Gender and Generation in the Sahrawi Struggle for Decolonisation

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REGENERATING REVOLUTION:

Gender and Generation in the Sahrawi Struggle for

Decolonisation

Vivian Solana

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Anthropology in a Collaborative with the Women and Gender Studies Institute University of Toronto

Vivian Solana Department of Anthropology in a Collaborative with the Women and Gender Studies Institute University of Toronto

2017

Abstract This dissertation investigates the forms of female labour that are sustaining and regenerating the political struggle for the decolonization of the Western Sahara. Since 1975, the Sahrawi national liberation movement—known as the POLISARIO Front—has been organizing itself, while in exile, into a form commensurable with the global model of the modern nation-state. In 1991, a UN mediated peace process inserted the Sahrawi struggle into what I describe as a colonial meantime. Women and youth—key targets of the

POLISARIO Front’s empowerment policies—often stand for the movement’s revolutionary values as a whole. I argue that centering women’s labour into an account of revolution, nationalism and state-building reveals logics of long duree and models of female empowerment often overshadowed by the more “spectacular” and “heroic” expressions of

Sahrawi women’s political action that feature prominently in dominant representations of

Sahrawi nationalism. Differing significantly from globalised and modernist valorisations of women’s political agency, the model of female empowerment I highlight is one associated to the nomadic way of life that predates a Sahrawi project of revolutionary nationalism. I speak of a labour of “regeneration” rather than one of “reproduction” to foreground the political

ii agency inherent to women’s daily work whilst also attending to intergenerational differences in political habitus. Enquiring into how Sahrawi women reckon with the contradictions produced by the conditions of a colonial meantime, I examine transformations in women’s labour of love, collective remembrance, hospitality, institutional participation, and practices of marriage/reproduction, to trace the inchoate ways in which Sahrawi women are contributing to multiply the possible futures of a revolutionary process initiated more than forty years ago.

iii Acknowledgements

The collective struggle of the Saharawi people is the most important resource for this dissertation. I am first and foremost indebited to the dozens of Sahrawi families, citizen-refugees and research assistants who have welcomed me in their homes throughout my fieldwork, offering me protection, more kinds of help than I could have anticipated and friendship to this day. Their example has been the main source of inspiration for the pages that follow.

I could also not have done this work without my collegues, friends and mentors from the

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Thank you to Prof. Ángeles Ramírez for being the first to suggest that I travelled to the Saharawi Republic in 2009. Thank you to Poet Bahia Awah for providing me with my first lessons in the history of the Sahrawi people and to Prof. Juan Carlos Gimeno and Prof.

Juan Ignacio Robles: their commitment to the Sahrawi struggle, their unflinching ethical-academic stance, and their friendship do not cease to inspire my work and beyond.

I owe many thanks to my supervisor Andrea Muehlebach for all her guidance and support throughout my doctoral program at the University of Toronto. Prof. Muehlebach has patiently read the earliest and messiest drafts of the chapters that follow and she has consistently provided me with insightful direction and encouragement. My work has also benefited greatly from the priviledge of regularly conversing with and receiving generous comments from Prof. Amira Mittermaier and Prof.

Valentina Napolitano. Andrea Muehlebach’s attention to how the best of people’s intentions may fold into unexpected political outcomes, Amira Mittermaier’s search for that which exceeds discourse and Valentina Napolitano’s attention to the uncanny persistence of the past in the present are just some of the ways in which my core committee’s intellectual contributions have marked and inspired my own. I would also like to express my gratitude to Prof. Lila Abu-Lughod and Prof. Jessok Song for serving on my dissertation defense committee and influencing my work theoretically.

A very special thanks goes to my dear friends and colleagues at the University of Toronto’s

Anthropology department Timothy Mwangeka Makori (AKA “the word magician”), Columba

Gonzalez Duarte and Jacob Nerenberg for exchanging their writing with me, asking me the hardest of

iv questions, making the best of suggestions, and rubbing some off their brilliance on to these pages. At the University of Toronto’s Anthropology department I have also been fortunate to know many scholars who have helped me along the way and shaped my thinking, including Prof. Alissa Trotz,

Prof. Naisargi Dave, Prof. Jannice Body and Prof. Tania Li. I am also indebted to Prof. Michael

Lambeck for his comments of my work while leading the department’s Dissertation Writing

Workshop and to all the colleagues who regularly formed part of this group between 2013 and 2014.

I also thank Sophia Cotrell, Natalia Krencil, Josie Alaimo, Annete Chan and Kristy Bard from the

Anthropology Department’s administration for their work and collegiality.

The research and the writing of this dissertation have benefited from the financial support of a number of institutions and programs, including the Anthropology Department at the University of

Toronto, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship and the Wenner Green Foundation.

I would never have endured the challenge of finishing this project without sharing conversation, meals, drinks and regular dance sessions with the wonderful friends I have had the good fortune to make during the course of my doctoral program. Thank you to Asli Zengin, Secil

Dagtas, Columba Gonzalez Duarte, Coco Guzmán, Timothy Makori, Jacob Nerenberg, Ozlem Azlan,

Hulya Arik, Laura Mandelbaum, Kate Rice, Meghana Rao, Prasad Khanolkar, Alejandra Gonzalez

Jimenez, Daniella Jofre, Janne Dingemans, Salvador Altamirano, Edgar Sotter, Ayşegül Koç, Aaron

Kappeler, Jaby Mathew, Dylan Gordon, Salma Altassi and Michelle Tung.

Last but not least, I thank my mother for her tireless labour reading and editing all the pages that follow, and to my partner, for patiently looking after me on stressfull days. My indebitness to both is boundless.

v Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iv List of Figures ...... viii Glossary ...... x Abbreviations ...... xii Prelude: The Fortieth Anniversary of the POLISARIO Front...... xiii 1 Introduction ...... 1 1.1 The Temporality of a Sahrawi Revolutionary Nationalism, Heroic Women and the Gendered Publics of History ...... 17 1.2 Centering Female Labour into Dominant Accounts of Nationalism, Revolution and State-Building ...... 34 1.2.1 A Genealogy of Sahrawi Women’s Labour and Political Action ...... 38 1.2.2 The Final Years of the Spanish Sahara (1960-1975) ...... 46 1.2.3 Building a Female Republic (1976-1991) ...... 53 1.2.4 The Labour of Regeneration under the Conditions of a Colonial meantime (1991-2015).. 58 1.3 Chapter Outline ...... 67 1.4 Methodology, Positionality and Ethnographic Refusal ...... 72 2 Halted Narratives ...... 81 2.1 Beginnings ...... 81 2.2 Before the revolution (1940 – 1960 approximately) ...... 88 2.3 The emergence of the POLISARIO Front and exile (1973 – 1976) ...... 94 2.4 Building the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (1975-1991) ...... 99 2.5 A Colonial Meantime: No War and No Peace (1991-2013) ...... 114 2.6 Conclusion ...... 119 2.7 Coda ...... 122 3 Living up to Hospitality ...... 124 3.1 Scaling-up Women’s Labour of Hospitality onto the Sahrawi Republic ...... 129 3.2 The khayma during the War Period ...... 145 3.3 The khayma in times of “Neither War nor Peace” ...... 150 3.4 Betwixt and Between khiyam ...... 157 3.5 Conclusion ...... 169 4 Inside and Outside the Women’s Union ...... 171 4.1 Inside the Women’s Union ...... 179 4.2 Organizing into the Women’s Union ...... 191 4.3 Outside the Women’s Union ...... 198

vi 4.4 Preparing for the POLISARIO’s 13th General Congress ...... 204 4.5 Conclusion ...... 213 5 Navigating Marriage-Scapes ...... 219 5.1 Marriage-“scape” One: Before the Revolution ...... 227 5.2 Marriage-“scape” Two: Early Years of Revolution (1975-1991) ...... 228 5.3 Marriage-“scape” Three: “No War no Peace” 1991-present (2005) ...... 229 5.4 Asserting Women’s Contributions: “We are not Expensive, we are Valuable” ...... 231 5.5 The Moving Substance of the Past ...... 237 5.6 Putting Marriage Practices to Public Scrutiny ...... 245 5.7 Conclusion ...... 258 6 On Love and False Promises ...... 260 6.1 Love and Gender Relations ...... 268 6.2 Love as Generational Idiom ...... 280 6.3 Transforming Affective and Aesthetic Regimes ...... 285 6.4 On Love as Destiny ...... 293 6.5 Conclusion ...... 297 7 Conclusion ...... 299 Bibliography ...... 302

vii List of Figures

Figure 1. Under the Marquee, 2013. By author.

Figure 2. Outside the Marquee, 2013. By author.

Figure 3. The SPLA infantry, 2013. By author.

Figure 4. Munadilat, 2013. By author.

Figure 5. Ministry of Transport, 2013. By author.

Figure 6. Ministry of Health, 2013. By author.

Figure 7. Ministry of Water and the Environment, 2013. By author.

Figure 8. Meme circulated through social media by young Sahrawi activists in 2011-2012.

Figure 9. Meme circulated through social media by young Sahrawi activists in 2011-2012.

Figure 10. By War Correspondent Christine Spengler in 1976. Posted by Sahrawi activist through social media by young Sahrawi activist as tribute to Sahrawi women on International Women’s Day, 8th of March, 2014.

Figure 11. Building the Republic. Image from the Sahrawi Republic’s National Archive based in the Province of Rabuni. Taken in the late seventies or early eightees, exact date is unknown.

Figure 12. Women gathered in a meeting. Image from the Sahrawi Republic’s National Archive based in the Province of Rabuni. Taken in the late seventies or early eightees, exact date is unknown.

Figure 13. The premises for the all-women’s school of the 27th of February. Since 2001 the school has been renamed Buyudur. By author, 2009.

Figure 14. Female combatant holding rifles and babies in the rear-guard of the Republic. Picture taken in the nineteen eighties. Exact date unknown.

viii Figure 15. Training as Nurses. Picture taken in the nineteen eighties. Exact date unknown.

Figure 16. Studying. Picture taken in the nineteen eighties. Exact date unknown.

Figure 17. Organising. Picture taken in the nineteen eighties. Exact date unknown.

Figure 18. Meme circulated in social media by young Sahrawi activists, shared in 2010.

Figure 19. Festival of Sahrawi Culture in Buyudur. By author, 2009.

Figure 20. The 10th of May Commemorations nearby El Aaiun. By author, 2013.

Figure 21. Festival of Sahrawi Culture in Buyudur. By author, 2009.

Figure 22. The Seventh National Congress of the Sahrawi Women’s Union in Smara. By author, 2015.

Figure 23. A gueton. By author, 2009.

Figure 24. Gueton embdeed into a household’s wall. By Walad Mohamed, 2014.

Figure 25. Gueton right outside wall of household. By author, 2013.

Figure 26. Inside a gueton. By author, 2011.

Figure 27. A keikota, By Walad Mohamed, 2014.

Figure 28. The National Union of Sahrawi Women’s Central Headquarters. By author, 2011.

Figure 29. Women’s Union Logo.

Figure 30. Cover of Booklet.

ix Glossary

I have transliterated terms in Hassaniya using a simplified system that is based on the International Journal of Middle East Studies’ Arabic to English transliteration system. I have omitted all diacritical marks except for the ‘ayn which is marked as (ʿ ) and hamza (’). Ta marbouta is simply “a”.

Below are words used repeatedly throughout the text:

ʿarifa: female leader of a political cell. ain airbaʿin: Inter-tribal council hayy (pl. ahya): neighbourhood. ahl: tribal sub-section. al-badia: the desert pasturelands. al-nidal: the struggle (also the name for a Sahrawi musical genre). al-maktub: destiny. al-mantiqa: the region (used to index the occupied Western Sahara). al-mjiba: literally “the things brought in” (used to describe bridewealth). al-thawra: the revolution daira (pl. dawair): district fakhdh: tribal sub-section. friq (pl. firgan): nomadic encampment. khayma (pl. khiyam): tent/household/nuclear family. hishma: modesty codes jamaa (pl. jamaʿt) : intra-tribal council jil (pl.ajal) generation sadaq: Mandatory Islamic bridewealth. Also mahr. x

shaykh (pl. shuyukh): elder with representational power over a tribe or tribal sub-section.

trab al-bidan: territorial expanse that encompasses parts of today’s Southern Morocco, Northern Mali, Northern Mauritania, Southern Algeria and all of the Western Sahara.

qabila (pl. qaba’il): tribe.

lauh: wooden slate used to study the Koran.

muʿadila (masc. mu adil): kind.

milhafa (pl. milhafat): customary female dress.

munadamat jamahiriyia: Organizations of the Masses

munadila (pl. munadilat, masc. munadil): militant. Used intercheably with mukafiha: female fighter or thawria revolutionary.

mukatil (pl. mukatilin): combatant/soldier.

nasrania: (m. nasrani): literally translates into Christian but the term is used in the Sahrawi Republic today to index Westerners more broadly.

sgarit: female ululations.

wilaya (pl. wilayat): province.

yaish al-tahrir: liberatio army zaraʿa: customary male dress.

xi Abbreviations

ARTifariti: Annual Artist Residency and Festival in the Sahrawi Republic

FiSAHARA: Annual Film Festival in the Sahrawi Republic

POLISARIO Front: Popular Front for the Liberation of Saqiya al-Hamraʿ wa Wadi al Dahab (the red ravine and the golden valley/river). PUNS: Party of Sahrawi National Unity FLU: Front of Liberation and Union UJSARIO: Union de Jovenes de Saqiya al-Hamraʿ wa Wadi al Dhahab (the red ravine and the golden valley/river) or Sahrawi Youth Union.

