Lions

Lions are invoked in two sharply different contexts: as part of a comparison about the unequal public visibility of death, and as an image of resistance in Khalil’s speech to Oscar Fate. They never appear as independent actors; instead, their imagined presence exposes how human societies assign value to some lives while rendering others disposable.

Death and Social Legibility

A white-haired man argues that words have long filtered death, softening its impact and shaping what society can bear to see. He contrasts crimes that become enduring public stories with mass deaths that attract little notice. During the Paris Commune, he says, thousands were killed without provoking much reaction, while the killing of a woman and her elderly mother by a knife sharpener made newspapers across France and Europe and reached the New York Examiner. The distinction, in his account, is social legibility: some victims were recognized as belonging to society, while others were excluded from it.

Lions in Khalil’s Speech

In a separate conversation, Khalil tells Fate that he believes Mohamed Atta died under torture and that the people said to have flown the planes may instead have been anonymous or coerced substitutes. He then recalls the first Christians being eaten by lions and declares that the lions will choke on black flesh. The image turns the spectacle of racialized killing into a threat of reversal: those imagined as prey speak back against the power that would consume them.

Narrative Significance

Across the two passages, lions connect the public treatment of death to the question of whose bodies can be made into spectacle. The historical argument describes deaths that were rendered socially invisible; Khalil’s declaration refuses that erasure by imagining black bodies as something the predators cannot consume without consequence. The animal remains a rhetorical figure rather than a developed nonhuman presence, but the contrast gives it force: lions stand at the intersection of violence, spectacle, and resistance.