Cities are full of strays, of dogs and cats, of the homeless and rootless. In their darkened corners, creatures seek shelter and security. In their density, they expose the individual to the gaze, pressure and flow of the agglomeration. An exemplary site of discipline, they yet retain a pulse of their own, through the inhabitants who reinvent their histories and reconfigure their cartographies. The story of the Libyan city is one of oil and surveillance, marginality and neglect – well-trodden themes of novels from the 1960s on. Animals, when they appear, are not the eloquent beasts of desert narrative, but startled forms, traversing the human gaze, and subject, like humans, to a new, industrial world. Creeping below the radar, or flying over it, they do not, nevertheless, become the same site of shared vulnerability and paradigmshifts as in the survival novel. Instead, humans identify with that which, like them, is static and surveyed: the statue of the Girl and Gazelle, tired, thirsty and exposed; the palm groves, savaged by diggers; and the neglected streets, choked by high rises. These are the creaturely traces that animate the urban novel, brought to life not as Sufi signs but through their exposure to sovereign power, as what Santner terms a ‘dimension of surplus value – attaching to objects and bodies that thereby become the focal points of ceaseless economic, cultural, and political administration’. Evoking the melancholy of the qasida's aṭlāl, these traces resonate with the mute eloquence of transience. Echoing the ominousness of Qurʾanic āyāt, as ‘signs’ of bygone ‘habitations’ (masākin), they cast panoptic ‘administration’ into natural historical scope, signalling that it, too, will one day be cast from the symbolic systems which confer meaning upon it.

The rapidity of Libya's urbanisation from the 1950s has, certainly, been seismic. From a population of thirty thousand in 1911, Tripoli expanded to almost two million in the 2010s, with mass migration in the 1960s resulting in the spread of slums and unravelling of local neighbourhoods. Benghazi's growth was similarly rapid.