UNHCR: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

SAHARAMARATON: Annual International Marathon in the Sahrawi Republic

SPLA: Sahrawi People’s Liberation Army

xii Prelude: The Fortieth Anniversary of the POLISARIO Front

May 10th of 2013 was the fortieth anniversary of the Sahrawi movement for national liberation: the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Red Ravine and Golden River: Saqiya al-

Hamraʿ and Wadi al Dahab (hereafter POLISARIO Front). Known as Africa’s last colony,

Morocco invaded the Western Sahara in 1975 after enduring almost a century of Spanish colonization. Thus, although the POLISARIO Front first emerged in opposition to Spain’s colonial regime, it has been fighting and resisting a Moroccan occupation of the Western

Sahara for most of its existence1.

The POLISARIO Front celebrated its fortieth anniversary in refugee camps near the

Algerian city of Tindouf, where approximately 160,000 Sahrawis live in a nation-state proclaimed, performed and organized since 1976: The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic

(hereafter “the Sahrawi Republic”). In 2013, the 10th of May commemorations staged a parade featuring an aesthetic, sequencing and structure not unlike nationalist parades one might expect to find elsewhere in the world. The late President of the Sahrawi Republic, highest commander of the Sahrawi People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and Secretary General of the POLISARIO

Front, Mohammed Abzelaziz, inaugurated the event with a speech that followed the saluting of the Sahrawi flag and the singing of the Sahrawi national anthem. The following is a brief excerpt from the late President’s speech:

1 On the 10th of May of 1973, the POLISARIO Front held its first national congress clandestinely, appointing the charismatic Martyr El-Ouali Mustapha Al-Sayed as the first of their Secretary Generals. Contravening Spain’s commitment vis-à-vis the United Nations (UN) to organise a referendum for the self-determination of the Sahrawi people, on the 6th of November of 1975, the same day as Spain evacuated its last soldiers and settlers through the Canary Islands, Morocco’s military escorted 350.000 settlers into the Western Sahara. This event, known as the Green March, initiated a sixteen year-long armed conflict between the Moroccan army and POLISARIO Front combatants. In 1979, the UN declared the POLISARIO Front the only legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people (General Assembly, Resolution 34/37) and the Western Sahara is the only African decolonization dossier that remains open at the UN.

xiii Today we are living one of the greatest moments in the history of people’s

emancipation and freedom. We are here to commemorate the fortieth

anniversary of the POLISARIO Front, a day of pride for Sahrawis that marks

the culmination of many years of horizontal Sahrawi resistance [….]. A nation

movement of liberation that developed into our revolution, breaking away with

many years of dark colonialism, relieving our people from ignorance, the

backwardness of our tribalism, poverty, marginalization, oppression,

subordination and submission. Our movement has led us towards the ranks of

glory, pride and dignity […] A Sahrawi independent state will constitute a

beacon of peace to the peoples of the region and will put a definitive end to the

expansionist philosophy and to the instability that reins over us… An

independent Sahrawi state is the only solution.

Hundreds of Sahrawi refugees had assembled behind low metal gates set up to delimit a corridor for the parade; some had climbed on to the roofs of land rovers in search for a better view. The day threatened to be so hot that by 10 a.m. I was already sweating and felt relieved to have been accredited with a badge that allowed my entry into an elevated box-like structure from where one could watch the parade sat on plastic seats protected from the sun by a marquee. A group of local and international journalists congregated at an angle from the marquee with their equipment. Next to them sat a group of female artists over a red carpet, clapping and playing hand-drums in a semicircle. They were dressed in black and white milafhat —a customary female dress—, their hair braided and decorated with artisanal brooches of colourful pebbles, discernible under the black fabric over their heads. The artists

xiv were singing al-nidal, a term that literally translates into “the struggle”, and gives name to the

Sahrawi’s own national musical genre (Ruano Posada and Solana Moreno, 2015).

As a foreign researcher in the Republic, I had been conceded a seat under the marquee amongst POLISARIO governors, male and female ministers, tribal (qaba’il) elders known as shuyukh (sing. shaykh), military officials, parliamentarians, other Sahrawi governmental officials, international delegates, and expatriated humanitarian or development workers based in the Republic’s administrative province of Rabuni. To one side of me sat my friend Salama, a young Sahrawi man in his early twenties who had a leadership position in the POLISARIO

Front’s Youth Wing, one of the Sahrawi Republic’s “Organizations of the Masses”, known as the Sahrawi Youth Union (UJSARIO). To my other side was my friend Juan, a Spanish engineer who worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR).

From our seats, we watched hundreds of soldiers marching down the parade with their rifles on the left hand side of their bodies and their right hand arms swinging up and down like pendulums. There were seven different military formations in total, corresponding to each of the military regions found on the right hand side of the 1,465 km military berm built by

Morocco, in an area of the Western Sahara known to the Sahrawi as “the liberated areas”.

Nomadic Sahrawi families sparsely populate these liberated areas under direct control of the

POLISARIO Front’s Sahrawi People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). Younger, more athletic soldiers ─the infantry─ entered the parade energetically. One by one, they delivered kicks and punches into the air, holding out knives and breaking bricks with their foreheads. A large rectangular sculpture, approximately two meters high, was set on fire and soldiers ran towards it, forming pirouettes as they jumped through it in full display of their physical prowess.

xv The smells of gunpowder filled the air. To my left, Salama seemed captivated by the scene.

I noticed he was tearing up. “Are you sad?” I asked him. “Sad? No mint Solana (daughter of

Solana), I cry of pride”. By contrast, to my right, Juan was letting out restless sighs and complaining aloud: He resented his presence at the parade. His boss at the UNHCR had obliged him and his co-workers to attend the event in a political gesture of solidarity with the Sahrawi people that Juan considered dissonant with the humanitarian goals of his work. “Look” he explained, in a powerful display of the temporality of emergency substantiating UNHCR’s official mission to “save lives”, a rhetoric legitimising humanitarian interventions more generally (Fassin & Pandolfi, 2010: 14): “It is up to my team whether or not the people outside this marquee continue to have clean water to drink by the end of the month. We are far behind.

We work until the sun falls every day, but here is my team today, wasting time and clapping at an army!” Caught somewhere between Salama’s loyal elation and Juan’s exhausted impatience, my own mind drifted into other thoughts that I scribbled into my field diary: Observing these young soldiers, I was reminded of their forefathers: the early Sahrawi guerrilla fighters of the

1970s. I reminisced at how different the aesthetic of these state-crafted military was to that of those early combatants, and thought about how paradoxical it was that forty years later, their descendants were being trained to perform a nation-state they simultaneously were prevented from fighting for. The spectacular acrobatics of these young men stood in my imagination for the thwarting that the United Nations (UN) imposed upon a Sahrawi armed struggle after it mediated a ceasefire between the POLISARIO Front and Morocco in 1991. Inserting the

Sahrawi struggle into what I described as a colonial meantime, this cease-fire initiated a peace- process that is consistently failing to deliver its promises to this day.

xiv To my delight, a group of elderly men marched next; they were dressed in the sand coloured camouflaged suits of the early Sahrawi guerrilla fighters I had felt nostalgic for earlier. Performing the transgenerational force of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism, groups of children marched after these elderly men. They represented the primary schools found in each of the thirty residential districts of the Republic. Some of these young students held wooden slates, known as lauh, used to study the Koran. Others carried different objects of nationalist semiology: pictures of Sahrawi martyrs, flags, miniature goat-skin tents symbolising the larger ones made and used by nomads and known as khiyam (pl. for khayma) and placards with familiar slogans such as: “The Sahrawi independent state is the only solution”. Other children carried hoes, pretending they were harvesting cereal, a common practice among

Saharan nomads in the Western Sahara’s desert pasturelands known as al-badia. Since the end of armed conflict in 1991, especially from 2005 onwards, the frontline for the Sahrawi struggle has been displaced to the uprising currently taking place in the occupied territory of the

Western Sahara (Shelley, 2004). Mimicking contemporary Sahrawi activists who participate in these uprisings, some children in the parade carried nationalist banners, whilst others, dressed as police officers, imitated Moroccan authorities as they theatrically pretended to hit the parading protesters with their batons. Other children paraded in a row, holding placards with different numbers on them “1”, “2”, “3”, “4”, up to “40”, one for each year in which the independence of the Sahrawi nation is being postponed.

Women too had a remarkably strong presence in this march. Some paraded in folkloric outfits, carrying banners that read: “The entire country or martyrdom” whereas others marched down as soldiers, after the male divisions, wearing men’s military outfits with green turbans around their heads, their hands tucked under their belts, carrying backpacks with spear-like

xv weapons and sometimes flags protruding out from them. Although the SPLA does not include female soldiers, the female marchers represented the generation of Sahrawi women who received obligatory military training during the years of armed conflict with Morocco. Most of these female soldiers remained in the rearguard of the camps of Tindouf, where the Sahrawi

Republic is located, yet others were present in the battlefields of the Western Sahara, mainly working as nurses, radio operators, drivers, medics or carrying light arms (Mundy, 2007: 290).

They embodied the revolutionary figure of the munadila (pl. munadilat), a word that translates from Arabic as militant (f.), and is used in the Republic almost interchangeably with mukafiha: fighter (f.) or thawria: revolutionary (f.). Like her male counterpart —the Sahrawi mukatil

(combatant/soldier)— the Sahrawi munadila is a symbolic figure constructed upon the moral duty to dedicate her daily labour, suspending and sacrificing her personal desires, for the collective cause of national liberation.

The figure of the munadila was further evoked when, more unusually for a nationalist parade, groups of Sahrawi women marched down in representation of each of the Sahrawi

Republic’s ministries. This uncommon gendering of the state as female rendered tribute to the immense labour Sahrawi women carried out whilst men remained in the Western Sahara, defending the land from Morocco’s invasion (1975-1991), the years when women became charged with building, organising, and administering the new infrastructures, spaces and institutions of their newly proclaimed Republic. Groups of munadilat marched down holding placards for the Ministry of Transport and Energy, alongside photographic images of gas bottles, solar panels, and public trucks used to communicate between the five different provinces of the exiled Republic. Others carried banners from the Ministry of Vocational

Training and Public service with placards that read: “Vocational training

xvi strengthens our resistance and our capacity to build national institutions”. Another group represented the Republic’s Ministry of Equipment, in charge of administering and provisioning citizen-refugees —and their institutions─ with resources delivered through international aid.

They carried banners with images of stoves, green emergency relief tents and other resources.

Cars from the “Sahrawi Red Crescent” (the Sahrawi branch of the International Red Cross) paraded down in representation of the Sahrawi Ministry of Health2. These women stopped the parade to perform first aid operations. They stepped out of the Republic’s ambulances: re-used vehicles that once belonged to Basque-Spanish police forces known as the ertzaintza, in

Basque, donated to the Sahrawi Republic’s Ministry of Health. Similarly, two UNHCR water trucks decorated with Sahrawi flags paraded down as part of the Republic’s Ministry of Water and the Environment. At that moment, I turned to Juan and teased him: “Is that your boss driving the truck?” “Pfff…” he rebuffed: “At least we were not asked to march down the parade ourselves! My colleagues tell me that in previous commemorations even expatriate aid workers marched!

2 Because the UN does not recognize the Sahrawi Republic, its humanitarian aid agencies officially collaborate with the Algerian Red Crescent (ARC). However, the ARC then hands over resources to the Sahrawi Red Crescent.

xvii

Figure 1. Under the Marquee, 2013. By author.

xviii

Figure 2. Outside the Marquee, 2013. By author.

xix

Figure 3. The SPLA infantry, 2013. By author.

Figure 4. Munalidat, 2013. By author.

xxi

Figure 5. Ministry of Transport, 2013. By author.

xxii

Figure 6. Ministry of Heath, 2013. By author.

xxiii

Figure 7. Ministry of Water and the Environment, 2013. By author.

When the POLISARIO Front agreed to initiate a UN mediated peace-process in 1991, the movement for national liberation exchanged its rifles for diplomacy. Renouncing the power of gunfire, the movement surrendered its strategies to the power of political representation. The movement routinely engages POLISARIO envoys, Sahrawi activists of all kinds, and their international supporters in activities that take place in spaces ranging from the high offices of the UN to bohemian European leftist cafes. These activities include secret “track two” conflict resolution diplomatic meetings, open poetry sessions, documentary film making and screenings, research and study groups, personal blogs, conferences, protests, rallies, the reporting activities of international human rights organisations, the mobilisation of local and

xxiv international journalists, the formation of advocacy groups lobbying the European

Commission, and the list could go on.

To this day, the POLISARIO Front’s display of this unwavering politics of recognition, as well as its strict abidance to international law and treaties has seen little outcome with regard to its utmost goal: that of obtaining sovereignty over the Western Sahara. Nonetheless, the movement’s political dexterity, as well as the post-Cold War boom of a development and humanitarian aid industry worldwide allows the POLISARIO Front to continue developing the bureaucratic, institutional, legal structures and infrastructures of a nation-state building project it initiated in exile in 1976. Allowing Sahrawi refugees to escape the pervasive imaginary of

“helpless and speechless refugees” (Malkki, 1996: 568), the POLISARIO Front deploys international aid to govern over and administer its displaced population, inscribing them as

“citizens” or “citizen-refugees”, the term I use to describe the dual legal categorization of my interlocutors. As the very materiality of the 40th anniversary parade demonstrates, the

POLISARIO Front mobilizes international aid: donated trucks, equipment, tools, food, clothing, even expatriated staff, to define, represent and to perform a Sahrawi nation-state to both internal and external audiences. The spectacle above ─with its professional army, schoolchildren and its valiant, industrious women─ constitutes a practice of narration procuring political legitimacy in a global arena of recognition.

