The Last Barbary Lion

There is a picture I often return to: an aerial shot of a Barbary lion, the once reigning megafauna of North Africa, now extinct in the wild.

In the photograph, the lone animal walks through the High Atlas Mountains, his steps imprinted in the snow. The lion is majestic, his mane full, his gait regal. His gaze seems fixed on a horizon invisible to the viewer.

The shot is dramatic, fraught, iconic. Taken in 1925 by Marcelin Flandrin, a French military photographer born in Algeria, during a flight from Casablanca to Dakar.

By then, Flandrin had been living in Morocco for years, documenting the country and using his lens to shape its image amongst Europeans. I wonder what made him orient his camera toward this body in the snow. Did he know that his would become the last photograph of a wild Barbary lion, uncaged?

*

“There used to be lions, a forest, and a waterfall right here,” I repeat to everyone I meet in Fes. There used to be a lion, instead of a souq, right near Lalla Yeddouna and the brocade weaver’s workshop, right down the hill from Qarawiyyin mosque.

If my interlocutor lets me, I tell them the founding legend of Fes: Idriss II was the son of Idris I, an Arab descendant of the Prophet and founder of the Idrisid dynasty, and Kenza, an Amazigh woman and the daughter of the chieftain of the Awraba tribe. He was born after the murder of his father.

There was a time I thought of this dislocation as exile, until an angry poet told me I wasn’t allowed to use the word.

According to the story, Idris II left his people in Walili in search for a place to settle, until he came upon water and a land inhabited by the Beni Yazgha and the Zwagha tribes. Through an agreement with the Amazigh chief, he purchased the land where he built his camp and a mosque—the land where we now stand.

Sometimes, I daydream as I walk down Talaa Kbira, as I reach R’cif. I try to conjure the waterfall, the green forest under the buildings. I try to feel the experience of that land on my skin. But since 809, the people have shifted the water streams, felled the trees, built and built, until the city became this incredible maze. Until Fes became a reality where no lion could be found.

“Endemic, extinct,” I repeat. Lions. Barbary lions. Can you imagine?

Can I?

*

After over a decade of living in the United States, I now live in Morocco. I am forty-one, and the move still feels tentative, complicated by histories both personal and global. I have fantasized for some time about moving back to the ancestral land of my people, and now I am here, unsure what to make of my new reality. Will I make it a home, or will it be another temporary stop?

Here’s another thing I try to articulate to people in Fes: I am struggling to find a new embodiment in a place that holds the pasts of both sides of my family. I approach Darija cautiously and refuse to slip back into my natal French. I understand the immense privileges of my passports, and I worry that this life I am building will disappear as quickly as it began.

In Fes, my identities shift depending on whom I’m speaking to: foreigners see me as a local, locals see me as a gaouria, a foreigner. The embodiment developed elsewhere does not serve me here. I have to learn when to puff up and when to shrink. I have to learn what shape this new existence requires.

*

There is a gaouri who lives in the High Atlas Mountains among Amazigh people. Aside from his native English, he speaks only Tachelhit, priding himself on belonging to this land and its people despite his complexion and ancestry. His Tachelhit sounds like German to me, a strange affect for an American man. His accent forces native speakers to strain their ears to make sense of his words despite his decades of speaking the language. He doesn’t tell them that his money—the money of his people—comes from technologies that kill and dysregulate landscapes. He installs solar panels while creating AI systems, even as he claims to work on preserving the crafts indigenous to the land. He has decided that the best way to preserve the crafts of his adopted country is to integrate AI into their production: he goes to villages and teaches artisans to use technologies that deplete their waterways. He prides himself on fighting the middlemen who exploit Morocco while doing the same himself, unable to see how his own hands, his own consciousness, are also agents of destruction.

I know and despise the man. Maybe even more than I despise the foreigners who come to Morocco to renovate riads and live lives of illusion and indolence. I despise him because he thinks he is different, that he has transcended the complications of home by claiming the home of others.

