamed or conquered. But instead they self-destruct. They get so caught up by their compulsion to possess, that they chase themselves into oblivion and literally melt into butter.

The story stages a collapse of this greed, but in a self-contained way. No one fights back and there’s no need for intervention, no need for any external force of reason to step in. The chaos just eats itself. The problem resolves itself. Then what remains after is something blameless, something domesticated and something consumable. It’s an imperial fantasy feeding on itself, a system that creates its own problem only to resolve it in a way that justifies why it was needed in the first place.

Then there’s Sambo. He doesn’t exactly fit into the stereotypical roles of either the clever trickster who outsmarts his oppressors or the naive victim who is blindly fooled by them. His survival is not an act of defiance, he simply becomes the part of the cycle. He doesn’t defeat the tigers, he consumes them.
The way that he gets to eat the remains of those who violated him is not an act of empowerment or victory, nor the end of the system collapsing on itself, it’s just a final step in its reassembly, allowing it to function in a new form.

The tigers are both the threat and the convenient resolution to that threat. And Sambo is both the victim and the one who internalizes this self-contained collapse. In this way, the story isn’t just a simple reflection of the colonialist worldview of its time, it performs it. It enacts the system that endlessly recreates its own crisis, stages its collapse, renders that collapse into something palatable and digestible, and therefore remains intact, justifying its own existence over and over. In this cycle of crisis and resolution, the logic of colonialist worldview is continuously renewed.

Therefore the question, do tigers melt like butter in the forest?, marks the spot where the narrative’s self-perpetuating logic becomes visible. Of course tigers don’t melt like butter in the forest, the phrase sounds like a nonsensical riddle that is detached from reality. But within the context of the story, it’s not something to be questioned. The transformation of the tigers into a pool of butter is framed as something inevitable, a natural conclusion which doesn’t require an explanation.

But when the question is pulled from the story and placed in an open space, it reveals what the narrative is doing. Why tigers had to melt like butter in the forest? What does it mean for the projection of power, of threat, of restless greed, to dissolve into something blameless, something consumable? And why does the narrative present this as a natural resolution? Do tigers really melt like butter in the forest? Maybe they do. But maybe the real question is why they are allowed to.