Exhibiting the Sahrawi Republic’s institutions and the loyalty of its citizen-refugees, events such as this commemoration perform a fraught sovereignty. The POLISARIO Front exercises a de facto sovereignty over the Western Sahara’s Eastern side of Morocco’s military berm, and the exiled Republic it administers in Algerian territory is officially recognised by sixty different nation-states around the world. The Sahrawi Republic has a seat in the African

xxv Union and, perhaps most importantly, it is from this polity that the POLISARIO Front governs over a population of approximately 160,000 according to its own political policies and priorities (Farah, 2008: 83-88; Wilson, 2016). From the Sahrawi Republic, the POLISARIO

Front nurtures citizen-refugees who, like Salama, may have never set foot in the Western

Sahara, yet may still find themselves moved to tears in the POLISARIO’s political commemorations. Nevertheless, as Juan’s meta-commentary suggests, the pride that Salama feels for his compatriots’ political achievements is tenuous. Salama’s is a government vulnerable by its reliance upon international assistance to provide clean drinking water for its constituents. His is a government compromised by its inability to attack its political enemies after having accepted the presence of UN blue helmets in and around the territory it claims.

Indeed, Salama cries not for a polity that was never meant to last; he cries of pride for the labour it takes to secure the future of sovereignty it represents, a future that is beginning to feel like a former future.

In the meantime —a period Sahrawis describe as one of “no war and no peace” and that I refer to as a colonial meantime— the everyday labour of Sahrawi citizen-refugees is sustaining their revolutionary process in exile. The valiant figure of the Sahrawi munadila parading above pays homage to women’s labour, but it does not fully represent it, it casts shadows over aspects of it; it even distorts it. The figure of the munadila is associated with a specific kind of political labour: the labour of representation that Sahrawi male and female professionals and politicians routinely carry out in national and international public spaces and spheres. Looking to understand the emergence and the endurance as well as the construction and the reconstruction of a Sahrawi revolutionary process initiated more than forty years ago, the following

xxvi dissertation looks behind the scenes of this important labour of political representation, discerning the more discreet facets of women’s revolutionary political labour in everyday life.

xxvii

1 Introduction

Refugee camps—paradigmatic spaces for “states of exception” (Agamben, 2005)—are typically imagined as places where legality is suspended, condemning displaced peoples to a life “without nomos, with no stable law to integrate their fate into that of humanity in general”

(Agiers, 2008: 30). The refugee camp is defined through an antithetical relationship to the modern nation-state and for the past forty years, the POLISARIO Front has translated and inserted the decolonisation struggle of the Sahrawi people into this dialectic. Resisting the political impotence that is legally and semantically etched onto refugees, since 1975, the liberation movement organises its struggle into a form commensurable with a global model of governance in which the nation-state is the political form considered legitimate for the exercise of sovereignty ─ the capacity to rule over a given population and territory.

The POLISARIO’s project of a revolutionary nationalism procures Sahrawi people with a language, an aesthetic and an administrative structure that secures the legibility of its political claims in the regime of truth of a global political arena. Aspiring to and “pre-figuring state power” (Mundy, 2007), exile offers the movement with a time-space in which to forge new social relations (Caratini, 2000, 2003, 2006; Wilson, 2016), build institutions, administrations and infrastructures (Gimeno, 2007; Farah, 2008; Wilson, 2012), create mass mediation technologies: newspapers, radio programs, as well as poetry (Deubel, 1999) and music (Ruano

& Solana, 2015), aimed at generating new aesthetic and affective regimes that seek to displace a tribally-affiliated system of governance with a nationally-affiliated one.

1 This dissertation investigates the ways in which the project of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism is sustaining and regenerating itself under the conditions of the present. Recent analyses of the POLISARIO’s Front political organization have departed from a perspective that decenters state-power from our understanding of sovereignty (Wilson, 2016). Building from this approach, in this work, I closely examine the ways in which the POLISARIO Front’s governance in exile implicates male and female citizen-refugees of different ages in different ways. I use the categories of gender and generation as lenses through which to analyse the specificities of the practices, dispositions, sensibilities and modes of political authority through which a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism first emerged and is being maintained into the present. Moreover, attending to the ways in which modes of socio-political organization are always accompanied by modes of narration, collective memories, discourses, iconographies, artistic production and commemorative rituals such as the one described in the prelude, this work examines the contradictions produced in the disjuncture between representations of a

Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism and the lived experience of struggle among different generations of women. In so doing, it describes the subtle ways in which expressions of a

Sahrawi struggle are shifting generationally, foregrounding a way of thinking about social and political transformation that speaks neither of continuity nor of rupture, but of regeneration.

Focusing on the regeneration of a Sahrawi revolutionary process requires paying attention to the less spectacular, more mundane labouring of political action. It involves putting into view what usually fails to acquire representation in dominant accounts of revolution, nationalism and state building: women’s everyday labour sustaining revolutionary processes such as the Sahrawi until this day. Whereas the prelude’s parade celebrates the

Sahrawi munadila —a figure closely associated with a generation of women trained to

2 assume a prominent presence in the new spaces and institutions of their exiled Republic—

women’s daily efforts to clean and repair their households, distribute, share and provision

families and neighbourhoods with food, prepare meals, host guests, breastfeed, heal, nurture

children and look after the elderly did not acquire memorialization in the 40th anniversary of

the POLISARIO Front’s parade. Such routine efforts hardly make headlines nor do they

usually enter into the annals of history.

Reflecting on what kind of labour comes to count as revolutionary ─activities deemed

worthy of narration, “events” that are understood to redefine “the political” (Badiou, [1988]

2013)─and what kinds of labour do not, is an exercise of particular importance to the present

moment of Sahrawi struggle. Today, historical accounts of a Sahrawi revolutionary

nationalism have reached a kind of temporal impasse. When, towards the end of the nineteen

eighties, Morocco and the POLISARIO Front reached a military stalemate in 1991, an UN-

mediated ceasefire promised to put an end to the conflict, ushering in the self-determination

of Africa’s last colony. The UN established a peacekeeping mission: United Nations Mission

for the Referendum in the Western Sahara (MINURSO) on either side of Morocco’s 1,465

km military earth berm used to divide the territory of the Western Sahara into two to this

day1. However, a quarter of a century after combatants put down their rifles, the UN has

failed to hold Morocco accountable to international law. The UN declares the Western Sahara

as a “non-self-governing territory” with a decolonisation dossier that remains open to this day.

The present conflict over the Western Sahara is often described with terms such as

“stagnated”, “frozen”, “locked” or “stalled” in a stubborn “zero-sum” game between Morocco

and the POLISARIO Front (see Jensen 2005; Theofilopoulos 2006, 2007). Such adjectives

1 See www.mineaction.org/programmes/westernsahara. 3 situate the conflict between two parties, misrecognising the tacit involvement of global powers in its irresolution and obscuring the fact that its endurance represents the continuation of

French, US, and Spanish colonial practices in North Africa. Morocco’s occupying regime continues to receive support from the same Western regimes with UN veto power and considerable influence over the decisions of international agencies such as MINURSO. The post-cold war shift in Western foreign policy from “communist containment” to one of

“containing Islamic fundamentalism” has framed the West’s prioritisation of political stability over promoting respect for international law and human rights in the region (Ruf 1987, Zunes and Mundy 2010: 59, Zoubir, 2010). Hence, the peace being kept by MINURSO is best described as part of a “Pax Americana” (Solá-Martin, 2010: 5), a way of promoting the status quo and legitimising the same power relations that are at the root of the territorial conflict (ibid:

10). A mediocre version of peace that, in Juan Carlos Gimeno’s view, acts as a system of communication, producing texts from a pedagogy of cruelty in which justice is being indefinitely deferred (2016 my translation).

Indeed, the fact that the violence of occupation co-exists with the practice of international peacekeeping in the Western Sahara certainly does not escape Sahrawis, whose lives are marked by this experience on an everyday basis. Consider the unequivocal messages of the following images circulating in the social media by Sahrawi youth:

Figure 8. Meme circulated through social media by Sahrawi young activists in 2011- 2012.

Figure 9. Meme circulated in social media by Sahrawi young activists, 2011-2012. Note that calling someone a donkey is a common insult in the Republic as well as in other Arab speaking contexts.

Framing the conflict within the temporal impasse of a “deadlock” contributes to perform what I describe as a colonial meantime over the Sahrawi struggle. Terms such as

“stagnated” “frozen” and “locked” obscure the enduring colonial practices of North American-

5 European-Moroccan corporative ventures routinely engaged in the illegal extraction of Western

Sahara’s resources─phosphates, fisheries, and fossil fuels (Kingsburg, et.al, 2015; http://www.wsrw.org/). In this colonial meantime, the thousands of UN blue-helmets dispatched throughout the territory of the Western Sahara lack a mandate to monitor and denounce human rights violations due to France’s annual veto to pass a UN resolution to that effect. Instead, clandestine activist media groups and other local human rights organisations carry out the dangerous labour of denouncing and exposing Sahrawi activists’ routine experience of violence under occupation: arbitrary detainments, military trials, tortures, disappearances and persecutions3. In short, describing the conflict of the Western Sahara as

“locked”, “stalled” or “frozen” reproduces a narrative involved in the misrecognition of global power structures that normalise international law malpractices, failing to capture the symbolic and no-so symbolic forms of violence this indefinite waiting for an increasingly elusive right to self-determination is exerting upon Sahrawi lives.

To claim that a colonial meantime today governs the Sahrawi struggle is to think of

“governmentality” as mediated through the experience of time and not just through bodies and subjectivities (Foucault, 1991). As will be described in part one of this introduction, the

Sahrawi Republic condensed out of a particular dialectic with a universal “historical time”

(Koselleck, 2004), striving for recognition and incorporation into an international community in which certain models of political organisations and relationships to time are more legible than others. The Sahrawi Republic’s present, its neighbourhoods, its legislative and electoral

3 See Martín Beristain y González (2012) for the most comprehensive report of these violations as well as reports compiled by Sahrawi activist groups under occupation, which include “El Comité de Defensa del Derecho de Autodeterminacion del Pueblo del Sahara Occidental (CODAPSO)”, “La Asociación Saharaui de Víctimas de Violaciones Graves de los Derechos Humanos Cometidas por el Estado Marroquí (ASVDH)” and Equipe Media (www.emsahara.com).

6 structures and its institutions sediment out of a relationship to the future that is now past and confronted with a geopolitical epoch when “the right of self-determination of peoples seems scarcely plausible anymore; it seems, in fact, already anachronistic-quaint” (Scott 2012: 197).4

In this work, I will contribute to show that ─despite the POLISARIO Front’s encounter with the “glass ceilings” of an international politics of recognition─ the movement of liberation is far from paralysed: Its economic and political policies, processes of subjectivization and social relations have been adapting to transforming historical circumstances, allowing the movement of liberation to endure until this day. However, since 1991, its dominant symbolic

(discursive, iconographic) representations have barely mirrored such changes. Most often represented in adherence to the discursive terms of international diplomacy, the struggle is perceived as having reached an impasse. Reflecting upon the literature that is published regarding the Sahrawi struggle, Alberto Lopez-Bragados (2015) argues that the UN’s stagnated peace-process is implicated in the production of a “poetics of dead end” over the conflict. He notices most of this literature is caught up in “a regime of truth suspended in the indefinite time of the conflict, and for that reason… it is incapable of opening itself to other alternatives, and to a reformulation of the principles that may allow us to think otherwise about the equation between a people and their sovereignty” (2015: 23). I seize on his insight, suggesting this

“poetics of a dead-end”, in part, echoes the POLISARIO Front’s own official discourse.

Resonating with some of Alexei Yurchak’s (2006) observations regarding the Soviet Union’s final years, the POLISARIO Front is required to continue reproducing the form of its politics

4 Indeed, the legal adjudication of decolonisation has rarely been achieved through recognition of the moral entitlements that international law and contracts prescribe alone. Instead, independence from colonial powers has more often been attained through peoples’ struggles (Falk, 2001: 48). Nevertheless, paying attention to the ways in which “third world states…as objects to the civilizing discipline of international legal regulation…have always been vulnerable to international law and international morality” (Scott 2012: 202) allows for an understanding of how an abstract, almost mythical right to self-determination is rendered thing-like.

7 —performing coherence with the political principles, values and ideals that first mobilised hundreds of thousands Sahrawis to organise and fight for national liberation more than forty years ago— often at the expense of engaging with its “constitutive” meanings (cf. Austin in

Yurchak, 2006: 22-26). This discursive stasis results out of a concerted effort to maintain unity, consensus and the legitimacy of the POLISARIO’s leadership vis-à-vis internal and external audiences, and, as I will show in the first chapter of this dissertation, through the oral narratives of elderly Sahrawi women, it is also reflective of a relationship to the future that is generationally specific.

The disconnect between the Republic’s political rhetoric─one that continues to draw upon the emancipatory and socialist-leaning values of its project of revolutionary nationalism─ and the much more laissez-faire policies the POLISARIO Front has been obliged to adopt in its tenacious adjustment to the conditions of the global present ─the gap between its performative and its constitutive dimensions─ necessarily produces contradictions that influence Sahrawi citizen-refugee’s morale and affective relationship to the project of a revolutionary nationalism that their movement performs. With the passage of time, the Republic has been undergoing processes of urbanization similar to those observed amongst refugee populations elsewhere in the world (Agiers, 2002; Allan, 2014). Organising into a form that is commensurable with the dominant political aesthetics of international diplomacy and cooperation (what I describe as the ideo-spatial logics of the modern nation-state), since the 1991 ceasefire, the Sahrawi

Republic’s infrastructures and institutions have become increasingly robust, signifying a durability that is at odds with the revolutionary goal of return to a decolonized Western Sahara.