I despise him because in his attempt to enter this life, he forces his people’s ways upon it, claiming they are better. And sometimes I worry that I will, too, someday take on a shape that isn’t mine and not notice who I have become.

*

My partner has never been to my childhood home of Mulhouse. His Moroccan passport makes it difficult to cross the Mediterranean to France. My estrangement from my family makes it even harder; I don’t know when I will be able to return.

We use Google Maps to see the façade of the building where I lived, the schools I attended, the church. I walk him through the cobblestone streets: Look, here’s the Temple Saint-Étienne, here’s the lycée. Together, we explore the city that I wanted to leave so badly but now cannot return to, the city I have not seen in fifteen years. The city I miss.

Sometimes, we deviate and travel through other parts of France I am cut off from. I show him Sarre-Union, where I spent half my summers with my French grandmother, bored to death, with nothing to do but eat the Merveilles du Monde chocolate she kept in her cupboards: milk chocolate, hazelnut, animal figures embossed into the sweetness. Megafauna endangered in the wild—lions, tigers, rhinos—printed on cardboard inserts, teaching us as children to preserve a world at risk.

Ayoub can’t see the interior of my grandmother’s house, can’t see its dark, confining rooms, so instead I show him the fountain, the main square. Places out of reach. Places I can access only via technology, memory, nightly dreams. Places that have changed with time but remain unnaturally fixed within me.

There was a time I thought of this dislocation as exile, until an angry poet told me I wasn’t allowed to use the word. That this pain wasn’t mine to claim. I complied and lost the word. Now I don’t know what to call this habit of conjuring from memory the places I am not allowed to return to.

*

When I feel lost in the world, I always go back to its natural elements: my alienation gets sublimated into articles about extinct animals, endemic plant species, traveling seeds, and shifting waterways. I find grounding in ever-changing landscapes, even as I remain confined to my corporeal existence. I let myself be swayed by images of ecosystems, allow them to permeate my mind until they blend with my memories. Sometimes, that’s all I have to counterbalance this constant movement and uncertainty. Ideas become roofs; daydreams become family. Sometimes this is how I survive.

*

In Marrakech, my partner comes alive. We go there for special occasions, staying in riads in the medina. Ayoub calls our favorite activity “roaming”: we wander endlessly, both gifted with the ability to find our way through any maze of streets. He laughs with strangers, strikes up conversations, eats voraciously.

I love Marrakech and had dreamed of calling it home, but the city often leaves me feeling uneasy. Too many French people. Too much performance. Too much history: this is the city of my people, a city I never explored with them because by the time I was born, they were already colonizing Palestine. And now I am there, trying to remember details, looking for the tree that my mother once hugged in a photograph, trying to remember the door of my grandfather’s childhood home. Retracing steps in the cemetery, looking for my ancestors.

Ayoub and I often walk through the mellah, trying to find anything that might guide me toward the city my grandparents experienced and the life they had there. How many times have I tried to visualize their features back then? What street did they walk together? What did they even look like, two teenagers in love in the red city? Where did they go to school? What did 1942 feel like to them?

*

There were a few weeks this summer when the Barbary lion was everywhere I looked. The statue in front of the mall in Fes. The article announcing the birth of two cubs in a Paris zoo. I read everything I could find, learned tidbits as the World Cup unfolded: how lions used to be gifted to kings; how a pair of them lived in the Tower of London; how the nickname of the Moroccan football team came to be when sports commentator Kamal Lahlou called them the “Lions of the Atlas” on air in 1973; how the lion’s DNA survived through the royal family’s collection, dispersed when Mohamed V went into exile in 1953; how they were re-homed to what would become the Rabat Zoo; how they are being bred, conserved; how everybody insists that although the lion no longer exists in the wild in North Africa, it lives on in the collective memory of its people.

*

In my high school literature class, as we prepared for the baccalauréat, we read Stefan Zweig as part of a unit on the Holocaust. We read The Royal Game, which I remember only vaguely and without much interest.

