The desert is what we fish, and the fossils are our fish

Abdellah’s expression, “The desert is what we fish, and the fossils are our fish,” turns fossil collecting into an image of both livelihood and loss. Spoken during a drive with David toward Tafal’aalt, it describes a community that draws its sustenance from the desert’s dead past while facing the possible disappearance of its own future.

The Image and Its Occasion

Abdellah speaks after pausing to scan the empty road along which crinoid dealers will pass on their return to Erfoud. He has stopped to buy specimens from stonecutters; the passing dealers and the specimens make the practical economy behind his metaphor visible. Fossils are not simply remnants of ancient life in this scene: they are what the people of Tafal’aalt can gather and sell.

Calling the desert a place to fish collapses two kinds of environment into one. The desert supplies no living catch in the ordinary sense, so the fossils become its substitute fish: the products of a long-dead world that can still be made to support the living. Abdellah immediately sharpens the image with the exclamation “Dead fish!” The catch is valuable, but its deadness makes the livelihood feel like a joke at the community’s expense.

Survival and Decline

Abdellah calls Tafal’aalt “A wretched place” and says that it is dying. He imagines a near future with “nothing here” and no people or trees, then insists that his people are “the last ones.” The fossil metaphor belongs to this wider fear: the desert’s remaining specimens and the children are all that the community has, with no other resource or prospect named in his account.

The surrounding scene gives the expression material weight. Abdellah’s attention moves between the road, the fossil trade, and David; his calculations about dealers and specimens are framed as part of a “pitiless struggle for survival.” His dark humor does not cancel that struggle. He asks David whether the joke makes him laugh, and, when David answers that it does not, Abdellah insists that it makes him laugh. The insistence holds despair and a brittle attempt at humor together without resolving either.

Repetition and Significance

Abdellah restates the thought in a related formulation: “We have fossils and our children. And nothing else.” As he says it, he raps the steering wheel with his nails. The repeated pairing makes the children, like the fossils, part of what remains to the community, but it does not make them interchangeable: one is the material basis of present survival, the other the human future Abdellah fears may have no place there.

The expression therefore binds economic dependence to threatened continuity. Fossils are the desert’s catch, yet they are dead; children represent life, yet Abdellah describes them alongside that finite resource and calls his people the last ones. As the engine starts and the journey continues toward Tafal’aalt, David hangs his head, while Abdellah tells him that he will see. The image has already made the destination’s predicament legible: a landscape that can still yield fossils may nevertheless be losing the conditions for a living community.