Indeed, the current conditions of a colonial meantime sentence the Sahrawi Republic to exercise a tenuous sovereignty, one threatened by the movement’s incapacity to tend for it

8 (relying on international aid), and by its inability to attack political adversaries (complying with the UN’s peace-process).

Especially to those born in exile, to grow up under the administration of the Sahrawi

Republic is to grow up in an intimate, nurturing and disciplining polity, which is, nonetheless, sometimes, simultaneously perceived as feigned. For example, my friend Salama, the same young man who was moved to tears feeling proud whilst watching the 40th anniversary of the

POLISARIO Front commemorations, would often tell me: “Mint Solana (daughter of

Solana)…Inshallah (God willing) one day we will hang out in the real world”, referring to somewhere outside of the Sahrawi Republic. Whereas there is no question that such comments were comments delivered playfully, Salama’s humour hinges on a very real perception that the same place he had grown up in, the place where he had been schooled, where he had learned how to think, feel and love, the place he cries in during collective celebrations, “felt” like something less than “real”. If this perception was more characteristic of those who, like

Salama, belong to a generation of citizen-refugees born into exile, it was not exclusive to them.

Following a long morning’s work in the administration of her district (daira), one of my host mothers, a woman in her fifties who was the head of the household I lived in for ten months during my fieldwork, would often enter the khayma with a tired expression. She would take a seat amongst us repeating words to herself in a low, soothing, almost imperceptible invocation:

“Oh Lord, give us peace, oh Lord, give us independence” and, sometimes I would hear her interject: “give us a real life, oh my Lord” (aʿtina hayt haqiqi, yarrabi).

Underlying these expressions is a particular “structure of feeling” (Williams, 1977) similar to a collective sense of disappointment that has been observed of post-revolutionary

9 settings in other contexts. As David Scott’s work (2014) lucidly elaborates, the aftermath of the

20th century decolonising revolutions worldwide are now faced with the ruins of the futures that propelled them into action. Similarly, Jessica Greenberg’s research in postsocialist Romania reveals a disappointment that emerges out of “the gap between expectations of political and social transformation and the complexities of social change over time” (2014: 40). However, unlike the —legally speaking at least— post-colonial states that Scott speaks of, and the postsocialist states that Greenberg and other scholars (Buraway & Verdery, 1999; Gal & Klingman;

2000; Verdery, 1996) focus on, the Sahrawi Republic is neither post-colonial nor post- revolutionary. Like the Palestinian, the Kurdish and other national liberation movements that have survived into the 21st Century, the Sahrawi struggle has adapted itself —without fully succumbing politically— to the conditions of a post- cold war political economy and geopolitical moment. Extending Das and Poole’s (2004) heuristic device of the “margins of nation-states” to a global scale, I think of the Sahrawi Republic as occupying a margin of an

“imagined global order”, not as a “periphery” but from a revealing historical location that appears unsynchronised with that of the rest of the world. Belonging neither to the “third world” nor to “the second world”, but to both, the Sahrawi Republic allows us to think

“between” the “posts” of post-socialism and post-colonialism, as well as beyond them (Chari and Verdery, 2009). The enduring existence of the Sahrawi Republic is a powerful reminder that neither the Cold War nor colonialism is over in the global present.

The chapters to come will show how the political and economic conditions of a colonial meantime challenge Sahrawi citizen-refugees’s capacity to reproduce the constitutive meanings of the political project that the POLISARIO Front performs through its rhetoric and official

10 policies. Yet, rather than the “disappointment” observed of post-socialist and post-colonial contexts, the political affect that makes these contradictions livable is one more akin to what

Lauren Berlant has described as “cruel optimism: the condition of maintaining an affective attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss” (2010: 94). In the Western Sahara, the POLISARIO Front’s claim to the right for self-determination forms part of a “cluster of things and promises”(ibid) —indeed it is attached to the material corpus of buildings, offices, vehicles and blue helmets of a peacekeeping mission (MINURSO) in which the United Nations invests close to 60 million dollars annually since 1991 as well as to other kinds of material support in the form of humanitarian, development and solidarity aid— that helps explain how something as elusive as an “international right” has become “an object of desire” (Berlant,

2010: 93) for many Sahrawis, as well as for many of their international supporters, for whom respect for the principle of people’s self-determination is enveloped with dreams of a world regimented otherwise.

The “cruel optimism” implicated in sustaining a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism through time is embedded in the project’s espousal of a modernist temporality of a “progress” now stalled into a kind of mirage. However, and this is crucial, as Berlant herself notes, if cruel optimism involves choosing to “syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity, with a system of attachment one is used to, that does not mean defeat by it” (2010: 97, my emphasis). Indeed, the dominant representations used to perform a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism are enmeshed in a politics of recognition with global power structures that never overdetermined Sahrawi citizen-refugees’ experience of time and their concomitant understandings of the political. Assuming that subjects, and their political movements, are incoherent and “capable of holding irreconcilable attachments and investments” (Berlant, 2008:

11 4), in this work, I look to different if co-existing experiences of time (Bear, 2014) amongst the

Sahrawi in order to counter the frustrations that emerge out of this colonial meantime and to convey the enduring political vitality of the Sahrawi revolution.

The POLISARIO’s movement was fraught from its inception with the contradiction of having to respond to two conflicting sets of political desires: a collective desire to restore the rights, liberties and values associated to the autonomous life-world that European colonialism threatened with the desire to integrate into the futures of “progress” of a global political economy. In the next section of this introduction, I will discuss how the politics of recognition embedded in the dominant rhetoric of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism always back grounded the pre-colonial and pre-revolutionary logics the movement nonetheless drew upon

─and continues to draw upon─to mobilize and to inform its gendered revolutionary process. As a result, a modernist model of female empowerment acquired more publicity than longstanding customary modes of female power amongst the Sahrawi that are nonetheless key to understand the durability of their revolution to this day.

Focusing on the temporalities associated with what I describe as women’s regenerative labour, I enquire into how Sahrawi women reckon with the contradictions produced by the conditions of a colonial meantime over their struggle, I ask: What version of history is being stalled and whose experience of time does it represent? How do different generations of women inhabit the temporality of their struggle? What happens when the temporary structures of exile start feeling permanent? What kinds of labour are helping maintain the revolution alive under the conditions of the present and what does centering less celebrated forms of female labour into revolutionary accounts do to dominant accounts of nationalism and state-building?

12 In order to understand the emergence and endurance, as well as the construction and the reconstruction of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism in exile one must look beyond the dominant gendered scripts that the POLISARIO mobilises to perform its project of a revolutionary nationalism. Focusing on women’s everyday labour is revealing of logics of longue durée amongst the Sahrawi that remain largely behind the scenes of a much more visible repertoire of official discourses and iconographies featuring the spectacular work of the heroic female militant figure of the munadila. I use the term “figure” to describe dominant representations of actual historical actors that perform political ideals, values, goals and models of empowerment, influencing (without determining) political desire transgenerationally. I argue that applying a feminist lens to our understanding of revolution, nationalism and state-building processes enables social-science —so fraught with its traditional modernist and colonial lenses

(Asad 1973; Kuper [1996] 2015; Said 1979)— with insight into pre-colonial practices, temporalities, moralities, aesthetics and notions of the political that are largely erased from the dominant lexicon of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism, even if these continue to inform

Sahrawi women’s understanding of their political struggle and empowerment.

Applying a feminist lens to a struggle for decolonisation, such as the Sahrawi, requires heeding to Europe’s long record actively policing colonised women’s bodies in the name of modernist and civilizational tropes in the Western Sahara (Bengochea, 2016), across North

Africa (Boddy, 2007) and beyond (Mac Clintock, et al.1997; Stoler, [2002] 2010). María

Lugones (2007) has combined the insights of native American feminists such as Paula Gunn

Allen ([1986] 1992) and African feminists such as Oyéronké Oyewùmí (1997) with Anibal

Quijano’s notion of the “coloniality of power” (2000) to suggest that European colonialism imposed a “modern/colonial gender system” now reproduced by contemporary post- colonial states around the world. Rocío Medina (2016) has already suggested the relevance of

13 María Lugones’s theory of the “coloniality of gender” to the Sahrawi struggle, and, in my work, I contribute to this line of analysis, specifically by examining how the conditions of this colonial meantime are re-organising Sahrawi women’s labour in ways that challenge some of their longstanding fields of power. Finally, I describe the shape that Sahrawi women’s abilities to respond take, regenerating the expression of their political agency under the coloniality of the present.

Departing from an analytic that “uses resistance as a diagnostic of power” (Abu-

Lughod, 1990 a.), the feminist optic I employ observes and interprets the way in which

Sahrawi women respond to the re-structuring of their labour, using such observations as a window into the transforming power structures operating over the Sahrawi struggle as whole.

Refusing the logic of a primarily Western and liberal feminist lens that situates “agency” in the moral and political autonomy of the individual subject (Mahmood, 1995), and influenced by feminist thinkers such as Chandra Mohanty (1988), Donna Harraway, (1988) and Karen Barad

(2007), I locate expressions of what I think of as instances of Sahrawi citizen-refugee’s

“structured-agency”. Thinking of agency as always already structured assumes that our capacity to act, be, and become is necessarily configured through (instead of against) existing

(instead of idealized) social relations, economies, materialities, administrations and epistemologies. From this specific feminist perspective, I aim to unearth modes of political action that without presenting themselves as neither explicitly feminist nor oppositional to the dominant project of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism, agglomerate a series of practices, sensibilities, and ways of understanding the world that “through the quiet encroachment of the ordinary” (Bayat, 2013: 86-103) are regenerating longstanding modes of female power amongst the Sahrawi, protecting

14 the rights and the well-being of female citizen-refugees, and with it, their capacity to regenerate the Sahrawi struggle as a whole.

The kind of engagement with attachment to and revitalization of a revolutionary process I am interested in describing manifests itself largely outside the fields of recognition established by a “historical time” that is characterised by punctuated moments of rupture (Koselleck, 2004) and its corollary gendered “heroic” achievements. The temporality of revolutionary action that

I am concerned with is burdened neither by the nostalgia for the (structured) memory of the past, nor by “messianic” futures (Benjamin, 1958). Rather, it is one that emerges out of the shared experience of an “attritional time” of struggle that is often lost to dominant historical accounts. I borrow the term “attritional time” from Sian Lazar who uses it to describe an inchoate temporality that constantly questions the futures envisioned by a co-existing

“historical time informed by past heroes and orientated towards prescribed futures” (2014: 92-

94).

Focusing on the temporality of women’s tenacious and steadfast everyday labour contributes to overcome the sense of paralysis of the political imagination produced by the temporal ordering of a colonial meantime. It opens our lenses to “coexisting temporalities”

(Bear, 2014) of struggle (Lazar, 2014) and its associated modes of political action that, dis- embedded from the nostalgia of the dominant project of a revolutionary nationalism’s futures past, responds instead to the priorities of the present. Women’s labour, so often decentered from dominant, historical accounts of revolution, nationalism and state building offers a picture that counteracts the frustrations produced by a colonial meantime. I examine women’s labour of love, remembrance, hospitality, everyday administrative practices and marriage practices to

15 convey a coexisting sense of resilience, patience and faith in a future largely outside the purview of the movement’s revolutionary, messianic historical time.

The next section of this opening chapter introduces the reader to the project of a

Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism specifically from the point of view of its relationship to history. Paying close attention to what expressions of Sahrawi women’s political agency have entered the radar of a universal history and which ones have not, it describes the forms of women’s labour that have acquired a central place in dominant representations of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism. Then, in an attempt to redress the invisibility of women’s political contributions to dominant accounts of revolution, nationalism and state building, the second section centers women’s labour to an account of Sahrawi women’s political agency through time. It shows how Sahrawi women’s modes of political action have been (and remain) informed by logics of longue durée associated to political and economic contexts predating the

Sahrawi Republic.

Crucially, this argument does not suggest women’s labour constitutes the reproductive force of an older order of things. At the core of these discussions is the suggestion that the term

“regenerative” labour is more analytically useful to describe Sahrawi women’s labour than the term “reproductive” labour, precisely because the latter is embedded into the same temporal and spatial logics of the modern nation-state that I suggest need to be decentered in order to fully understand the enduring vitality of the Sahrawi revolution. The use of the word regeneration instead of, simply, reproduction, forefronts the agentive and political quality of

Sahrawi women’s everyday labour, one that invigorates their revolutionary process in the present, by multiplying (instead of prescribing) its possible futures.

16 1.1 The Temporality of a Sahrawi Revolutionary Nationalism, Heroic Women and the Gendered Publics of History

The POLISARIO Front traces its own history to the anti-colonial resistance in and around French-Spanish borders blocking access to pastures and trans-Saharan trade networks of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (López-Bragados: 2003). These early warriors

(muhajidin) responded to the 1905 ruling by Shaykh Maʿ lainin, a fatwa calling upon the

Saharan nomadic qaba’il (tribes) of trab al-bidan ─a territorial expanse that encompasses parts of today’s Southern Morocco, Northern Mali, Northern Mauritania, Southern Algeria and all of the Western Sahara─ to defend the life-world Christian invasions threatened. The POLISARIO leadership explicitly identifies these early warriors as their predecessors (Gimeno & Robles,

2015: 26)5.