Instead, I became obsessed with Zweig’s life: the fame and wealth of the Austrian Jewish writer, his escape from Nazis to England, then the United States, and finally Brazil, where he died by suicide in exile. In letters to friends and acquaintances, he described the despair of watching his world end, knowing that he would only ever be able to express himself in his native German from afar. Looking back at a society that no longer made sense to him.

His infamous suicide letter describes his inability, at sixty, to reinvent himself in a new world, a new language, a new land. That instead he preferred to leave with dignity while he still could. He and his wife Lotte died from a barbiturates overdose on February 22, 1942.

*

In the articles I read, the Barbary lion’s disappearance from the wild is described as painfully slow. There isn’t much data about population numbers before the nineteenth century, but between 1839 and the last sighting in the wild in 1942, only twenty-one sightings are recorded. Separated from their prides, the creatures would roam alone, seen in the Middle Atlas and the High Atlas, often near water sources. These lions that used to inhabit the entire region, from the Atlas Mountains to the Mediterranean, retreated to remote places, ghosts of their original habitat. Then, in 1942, as the world was at war, with the French occupation of Morocco seemingly never-ending, a rifle was raised in Tizi-n-Tichka, killing a wild Barbary lion—the last documented killing of one in Morrocco.

*

During an artist talk at a cultural space in Casablanca, a young Moroccan writer asks me to elaborate on my definition of home. It’s a question I get asked a lot, meaning which country I believe I belong to, which passport defines me, which border contains me best.

I hesitate to express the foreignness that I still embody.

I often feel limited by language when answering this query, so instead I offer him the landscapes that populate my inner world: the blue of the Mediterranean, the specific dark red of the stone used to build the church next to my house in Mulhouse, the smell of Kathmandu, my stoop in Philadelphia. The list is frighteningly endless, unruly, impossible. Almost obscene for the people in the audience who dream of travel but can’t access it.

I repeat the line I have come to find reassuring: “No one else carries the unique combination of experiences and landscapes that you do.” He nods, encouraged.

I continue answering, trying to offer him glimpses of home in the form of Fes. I attempt to find a detail, an image that encompasses this belonging he wants me to name. I hesitate to express the foreignness that I still embody. I could talk about the Friday couscous ritual, sitting in Ayoub’s childhood home or my friend Fatima’s fingers interlacing mine. But describing these moments feels like entering someone else’s life.

Instead, I tell him about the night of the World Cup quarter final, when the Moroccan team—the Lions of the Atlas—lost to France. The streets became eerily quiet as we all tended to our bruised egos and grieved the loss of a communal belief. I tell him about the moment when, as I stepped out on my balcony to light a cigarette, I saw the child of the moul el hanout playing football alone, kicking and dribbling against his shadow on the deserted street. An intense soccer game against himself. As if preparing for a future that he couldn’t yet see but was already yearning for. I tell him about the tenderness I felt for this child I interact with every day. How it moved me that as we all despaired—even over something as trivial as football—he chose to play through his disappointment with the stubbornness of the youth.

*

For Ayoub’s thirtieth birthday, we come to Marrakech again and sit at our usual haunt, Le Café Glacier, overlooking Jemaa el Fna. The service is brisk but becomes friendly when Ayoub cajoles the waiters dressed like their Parisian counterparts. We make a point, on these trips, of sitting on their terrace three, sometimes four times a day, escaping the sun, drinking tea, reading, or simply watching the crowds. I often myself lost in rêverie, making up stories or simply reminiscing.

This time, I entertain myself by attempting to describe Jemaa el Fna while evading the orientalist clichés that plague literature about Morocco. The moon over the pink minaret, the Gnawa musicians, the stalls piled with wax fruit and churning out juices for tourists, the constant human flow. The animal handlers are here too, holding monkeys on leashes for tourists to pose for pictures. Because it is the World Cup, the monkeys are wearing jerseys of the Morocco national team. The Lions. Hakimi #2.