However, it was not until the late 1960s that their struggle against foreign invasion acquired a nationalist form. The first expression of Sahrawi nationalism is usually traced back to the movement led by Mohammed Ibrahim Bassiri in the “Spanish Sahara”, present-day

Western Sahara (Aguirre, 1998; Sayed, 2001). Gathering up to 7,000 militants in the year of

5 The erudite Shaykh Ma’lainin had the reputation of a mystic; he was known to be wise and to have a strong Baraka (Eventually, everywhere he went he was showered in gifts. He married twenty times and had 27 sons and dozens of daughters. His encampment grew so large and so prosperous that he was able to build a small town in Smara, where he kept his books in a library that lasted a quarter of a century, from 1898 to 1913 (García, 2010: 20-21). He was author to more than three hundred literary texts, and owner of the library of Smara, which held more than five thousand volumes, destroyed by the French army in 1913 (Mahmud Awah, 2015: 14). Following a strong blow from the French army, in 1934, the qaba’il of his insurgency were obliged to sign a ‘peace agreement’. This led to their disarming and is usually described as the moment of “pacification” (Gimeno & Robles, 2015: 22). From then onwards, some of these muhajidin enlisted in Spain’s MIAS –mixed militias commanded by Spanish officials that patrolled French borders- (Robles et al. 2015: 25). In this way, Spain started operating a paternalistic policy, promising muhajidin protection from French persecution, whilst taking advantage of these peaceful relations to increase its own presence in the region. In 1939, General Franco would emerge victorious from the Spanish civil war. With hopes that his alliance with Nazi Germany would help Spain take over some of France’s territories in the region of West Africa (Esteban and Timón 2015), the period of the 1934 pacification was also marked by the beginning of Spain’s intensified ‘scientific’ exploration of the territory between 1940-1964 (ibid 17-23), in search of a “usable Africa” (Serrano and Trasosmontes 2015: 6-14) which, by 1948, would result in the discovery of one of the largest reserves of high quality phosphates in the world (San Martín, 2010: 31-35)

17 1968 (García, 2012:102), Bassiri, a young graduate with university degrees from Cairo and

Damascus, influenced by the Pan-Arabist and socialist-leaning ideologies of those times, was the first person known to use the term “Sahrawi” (Lebsir in Gimeno & Robles, 20013: 164).

Bassiri was also the first to call for the unity of all qaba’il (tribes) living in an around the territory of today’s Western Sahara (see Isidoros, 2015: 177-180 for a discussion of what territory he was referring to at this time). Indeed, Franscesco Correale (2015: 31) affirms that the dramatic story of his disappearance constitutes Sahrawi nationalism’s foundational “myth”.

Following Bassiri’s capture in the aftermath of the forceful dismantling of the al-zamlah protests, Sahrawi nationalists learnt a lesson: Spain was receptive to neither a peaceful nor a gradual negotiation of the colony’s independence. Instead, they argued, independence required escalating the demands and the methods used to obtain it. Inspired, in part, by Fanon’s writings

(1963), three years after Bassiri’s disappearance, a group of poorly armed insurgents attacked a

Spanish military checkpoint at al-khanga on May 20th 1973. Ten days prior, The POLISARIO

Front had held its first congress with the slogan: “We will seize our freedom with our rifles”

(San Martin, 2010: 85-86).

The POLISARIO Front’s ideological vanguard, composed of youth who had studied in large metropolis such as Damascus, Rabat, Algiers, Cairo, Paris and Madrid, were familiarised with the lenses of a global political culture. They were “the first generation of Sahrawis who went to a school other than that of the desert schools which were open to the rest of the world.

They were sons of nomads who learned to think differently about their history and about their society.” (Caratini, 1996: 6). Arguably, one of the most influential ideas the POLISARIO

Front’s vanguard learnt in these formative global spaces was the notion of revolution itself. A conception of political action embedded into a modern genealogy of a universalised “historical

18 time” that emerged out of the conceptual shifts of the Enlightenment (Koselleck, 2004: 18-20).

A rectilinear conception of time of Christian origin characterized by the impetus to create a break with the past (Arendt, 1964: 27) and marked by a displacement from prophecy to prognosis of the future (cf. Koselleck in Roitman, 2014: 18): that moment when time began to be conceived as a domain in which humans (and men in particular) could act upon influence and prescribe (Koselleck, 2004: 15-22). As Cabral (1974) suggests, and as scholars such as

Mudimbe (1988), Said (1979), Laroui (1967) and Wolf (1982) help us understand, decolonisation struggles have been fraught with a collective effort to engage with this

“historical time” (Koselleck, 2004: 104) as authors and agents of their own historical narratives.

The emergence of the POLISARIO’s revolution was roughly contemporaneous with other movements of liberation taking place across the African continent and the Middle East — the Algerian National Liberation Front, Tomas Sankara’s Burkina Faso, Haile Mariam’s

Ethiopia, Gaddafi’s Lybia, Nyerere’s Tanzania, Mozambique’s Liberation Front (FRELIMO), the National Liberation Front for Angola (FNLA), the South Yemen National Liberation Front, the Palestinian Liberation Front, and many others that emerged during the second half of the

20th Century across the non-aligned countries of the Cold-War. Such movements were situated in a temporal experience coupled by a “poetics of geopolitical spatiality” (Scott, 2014 (a): 169) in which national sovereignty seemed like a plausible future. The POLISARIO Front’s emergence was immersed in a trans-political space that shared what the Sahrawi poet Bahia

Awah has described as “a fever of emancipation” (2015: 52). These were times infused with a sense of possibility for which the Sahrawi people had to prepare.

19 Mediating between the Sahrawi people and their futures of sovereignty was the movement’s capacity to organize into political forms that were legible to the “historical time” of a universalized history (Koselleck, 2004: 104). Thus, the POLISARIO Front’s revolutionary nationalism entailed the design of a new form of political authority, writing over —without fully replacing— their prior, non-statist model of sovereignty and entitlement to land/resources, in ways that were embedded in aspirations to match global standards of “progress” and

“modernity” (also see Donhman, 1999 on his account of Ethiopia’s revolution).

This process of entering a universal history overshadowed not only Saharan nomads’ autochthonous conception of time but also their associated models of political organisation.

Instead of using numerical figures, Saharan nomads labelled time according to events of particular significance (Caro-Baroja, 1955: 391-422). Thus, the elderly women I interviewed during my field work told me: “I was born in the year of the vaccine”, which corresponds to

1953, the year when Spain’s colonial administration initiated a public health campaign against chicken pox, or “I was born in the year of the attack”, referring to the Franco-Spanish-

Moroccan military operation known as “Operation Ecouvillon”, crushing the armed resistance of yaish al-tahrir (army of liberation) in 1958. In this way, the time of someone’s birth did not merely convey the age of the speaking subject; it evoked circumstances of enough significance to have passed through the filters of collective memory.

Moreover, this registering of time is ingrained in a conception of humans’ relationship to land and its resources that is very different to that underwriting the sovereignty of the nation- state. During my fieldwork, several elders explained to me that humans could not own land, given that land belongs to no one other than God. Armed conflict —as Pierre Clastres ([1980]

2010: 237-278) has argued for non-state societies, even, following his logic, for “anti-state”

20 societies— was a structural condition of a Saharan nomadic political system. Access to territory and its resources was conceived as having to be continuously earned and fought for, creating hostilities, as well as alliances that were founded on providing protection between neighbouring qaba‘il (tribes) (Caratini 1989). Procuring life in the desert was contingent upon consistent negotiation and contestation with ‘other’ groups and forces, thus, non-human agents such as droughts, their associated plagues, famines, as well as valleys and hills, feature prominently in Saharan historicity. Spatial and environmental referents too were used to express time, such as “the year of the epidemic” or landmarks such as “the year of the green valley” in reference to the landscape which surrounded a person’s nomadic encampment at the moment in time being described (Caro Baroja, 1955: 124 & 497). To pre-revolutionary Saharan nomads “calendars served as maps registering points of access to resources throughout time”

(Gimeno & Robles, 2013: 20).

By contrast, some of the spaces of the today’s Sahrawi Republic are named after numerical days in the calendar of the “historical time” of the POLISARIO’s revolution. For instance, one of the Republic’s high schools is called “The 12th of October”, after the revolutionary “event” in 1975, when tribal elders officially agreed to relay their leadership to the young men of the POLISARIO Front. There is also an all-women’s school named as “The

27th of February” (recently renamed as the province of Buyudur) memorialising the day of the

Republic’s proclamation in 1976. Thus, if the POLISARIO Front drew on and mobilized

Saharan customary notions of governance to forge a large alliance between Saharan tribes

(qaba’il) in a combat against Spanish colonialism first and against Morocco’s occupation of the

Western Sahara to this day, it did so displacing a non-androcentric temporality for an androcentric temporality associated with the political model of the nation-state.

21 Representing Sahrawi anti-colonial struggle in the terms of this revolutionary temporality was also a deeply gendered process that overshadowed expressions of Sahrawi women’s political agency associated to political modes of organisation outside the scope of the temporal and spatial logics of the nation-state. In 1974, alarmed by the evidence of a Sahrawi uprising, Spain’s colonial administration created the Party of Sahrawi National Unity (PUNS) with the aim of foreseeing a process of decolonization favourable to Spain’s enduring interests in the region. A second party, the Front of Liberation and Union (FLU) was also created during those years, gathering support for the integration of the Western Sahara in Morocco. However, neither of these political options could compete with the POLISARIO Front’s draw amongst the Sahrawi people. Some have argued the POLISARIO owed its overwhelming popularity to its success at connecting with a primarily young, male and nascent working class emerging in the colonial cities of the Spanish Sahara from 1958 onwards (Aguirre 1995: 78)6. Somewhat contradictorily, others suggest the POLISARIO’s vanguard romanticised nomadic pastoralists, under the assumption that their customary distributive economic practices were more conducive to a socialist praxis (García, 2002: 136-139). However, neither the category of

“class” nor that of “nomadic pastoralists” —which may be thought of somewhat similarly to

6 Similarly to other places in Africa, the Western Sahara experienced a “development era” (Cooper 2002) in the aftermath of the Second World War. Between 1960 and 1975, 26,000 km of roads were built and thousands of cars were registered. Commerce between the colony and neighboring Spanish Canary Islands boomed during those years, transforming longstanding trading practices amongst Sahrawis from a primarily bartering activity to a lucrative one (García, 2002:86). The Spanish company “Fosfato de Bucraa, S.A.” began exploiting the rich reservoir of phosphates in the outskirts of Al-Aaiun on a much larger scale than its predecessor, EMINSA (Mundy & Zunes, 2010:102). A 100-km transporter belt to deliver the phosphate to the coast was built by the Spanish company “Tejados y Cubiertas S.A”, as well as all other urban infrastructures in these nascent Saharan cities. Public administration grew concomitantly and with it its military presence, elevating from 739 Spanish soldiers in 1925 to 3,823 in 1974 (Serrano & Trasosmontes, 2015: 17). When, in 1966, the Spanish Sahara received the statute of a Spanish province, an unprecedented number of Sahrawi men were employed during this time in the colony’s “indigenous” military branch known as Tropas Nómadas, in public administrations, in construction and in industry work.

22 the importance Eric Wolf [1969] (1973) has attributed to “peasants” in other revolutionary nationalisms— caputures the debt that the Sahrawi revolution has with its women.

The POLISARIO Front’s popularity was largely contingent on its ability to connect with and to include Sahrawi women’s demands into its aims and discourses. Women’s mobilization was key to the early days of organizing a clandestine revolution, if largely invisible to Spanish political authorities. It was not until May of 1975, after a UN mission visited the Western Sahara to carry out an investigation on the process of decolonization that

Spain was allegedly undergoing in the territory, that women’s mass involvement in the

POLISARIO Front’s movement became widely acknowledged by Spanish colonial authorities and other international observers. One of the mission’s delegates’ remarks eloquently speaks to the invisibility of Sahrawi women’s agency prior to this moment:

The very moment that we stepped out of the airport of El Aaiun (Western

Sahara’s largest city), a sea of people received us with the POLISARIO’s flags and

placards: “Total Independence”, “Spain Go out”, “Neither Morocco, nor

Mauritania”. “We are Sahrawi”. I was surprised that most of them were women.

(Marta Jiménez in García, 2002: 143-144, my emphasis).

The importance of these public protests was pointed out to me in one of my early conversations with the National Union of Sahrawi Women’s current Secretary General. When I asked her about the early days of revolutionary action, she said: “There had always been respect for Sahrawi women in our society but, until those days, women had not been expected to take part in activities beyond the domain of the khayma (tent/household/nuclear family).

Those mobilizations created opportunity for women to be seen and heard in a different way”.

23 The domain of the khayma she mentioned may easily be associated with a “private” realm, a “fractal” distinction in permanent negotiation with its binary opposite, the “public”

(Gal, 2004: 264-267), and a category of modern political theory that nonetheless draws from an older, Aristotelian conception of the oikos, a space where property-less women and slaves carried out reproductive labour, as opposed to the creative, political action and activities that free men carried out in the “public” realm of the polis (cf. Arendt in Landes, 1998: 145).

Interpreted through the lenses of this dominant tradition of political theory, the Secretary

General’s observation could be heard as an example of a familiar, modernist narrative in which women’s political action is imagined as contingent upon their capacity to labour outside of

“domestic” spaces. However, as the second part of this introduction will demonstrate, the domain of the khayma constitutes a very important customary field of female power amongst the Sahrawi people. I therefore suggest the key word in the Secretary General’s observation is not khayma; the key to understand the point of inflection she describes is: “the opportunity to be seen and heard in a different way”. Indeed, these early street protests took place in colonial and public spaces —accessible to the photographic camera and to multiple and unknown gazes— did not only make Sahrawi women visible to international audiences, they also emplaced their political action in the discursive spaces of the polis, making their political agency recognizable and legible to a long tradition of political theory for whom “the political” is closely connected to the linguistic forms of narration in “public spheres” (Arendt, 1964;

Habermas, 1989). In other words, the Secretary General’s observation says more about what forms of political action are understood as powerful and empowering by actors influenced by the “travelling theories” of a social-scientific tradition (Said, 1984) than about Sahrawi women’s political power per se. The implications of a modernist and colonialist epistemic

24 failure to understand the khayma as a political space will be further elaborated in the next section, but the point I want to make for now is that the street mobilizations and subversive actions that took place during the last years of Spain’s colonial regime over the Western Sahara were deeply significant because they were the medium through which Sahrawi women entered the radar of a universal “historical time” (Koselleck, 2004).

This new kind of visibility marked a point of departure for Saharan pastoralist women’s subjectivities because when they entered the radar of a universal history they did not do so in representation of the kinship-based identities and status group that had substantiated their subject positions within Saharan pre-revolutionary and pre-colonial governance structures; they did so qua national subjects, qua “Sahrawi women”. Following the mass displacement of

Sahrawi people into Algeria —the land is within the borders of the Algerian state but it is important to note that it is an extremely dry region known to Saharan qaba’il as al-hamada given that some had traversed it for centuries— the POLISARIO Front was provided with an opportunity to nurture these new national and gendered political subjects. Acknowledging the critical mass that women represented in their revolutionary struggle, similarly to other socialist- inspired regimes, the Sahrawi Republic treated women as “a corporate entity” (Gal, 2004: 99-

100), something that would eventually lead to the creation of the “organisation of the masses”, known as “The National Union of Sahrawi Women” (hereafter ‘The Women’s Union’). In this way, entering a universal history was coeval and conterminous with becoming “universal” women, allowing no fissures within the subject position of “the Sahrawi woman” other than that of age. Indeed, the revolutionary movement turned “youth” into a similar corporate entity who, like “women”, “workers” and more recently, “students” also acquired political

25 representation through an “Organisation of masses” known as the Sahrawi Youth Union

(hereafter “the Youth Union”)7.

The project of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism prescribed men and female youth with unprecedented expectations. A customary assembly at Ain Ben Tili on the 12th of October contravened a longstanding gerontocratic model of political authority amongst Saharan nomads when tribal elders agreed to relay their political and military leadership over to a much younger

POLISARIO’s leadership (San Martín, 2010: 100). Since then, much has been invested to attach the POLISARIO’s vanguard image to its male and female youth. If in pre-revolutionary times, formal education had been centered on the study of Islam8, in the early revolutionary period, religious education was strictly banned from schools. Inserting the Republic towards the future of a socialist defined progress, the provision of a universal and modern education became a “national leitmotiv” (Correale, 2015: 16). Furthermore, investment in future generations took place across a transpolitical and transnational field whereby thousands of

Sahrawi male and female youth were sent abroad to receive higher education, mostly to

Algeria, Libya and Cuba and to a lesser extent Spain and the Soviet Union. As an early

Sahrawi revolutionary slogan suggests: “the revolution is the revolution of the generations (al thawra thawra al-ajil)”, the promise of a revolutionary politics and its associated, linear and andro-centric

7 The Sahrawi Workers Union (UGTSARIO) which, given the lack of industry that the conditions of exile impose, plays a largely symbolic role mobilising constituents in the Sahrawi Republic. It nonetheless plays a very important diplomatic role participating in trans-national fora and harbouring solidarity from workers unions internationally. Finally, the Sahrawi Students Union (UESARIO) was created in 2011, organising an important number of Sahrawi University in diaspora.

8 Nomadic encampments that could afford to invest in sustaining a Koranic scholar (amrabit, murabitun, pl.) taught children Koranic hermeneutics on wooden slates known as lauh —now a national signifier, recall the lauh carried by children in the prelude’s parade. Islam reached the region around the year 1050, when thousands of nomadic warriors, inspired by a saint originating from Siguilmassa (Rissani, Morocco), joined a jihad that would conquer most of present day’s Spain. Along their way they founded the city of Marrakesh and ruled over Al ‘Andalus for fifty years. They were known as the “Almoravides”. Murabitun are erudite men (usually) in charge of transmitting Koranic hermeneutics and of guarding the zauia, the sactuary of their founding saint (García, 2010 17).

26 temporality was conceptually laid upon an “intergenerational contract” (Greenberg &

Muehlebach 2007:20), whereby younger generations were expected to guarantee the revolution through time9.

Several scholars discuss and acknowledge how central discourses over and about

Sahrawi women are to the symbolic construction of the Sahrawi nation (Allan, 2010;

Bengochea, 2016; Correale, 2015: 112; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh; 2014; Juliano, 1999; Medina,

2015). Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism summons “sex-related differences between bodies… as testimony to social relations and phenomena that have nothing to do with sexuality, and not only as a testimony to, but also as testimony for, in other words, as legitimation” (Godelier,

1981: 17). Such observations echo feminist post-colonial scholarship based in other contexts, elucidating how decolonising projects worldwide have relied upon the female body to furnish nationalisms with meaning (Abu-Lughod 1998, Aretxaga, 1997, Baron, 2005, Chatterjee, 1993,

Kandiyoti 1991, Moghdam 1993, 1997, Yuval-Davis, 1997).

The most prominent female symbolic referent for the Sahrawi nation is embodied and represented by the valiant and industrious figure of the munadila introduced in the prelude.

Her symbolic emergence is deeply connected to the creation of the Sahrawi Republic, representing a “new” and “modern” female subject, evoking, to borrow Lila Abu-Lughod’s expression, a woman “remade” (1998). Her figure recalls a generation of Sahrawi women that were schooled as soldiers, teachers, nurses, accountants, etc., and propelled to occupy the new spaces of a nascent nation-state declared in exile: neighbourhood councils, provincial administrations, school, ministries, hospitals, theatre halls and the Sahrawi parliament.

Constituted in struggle, the figure of the Sahrawi munadila performs the duty to dedicate her

9 This seconds Benedict Anderson’s observation noticing anti-colonial nationalist intelligentsias were different to those of 19th Century Europe in the political significance they attached to their youth (1983: 118-119).

27 labour, as well as the physical spaces of her home and of her womb —both her reproductive capacities, and her productive capacities—to the national cause of liberation. Conjuring a subject that clashes with a politics of liberal emancipation and drawing from Martin

Holbraad’s definition of revolutionary politics (2014), the munadila is performed through her service and self-sacrifice to the revolution and to the nation. In this way, and, as the lyrics of a revolutionary song that was popular in the eighties helps to suggest: “The woman who is not a munadila, go on, divorce her, the people will make fun of her/ Imra mahi munadila yallah talaqha, alshaʿab aʿliha yatfala”, the heroic figure of the munadila was made to stand as a visible marker for the political determination and the strength of the people as a whole.

The image below—one of a Sahrawi woman holding a baby on one side of her body and a rifle on another—is perhaps one the earliest iconographic representations of the Sahrawi munadila. This image was taken by the war correspondent Christine Spengler in 1976 and it can be found iterated in representations of Cuban and Maoists revolutionary women (and beyond). As such, I consider it to be part of a gendered genre of images that symbolises what

Kristin Ross has described as the figure of “the colonial militant”, a figure that, along with that of “the worker”, she argues, was central to inspire and to inform the mobilisations of middle- class French youth and student in and around the events of May’68 (2002: 10).

Figure 10: Photo by war correspondent Christine Spengler in 1976 and posted by Sahrawi Activist through Social Media as tribute to Sahrawi Women on International Women’s Day on the 8th of March 2014.

Whereas Kristin Ross convincly shows how the figures of the “colonial militant” and the “worker” very quickly became erased from dominant representations of May’ 68 French uprisings (see also, Ticktin, 2011), the same cannot be said of a Sahrawi Revolutionary

Nationalism─note how I came across the image above circulated by young Sahrawi activists in social media as recently as 2014. Crucially, whereas Ross claims the figures of the

“colonial militant” and “the worker” stood for French middle class activists of the late 60s as

29 political modernity’s “others” (cf. Ranciere, in Ross: 2002: 25), to anti-colonial revolutionaries, such images represented something almost opposite: they demanded inclusion into a modern and universal history, albeit if also aiming to disturb the respectability of the kind of liberal modernity associated with European metropoles.

After decades of a nationalist and revolutionary struggle for decolonisation, today

Sahrawi women make headlines, often producing scripts about the Sahrawi struggle, more generally: “Western Sahara Women are Leaders in Forgotten Struggle for Independence” (The

Washington Post, 2013); “An Arab Country that Appreciates Women” (Seminariovoz, 2014);

“Sahrawi Women Relish their Rights” (BBC News, 2003); “Sahrawi Women Are Seen as

Powerful and Are Leaders” (AfricaMetro, 2015); “Sahrawi Women: Resistors, Fighters and the

Pillars of Society” (Thaqafa Magazine, 2015) “Are the Sahrawi Women Africa’s Most

Powerful?” (Emirates Woman, 2015), “Sahrawi Women lead the fight for Freedom” (Gulf

News, 2016). National and international commentators routinely render tribute to Sahrawi women’s participation in their revolution in homages that allow for slippages between women’s strength and the strength and determination of the Sahrawi nation as a whole. Take, for instance, the closing sentences of the inaugural speech of one of ArtTifariti’s Spanish organizers, an international art residency held in the Republic annually that I was present at in the year 2012: “A round of applause to women who are the flag of the Sahrawi struggle for freedom”10.

Today, Sahrawi women’s “hypervisibility” (Amar, 2014, more on the concept in chapter three)—albeit within an under-publicised struggle— does not always communicate the subversive modernity that the figure of “the colonial militant” once more ubiquitously did. If the National Union of Sahrawi Women’s first logo in 1985 was that of a woman holding a rifle

10 For more information on this initiative, see: http://www.artifariti.org/en/

30 on one hand and a baby in another much like the image above, following the Women’s Union

1996 Congress, the logo was changed to that of a woman dressed in a Sahrawi flag (Medina,

2016: 284; see chapter three for an image of the Union’s current logo). Circulating within the intertextual field and transpolitical climate of a post-Cold War and post-9-11 historical moment, contemporary evocations of Sahrawi women’s militancy are used to qualify the

Sahrawi political project differently to different audiences.

For instance, the POLISARIO Front’s longstanding claim that a Sahrawi “traditional nomadic culture” confers upon women a special social status (Juliano, 1999; Lippehart: 1992) is often reiterated in support of a widely expressed view that Sahrawi women are remarkably different from other Arab and Muslim women (Coconi, 2008; Perregaux, 1993; Tortajada:

2002). Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2014) has usefully argued how these accounts largely regurgitate the POLISARIO Front’s official discourse who, in seeking support from Western and humanitarian actors, distance Sahrawi women from “other” Muslim women, whilst reproducing longstanding orientalist and colonial representations of Muslim women as passive and oppressed by men. Elsewhere, I have argued (Solana, forthcoming) that depictions of

“uniquely liberal, secular and empowered refugee women” that Fiddian-Quasmiyeh describes

(2014: 2, 126) say more about the political culture of a global and hegemonic feminism and its exclusions (Grewal, 2005; Mahmood, 1991; Mohanty, 1988) than about the dominant political culture of a Sahrawi nationalism in and of itself. They help us understand the way in which gender continues to make “international relations work” (Enloe, 1990), as well as the strategic discourses that the POLISARIO Front’s leadership and their supporters are obliged to deploy at a time when military interventions are waged in the name of women’s rights and of Muslim women’s rights in particular (Abu-Lughod, 2002; more recently #saveourgirls). However, these

31 liberal discourses over and about Sahrawi women do little to help us understand Sahrawi women’s models of female empowerment and the frames of reference they use to sustain, enliven and regenerate their revolutionary process to this day.

I argue that Sahrawi women’s hypervisibility is implicated in producing important erasures to our understanding of their contributions to their revolutionary process.

Notwithstanding the extensive recognition that Sahrawi women receive in representations of their struggle, as Joan Scott has persuasively argued, the fact alone that women are more and more visible in our social scientific accounts —and, I would add, in other textual and visual media—the fact “that gender is a new topic and a new department of historical investigation, that alone does not have the analytic power to address (and change) existing historical paradigms” (1988: 33). Revolutionary parlance ─ so embedded, as Koselleck has shown (2004:

15-22), in the “existing historical paradigms” of Scott’s quote─is typically centered on spectacular events that take place in spaces that lend themselves to the display of “public” forms of action. This converges with a modernist valorization of women’s labour in “public realms”—present in liberal and in socialist political traditions— that lends itself to the wide circulation of representations of the Sahrawi revolution through celebrations of women’s activities outside of their immediate households and neighbourhoods in ways that inadvertently naturalise women’s labour in domestic spaces.

Take as an example an article that was published in one of Spain’s mainstream newspapers, “El Mundo”, on February 13th of 2016. The article was entitled: “Supermujeres en el Sahara” (Superwomen in the Sahara) and it gathered brief testimonies and the portraits of six women: A police agent dressed in the Republic’s police uniform, a journalist announcing news in the Republic’s recording studio of Radio RASD, a make-up artist who

32 works for TV-RASD, the Vice-President of the Pan-African Parliament, and the female

Minister of Employment and Public Service. According to the author of the piece, Alfons

Rodríguez, Sahrawi women are “superwomen” because: “Thanks to a progressive constitution, they are present in all areas of social life, including politics, while they look after their homes and their families, in a culture where most of the gender roles remain intact”.