This is the fifth time I have sat at this table during this trip, playing with the words in my head, forever trying, forever failing.

When people see Jemaa el Fna, they talk about the movement, the food, the music. I think about the labor of Amazigh people who come from their villages to make enough money to survive on what they earn from tourists. And these days, I return to the legend of the square: how the Saadian Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur wanted to build a mosque on this land, a mosque he wanted to name Jemaa el-hna, the Mosque of Tranquility. It was the time of the plague, and the outbreaks shattered his plans. The Moroccan people renamed the square Jemaa el Fna—the Mosque of Death. The Mosque of Extinction.

*

Scientists have been talking about a sixth mass extinction of the Anthropocene. Megafauna disappearing. Mammals. Us next.

This is a season of despair, and I notice myself telling stories, recounting legends, and turning them into parables.

*

I return to the photograph. The snow-capped mountains, the lion. I insert myself into the frame. I sit in the plane, watch the scene from above. Sometimes, I let myself be the lion, feeling the cold layers of frozen water under my feet, surveying the immensity of the landscape before me.

I imagine myself a cub growing up inside the palace, tended to by an army of servants. Surrounded by family, and manicured gardens, away from the mountains.

*

Among the memories I return to lately is one of my French grandmother, who died recently, a few years shy of a century. By then, we had not spoken in close to twenty years, aside from a few nocturnal hauntings, and I only learned of her passing through my regular internet searches for her name, a longtime habit of gleaning information from a family I escaped.

Yet, in the pile of objects I shoved into one of the two suitcases I used for my move to Morocco, I carried a card she wrote to me for my fifth birthday, written in cursive: “Ma chérie, je t’aime très fort. Milles bisous. -Grand-Maman.” I have no idea how this card made it through so many moves, so many lives, so many landscapes.

Here’s a parable about my Grand-Maman, who lost her leg during the war. She was seventeen when her left leg was amputated, right above the knee, to arrest the gangrene. For eighty years afterward, she could not find comfort in her body, always having to adapt to new prosthetics. And she would talk about that lost leg that haunted her still, its pain as real as the pain in the body that remained.

*

There are still lions living in captivity around the world that descend from the ones once kept in the Moroccan royal collection, a lineage believed to preserve something of the vanished lions of North Africa. It is strange to think of a species gone from its landscapes but still artificially kept alive elsewhere.

I used to follow the scientific debate around the idea of de-extinction, or the possibility of bringing back approximations of disappeared species through technologies I don’t quite understand, using DNA retrieved from preserved specimens. The literature was full of images of mammoths returning, lost species being reintroduced to their former habitats.

My body revolted. “You can’t turn back time! There isn’t a habitat to return to! How will they adapt to changed conditions?” I would grumble to whoever would listen. I protested by refusing to engage with the topic anymore. No more academic articles for me. I returned to dreaming of skies full of passenger pigeons, valleys of lions, flowing rivers. I returned to imagining, conjuring within myself.

Some scientists have imagined a path toward repopulating the mountains, returning all the lions to thrive in their decimated habitats. And yet, there was a part of me that couldn’t bear the thought, that couldn’t trade my nostalgia for a possible future. I kept repeating “We need to live with the consequences. This is natural law.”

*

In a dream, eventually—he appears. A wild Barbary lion, larger in size than any animal I have ever imagined. He finds me in a landscape of mulberry trees, cacti, cedars and oaks, an ecosystem that cannot exist outside of this vision. I am in awe as I watch him advance with delicate force. Silently, he asks me to follow him, and my pace miraculously matches his as we walk alongside one another.

We are outside of time as I know it. Memory and future collide as we pass by traditional Alsatian houses, the coulcoul vendor of R’cif, the Mediterranean Sea, a pair of laughing teenagers. Until we reach the snow-covered mountains and finally face the horizon.