However, most women who live and work in nation-states with “progressive constitutions”

(“progressive” here most probably stands for constitutions that grant equal rights to men and women) also live in cultures where the gender roles assigned to household reproduction remain intact. One of the women interviewed in Rodriguez’s piece, the police agent Mariam

Mohamed Louika, points to this reality exactly: “It is complicated to be a mother, a wife and to work at the same time. Although I don’t think this is any different in any other country of the world” (my translation from Spanish).

Indeed, superwomen are hardly just a Sahrawi phenomenon. Women worldwide juggle between the emotional and physical labour of care and protection in the domain of their households and professions —often entailing iterations of reproductive, emotional and caring labour as well—outside of their homes. Allowing the author of “Superwomen in the Sahara” to make an argument about Sahrawi women’s exceptionality is an unwritten orientalist and colonialist sub-text that deems Muslim and Arab’s women incorporation into the global order of things remarkable. Moreover, his argument relies on a gendered script that normalises household reproduction as women’s work, a script that Mariam Mohamed Louika’s narrative similarly reproduces in her testimony when she presents her labour as a mother and as a wife as something that she “is”, an identity, and her labour as a policewoman as something that she

“does”.

33 Overall, portraits such as these naturalize, marginalize and even foreclose the mundane labour of regeneration that keeping a revolutionary process alive actually entails. Simply featuring women into historical accounts, even granting them the unusual visibility that

Sahrawi women enjoy in their project of revolutionary nationalism does not address the structural invisibility of women’s political agency and contributions to their revolutionary action.

For this reason, this dissertation goes beyond an analysis of gendered representations in the

POLISARIO Front’s official discourses (Allan, 2010; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2014), countering a modernist genre of hypervisible Sahrawi women with a more inconspicuous version of their struggle, one that foregrounds acts of nurturance, faith, patience, loyalty and resilience. My ethnographic account is of a struggle that has less to do with striving to become a globally recognizable empowered political subject and more to do with the forms of women’s every day labour that have allowed the Republic to stay defiantly in place for the past forty years. It is to these forms of labour that the discussion now turns, providing the necessary background to understand the transforming expression of Sahrawi women’s political action over the last fifty years and how Sahrawi women are bringing the experience of an “attritional time” to bear on the “historical time” of their revolutionary process in the present.

1.2 Centering Female Labour into Dominant Accounts of Nationalism, Revolution and State-Building

During my first visit to the Republic in 2009, I attempted to lend my host a hand cleaning the sand a midday storm had blown into her house. My intention was to imitate the strong and swift strokes with which she pressed a hand-brush against the carpeted floor, all the while

34 managing —on her hands and feet— to direct all the sand into a single pile that she propelled out through the door’s opening. It was a lot harder than she made it look. A cloud of dust lifted around me as I clumsily banged a brush against the carpeted floor, until my host, who had been watching me with amusement, said, “Just lie down. Lie down. Make yourself comfortable”.

When I resisted, she pulled the brush out of my hand and, attempting to console me, emphasized, “lie down, Vivian; we know how to do this because we have fought Moroccans for a long time”.

My host’s presentation of her political struggle through the seemingly mundane act of cleaning her house strikingly contrasts with prevalent representations of Sahrawi women’s political action expressed through the more visible labour they carry out outside the spaces of their households. Against a tradition of modern political theory wedding the political with the enactment of public speech (Arendt, 1974; Habermas, 1983), from my host’s perspective, the political is not necessarily a communicative act which gains expression in what one says or does in front of others: the activities one performs in the silence and in the relative invisibility of one’s own home can also come to count as political acts. Moreover, my host does not present her daily work of reproduction as something natural to her gender. Instead, she presented her routine activities as a skilled and specialised form of labour that I —another woman— could not do. She knew how to clean the dust off her khayma not because she was a woman, but because she was a Sahrawi woman whose labour she dedicated to the collective cause of her nation. This framing of her everyday labour as a form of political action against foreign invasion valorises her daily work, placing it at a par with the more conspicuous actions of her warrior male counterparts, or those of her male and female government ministers and diplomats.

35 In this section, I show how my host’s way of making the daily task of cleaning the dust out of her home commensurable with the political struggle of her nation draws on a longstanding political valorization of women’s labour among the Sahrawi that predates their nationalist revolution. I aim to show that the dignity with which she presents her day-to-day responsibilities in the present is possible thanks to a pre-existing collective recognition that the endurance and the regeneration of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism relies upon her everyday labour.

Renowned Marxist feminists in Western contexts such as Silvia Federici (2012) and Selma

James (2012) amongst many others (Benston, 1969; Dalla Costa & James, 1973; Franzway and Fonow, 2011; Luxton, 1980; Mitchell, 1966; Morton, 1972; Secombe, 1974) have similarly foregrounded their societies’ dependency on women’s reproductive labour. Their scholarship forms part of larger political movements, such as “Wages for Housework” (WfW)

—itself connected to and inspired by the demands made by a much longer tradition of Black feminism in the USA —aimed at exposing the contradictions of a state-capitalism nexus that offers protection and recognition to the wage labourer, whilst commanding and relying upon the labour force of a much larger, predominantly female, wageless population, located both inside and outside the borders of the “advanced” capitalist nation-states from where these feminist authors write. The industrial and post-industrial economic context of this scholarship is thus considerably different to that of the Sahrawi Republic. However, the POLISARIO

Front’s nation-state-building project is entangled with larger aspirations to regulate and to control the resources of the Western Sahara, preparing the polity it governs for global capitalism’s command on labour power. For instance, the Republic’s Workers Union —the

“institution of the masses” UGTSARIO of the Sahrawi Republic— provides an explicit

36 example that speaks to the way in which the POLISARIO’s movement not only prepares its population to enter global capitalist relations, it also seeks to organize its population to protect itself within these relations.

Today’s Sahrawi Republic “pre-figures” a Sahrawi state in the Western Sahara (San

Martín, 2007) and with it, the state-capitalism nexus that scholars and activists in movements like Wages for House Work are trying to undo. Moreover, from the 1991 ceasefire onwards, economies sustaining the Sahrawi Republic: international and humanitarian aid, migrant remittances and trans-Saharan commerce, are structurally inserted and intertwined with the advanced capitalist economies in which these Marxist feminists are located. For these reasons,

I argue that their insights, even if located in a significantly different political economy, resonate with the Sahrawi women’s present predicaments. Furthermore, thinking from the location of the Sahrawi struggle forces a denaturalization of the modern state’s gendered logics of production and reproduction and its associated public versus private ideo-spatial configurations, in ways that may provide useful insight for feminists engaged in movements of this kind worldwide.

Whereas Marxist feminists typically use the term “reproductive labour” to qualify women’s unwaged work, I have found it inadequate to describe Sahrawi women’s labour. If the labour of reproduction─conceptually linked to a “private realm”─typically represents political continuity, the labour of production ─conceptually linked to the “public realm”─ is associated with innovation, transformation and to the space for the articulation of the political. Instead, foregrounding a longstanding valorization of women’s labour as political action amongst the

Sahrawi, the term “regeneration” rejects a naturalisation of the ideo-spatial logics of the

37 modern nation-state, and with it, any connotation of women’s reproductive labour as being politically passive.

In what follows I turn to the contingency of Sahrawi women’s location: the histories that explain how Sahrawi women’s daily activities fold into and are valorised as modes of political actions. Focusing on the series of structural transformations that have organized

Sahrawi women’s labour in the last forty years of struggle, I offer a brief genealogy of what spaces have counted as spaces for political action through time, to examine the way in which transforming political contexts (colonialism, invasion, war, peace-process) and their corollary economic relations of production and reproduction generated different conditions of possibility for the expression of women’s political action over time. The transforming expression of

Sahrawi women’s political action has influenced women’s work rhythms, marriage relations, affects and subjectivities, providing the necessary background to understand the practices,

“structures of feelings” (Williams, 1973) and narratives about life course that are explored throughout the chapters that follow.

1.2.1 A Genealogy of Sahrawi Women’s Labour and Political Action

The private versus public ideo-spatial configurations of the modern nation-state can hardly be mapped onto the pre-revolutionary life-world of Saharan nomads. The ancestors of

Sahrawi citizen-refugees were Hassaniya-speaking nomadic pastoralists, connected by political, economic, social, artistic and literary structures, who lived across a territorially ambiguous geographical expanse encompassing present day Western Sahara, northern

Mauritania, parts of southern Morocco, western Mali and southern Algeria known as “trab

[land] al-bidan [of whites]”. Before the 20th Century, trab al-bidan was delimited neither by the borders or military patrols, nor by the checkpoints that constitute modern technologies of

38 sovereignty. Besides, its inhabitants did not constitute a homogenous “people” in the sense imagined by modern nationalisms. Instead, the peoples of trab al-bidan were organized into political associations of differential status known as qaba’il (‘tribes’ s. qabila), and sub- sections known as fakhdh and ahl, each of which was composed of individuals of recognized differential status11.

Informed by the colonial epistemological frameworks of European social science haunting disciplines to this day (Asad 1973; Kuper [1996] 2015), colonial accounts depicted

Saharan nomadic pastoralists as devoid of political structure and organization (cf. Sánchez in

1932, San Martín, 2010: 134). Entrenched in an epistemology that understands “the tribe” as political unit of narrow affiliation, a colonial blindness failed to acknowledge the way in which a tribally affiliated pre-national order also included centralized governmental bodies with a, territorially fluid, sense of unity amongst them (Isidoros, 2015)12. Consideration of the status and role

11 Qaba’il enjoying the highest status were those of “noble warriors” known as hassan or ahl al-madfa‘(people of the gun who claimed descent from the Arab tribes of beni hassan), followed by noble religious tribes shorfa or ahl al-kitab (peoples of the book, often claiming descent from the Prophet Mohamed). Of lesser prestige were tribes known as znaga, who paid tribute to warrior and religious tribes, in exchange for their protection. Together, these were referred to as bidani (meaning whites in categorical opposition to black non-hassaphones known as kwar11). Membership into a qabila was granted either through agnatic descent from a shared ancestor or pacts known as ‘asaba. Such pacts usually involved the sacrifice of an animal (Caro Baroja 1955: 18-22). Wilson argues that, in some cases, there is no claim amongst qabila members of shared descent (2016). Discriminated into a status of ambiguous belonging to the category of bidani were artisans, known as mu‘allimin, hereditary musicians, known as igawwen (les griots in French anthropological literature), and lower still in the social hierarchy, were slaves abid and freed slaves haratin. These last four groups lived and affiliated with tribes (if rarely intermarrying with them, and they were also forbidden from carrying weapons, Caro Baroja 1955: 34-41), exchanging labour for protection. Finally, age was another important marker of difference, granting power and respect to elders belonging to any gender or social group, over youth.

12 Binding Saharan tribes (qaba’il) together were practices of ‘asabiya, roughly defined as practices of solidarity (Wilson, 2016: 53) or cohesive forces enabling collective action (cf. Durkheim 1969, Gellner 1975: 203/18,Weir, 2007 and Rosenthal’s 2005 translation of Ibn Khaldun’s The Muqqaddimah in Isidoros, 2015). Each qabila had its own leader shaykh (pl. shuyukh), who enjoyed a form of representative, symbolic power granted by the executive power of the jamaʿa (pl. al jamaʿt), an intra-tribal political assembly composed of the most respected, usually male elders of the qabila (Caro Baroja 1955: 18-24). There were al-jamaʿt for entire qaba’il, but also for their patrilineal sub-sections fakhad as well as inter-tribal jamaʿt, usually for the purposes of resolving issues within intertribal encampments (firgan, sg. friq). In turn, supra-tribal solidarities were officially regulated by men in an assembly known as ait arba’in (the committee of the forty) (San Martín, 2010: 72), where representatives from different qaba’il convened in times of war to prepare ghazu (pl. ghizwan, ‘raiding/war’; rezzou/razzia in French 39 and English), to arbitrate in conflicts between tribes (Isidoros: 176) as well as to resolve

40 played by women in this pre-national and pre-colonial political organisation, let alone firsthand accounts of Sahrawi women themselves, are largely missing from historical accounts. In

1913, the French army destroyed Shaykh Ma’lainin’s library with more than five thousand volumes (Mahmud Awah, 2015: 14) that may have provided valuable information regarding gender roles and the status enjoyed by Saharan women. With the exception of Sophie Caritini’s extensive ethnographic research in 1974 amongst the Rgaybat (1989) ─the largest qabila in the

Western Sahara and the most represented in the contemporary exiled Sahrawi Republic─, which provides important insights regarding gender roles amongst the Saharan nomads of the

20th Century, existing documentation regarding Sahrawi women’s roles in the years leading up to the Sahrawi revolution is authored primarily by European men, paying tangential attention to women’s lives and to their political and social contributions (Aguirre, 1988; Beslay, 1984;

Bens, 1947; Melero Clemente, 1945; Caro-Baroja, 1955). Information regarding gender roles is so scarce that Amoretti notes:

An overall picture of the society is lacking…even when we do encounter remarks

on more substantive issues, such as those that indicate the possible existence in

some groups of an ancient matriarchy, we find ourselves then having

disputes over trade and/or Koranic education (Shelley: 2004: 167). Wilson’s ethnographic findings raise doubts as to the universal inclusion of trab [land] al-bidan’s qaba’il into the ait arba’in. Similarly, San Martín (2010: 72) has claimed that the ait arba’in included qaba’il groups with access to pastures in an area within trab [land] al- bidan, known as khaat al-kahwf (line of fear). As the very term evokes, Khaat al-kahwf is an area that prided itself on remaining outside the control of both the late 18th century emirates of Northern Mauritania (Bonte 2008) and the pre-colonial Moroccan sultanate of bilad al-makhzan (space of state control). Ambiguously pertaining to the Moroccan sultanate was an area beyond Morocco’s bilad al-makhzan, known as bilad al-seiba (space of “chaos” ruled indirectly, through tribal organization and religion), an area that, despite being outside the direct rule of the Moroccan sultanate, allegedly collected taxes and oaths of allegiance from Saharan qaba’il living within it (Joffé 1986). Morocco claims present day Western Sahara fell within bilad al-seiba, aiming to legitimize its current occupation of the territory upon such this historical claim. By contrast, San Martín (2010: 74) and many of my Sahrawi interlocutors deny this, arguing that the bounds of Khaat al-kahwf were outside bilad al-seiba. In this way, the area of Khaat al-kahwf has come to stand for many as a pre-colonial Sahrawi homeland of sorts, even if the concept of “homeland” is inadequate (Isidoros, 2015: 177), fraught with ethnocentrisms and anachronisms that may hardly capture the Sahrawi pre-colonial notions of sovereignty.

40 to reckon with a much more widespread literature which present Sahrawi social

structure as that of an ordinary patriarchal and hierarchical society (Amoretti:

1987, 188).

Thus, contemporary scholars who have sought to understand pre-national and pre- colonial Sahrawi histories rely upon these fragmented and largely gender-blind accounts and upon conversations with Sahrawi elders in the present (Bengochea, 2016; Isidoros, 2015;

Juliano, 1999; Lippert, 1995; Medina, 2015, 2016; Solana, forthcoming; Wilson,

2016)13.

The way in which colonial records have tended to reduce pre-colonial Sahrawi societies to the relatively nondescript qualifier of “patriarchal” —nondescript insofar as patriarchy is virtually universal— largely assumed that Saharan women’s subordinate social position was equivalent, and often imagined as even more subdued than that of women in European patriarchies. However, this assumption seemingly contradicts a fairly shared memory amongst the POLISARIO Front’s women whose motivation to join the anti-colonial struggle was substantiated by the sense that the respect, status and freedom they had enjoyed in their nomadic lifestyles was jeopardized by foreign invasion. Anne Lippert (1992: 341) asserts that a Sahrawi oral heritage includes the names of women Koranic teachers, traditional healers and scholars. Dolores Juliano (1998) affirms this collective consciousness among the

POLISARIO’s women includes a longstanding perception that their society enjoyed greater freedoms than their Arab sisters in urban contexts did. In her reading of medieval historians,

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), Ibn Battuta (1352-1353), Mahmoud Kati Ben El-Hadj El-

Motaouakkel Kati (1468-1593), and of the colonial explorer Antao GonÇalves (XV century),

13 This includes contemporary efforts to document Sahrawi oral histories (Gimeno et al. forthcoming), the primary medium of inter-generational communication among nomadic pastoralists.

41 Juliano finds scattered evidence of matrilineal and matrifocal Muslim tribes in the Southern region of the Western Sahara, who shifted from matrilineality to patrilineality roughly between 1493 and 1529 (1998: 41-42). From her reading of these medieval men’s accounts — especially judging from their surprised reactions to what they described as Sahrawi women’s libertine behaviour and the close relationships they appeared to enjoy at the time, uncensored, with non-related men— Juliano’s historical research indicates there is some evidence to support the idea that Saharan nomads imposed less strict sexual and political controls over women than sedentary societies did during the Middle Ages.

My extensive conversations with elderly Sahrawi women during my research reveal a clear nostalgia for the freedoms they enjoyed in their nomadic lifestyles, growing up between the 1950s-1970s (see chapter one). Nomadic encampments are known as firgan (sing. friq), which by 1950 were typically composed of 3 to 15 tents known as khiyam (sing. khayma)

(Wilson, 2012: 17). Firgan belonging to the same qabila coordinated their movements and followed a similar migratory schedule and geographical trajectory to one another (Caratini,

1989, Caro Baroja, 1955). Each khayma and each of its members could possess individual property, yet most resources were widely shared among the members of a single nomadic encampment. Labour too was pooled between members of a nomadic encampment in a system known as twiza (Wilson, 2012: 27). Men spent long periods of time away from their nomadic encampments grazing, exchanging goods in trans-Saharan markets ─and sometimes reaching as far North as Marrakesh and as South as Timbuktu─ or engaged in battles, raids or in the political labour of representation of their intra-tribal assemblies known as ain airbaʿin. In their absence, women took charge of all the labour and political decisions required for their encampment to run. This work varied according to the women’s age and social status and

42 included: tending to animals, harvesting cereals, preparing foods, medicine, midwifery, childrearing, as well as weaving carpets and tents. Overall, echoing Marshall Sahlins’ thesis in his

“Stone Age Economics”, suggesting non-state societies were, largely, “affluent societies”

(1972), women’s recollections of their nomadic lifestyles emphasized how much free time they enjoyed to pursue leisurely activities such as visiting friends and family and organizing long celebrations.

Marriage making was a key political field in which elder women enjoyed considerable influence. Despite an official, ideological division between patrilineal kin-groups ─each khayma housed a nuclear family known by the patronym of the senior male—, women, who usually married men belonging to sub-sections (fakhdh) of greater wealth and prestige than their own, weaved and nurtured affective ties between their natal families and the families they joined through marriage, reducing cleavages within, and sometimes across the tribes (qaba’il) that inhabited and moved across trab al-bidan. Thus, Sophie Caratini observes how women’s displacements through marriage produced “centrifugal forces opposed to the centripetal competitiveness between men… Women acted as the cement between men” (2003: 103-108).

Elder women enjoyed considerable leverage in the marriage negotiations of their offspring. The more women of their own tribal sub-section fakhdh or qabila they could get to marry into their husband’s own, (given this was usually of greater prestige than her natal provenance) the more she would favour her own lineage (Bengochea, 2016: 57). A women’s first husband was a decision of considerable political weight and strictly negotiated between elders. Whereas young women had no say in who their first husbands would be ─young men, depending on age and status, sometimes did not have much say either─, a demographic shortage of women over men and a very distributive economic system favoured diachronic

43 polygamy, instead of a simultaneous polygamy (cf. Caro Baroja, in Juliano, 65). That is, for many nomadic women, their first marriage was one of many they would have throughout their lifetime, and, from the second husband onwards, brides could be involved in the choice of their spouses.

The space of the khayma constitutes a key customary field of power for women

(Isidoros, forthcoming). A woman joining the nomadic encampment of her husband upon marriage would carry a new khayma with her. This khayma would have been made through women’s collective labour in her natal encampment and it was the women in her husband’s nomadic encampment who would help her maintain it in good shape throughout her life.

Crucially (and against the assumption of the oikos as free men’s property), the khayma was the woman’s property and it would remain so for life, even after she became divorced or widowed.

By contrast, a man could never own his own khayma. In this sense, despite an overriding patrilocal residential system, husbands were always guests of sorts in a woman’s home.

For this reason, women’s labour of hospitality constituted another key field for their political action and, as chapter two of this dissertation will show, this remains true in the present. Some note there is evidence to suggest that elder women sometimes sat on the intra- tribal assemblies known as ait arbaiʿn (Rossetti, 2012; Zunes & Mundy, 2010: 133), although the political leaders of a qabai’l, or of any of its sub-sections, were (and remain) mostly male, and are known as shuyukh (shaykh). Shuyukh were appointed by the executive power of intra- tribal assemblies known as jamaʿa (pl. al jamaʿt), composed of the most respected male elders of the qabila (Caro Baroja 1955: 18-24). The authority of shuyukh, who represented qaba’il in these inter-tribal assemblies, was always unstable and contingent upon their redistributive capacities. If a shaykh was not generous or could not protect and defend his

44 group, his authority would wane and his position as shaykh would be revoked (García, 2010:

12). Crucially, mediating between a shaykh’s generosity and the larger community, was always his wife’s’ labour of hospitality in the domain of the khayma where he lived, a khayma that wives not only owned, but managed very frequently entirely on their own (recall men’s prolonged absences from nomadic encampments). In this way, a woman’s capacity to make guests feel welcome or unwelcome in the space of the khayma could make or break political alliances.

Collapsing notions of the private versus public episteme that organizes labour

(productive versus reproductive labour) and political action (individual versus collective

action) within the episteme of the modern nation state, in pre-revolutionary times, a woman’s

khayma was multivalent: it served as the dwelling for the intimate life of her nuclear family as

well as the space for social gatherings, sometimes overtly political ones, such as occasions for

negotiating a marriage or deciding to initiate confrontations with other families or tribes. As

my host’s presentation of her labour removing the sand from her household as part of her

struggle against Morocco suggests, this longstanding valorization of the space of the khayma as

political persists among Sahrawi in the present; it represents what Raymond Williams might

describe as world-views that are “residual” —“that which has been effectively formed in the

past, but is still active in the cultural process"— not only as "an element of the past, but as an

effective element of the present" (Williams, 1977: 122). These pre-revolutionary and pre-

colonial logics, where distinctions between the private and the public are null, continue to

inform Sahrawi women’s understanding of their political agency.

Colonial Spain’s inability to perceive the political nature of women’s khiyam was key

to the success of the POLISARIO Front’s early clandestine organizing. Although “public”

45 meetings and men’s assemblies were prohibited by Spanish authorities, women were able to use their households for inadvertent political discussions, convincing new groups of women to join the movement, allocating responsibilities amongst them, whilst sewing sweaters and trousers for their kin (Bengochea 2013: 119). However, especially from the 1960s to the 1970s,

Spain’s colonial regime introduced new gendered conceptions of labour and political action that are relevant to understand the POLISARIO Front’s anti-colonial project and political organization in exile. During the last years of the Spanish Sahara, the political contributions of

POLISARIO Front’s female pioneers were not reduced to the spaces of their khiyam. Less subjected to policing, women’s bodies made particularly good vessels for the movement’s materials –pamphlets, weapons, documents, words-, making their way into the neighbourhoods, institutions and workplaces (Hernández 2006: 59) of the semi-urban centers that developed during the last decade and a half of Spain’s colonial administration. As I argued in the previous section of this chapter, women’s visibility in these new “public” spaces —street protests, labour and student strikes, attacks on colonial property, etc.— was the conduit through which Sahrawi women’s political agency entered the radar of a universal history and attained unprecedented international recognition. But, exactly what “public” spaces did Sahrawi women begin to occupy during the last years of the “Spanish Sahara”? What demographic did such women represent and how did they become convinced of supporting a movement led primarily by young, male university graduates? What ethical values and political interests underlay women’s political mobilization during the years that led to the Sahrawi revolution?

1.2.2 The Final Years of the Spanish Sahara (1960-1975)

Whereas the political structures of Saharan qaba’il were severely weakened as early as

1934, following their “pacification” by French and Spanish forces, their systems of distribution

46 and redistribution were not significantly affected until the 1960s. Arguably, until then, both

Spain’s colonial intervention and Saharan qaba’il anti-colonial resistance were of low intensity. Although the territory of the Western Sahara was first assigned to Spain during the

Conference of Berlin (1884-85), the territorial borders between present day Mauritania,

Algeria, Morocco and Western Sahara were not clearly delimited until 1912 (San Martín, 2010:

20-35) and, at least until the 1940s, Spain’s activities were reduced almost entirely to mercantilism, with its military presence being limited to the coasts (Rodrigo Esteban, José &

Barrado Timón, Diego, 2015 1-16). It was not until 1958, following France and Spain’s crushing of an insurgency of Saharan qaba’il at Operation Ecouvillon (in French) or Operación

Teide (in Spanish), that Spain’s colonial regime began significantly investing in the development of urban infrastructures and industries in ways that altered autochthonous systems of distribution and redistribution14.

Alicia Campos and Violeta Trastomontes describe the period of 1960-1975 as a

“second colonial occupation” (2015). The alarm that the 1958 insurgencies caused amongst

Spanish authorities compounded onto Dictator Francisco Franco’s concern over the waves of decolonization taking place around the world at the time, compelling him to strengthen his grip over the Spanish Sahara. From the 1960s onwards, policing measures were increased over the

14 The Algerian Front of National Liberation started carrying out a war of liberation against France in 1954. In 1956 Morocco obtained its independence from France. That same year is known to Sahrawis as ‘the year of the epidemic’, resulting, in part, from a period of drought that lasted well into the 1960s. At that time, most of the Moroccan army of liberation had integrated into the newly formed Royal Moroccan Armed Forces. However, factions that sought to liberate regions in Northern Morocco as well as regions of trab-al-bidan that remained under Spanish rule, built alliances with Saharan qaba’il, carrying attacks on Spanish posts from Northern Mauritania and Southern Algeria. Their insurgency was crushed during Operation Teide-Ecouvillon, an attack carried out in 1958 by French, Spanish and, surprisingly for some, the newly formed Moroccan Army. Spain ceded Tarfaya to Morocco in return for its support, a region located in present day southern Morocco bordering with northern Western Sahara. Many Saharan qaba’il experienced this as a moment of re-colonization. The shaykh of the Izarguien described this moment as: “One night, without moving our khayma, I went to sleep Spanish and I woke up Moroccan. They decided to imprison us into four cages (Morocco, Spain, Mauritania and Algeria)” (in García, 1994: 85, my translation).

47 territory both on the coasts and towards the inland where most qaba’il lived. Moreover, from the 1960s, arrays of social and economic incentives were introduced, aimed at attracting

“native population” to the cities. Spain’s budget for its Saharan colony increased from 55.5 million pesetas to 2,374 million pesetas between the years 1960 to 1975 (García, 2002:86). The aerial attacks of Operación Teide in 1958 had destroyed the wealth and infrastructure of entire nomadic encampments. Their dispossession, added to the prolonged droughts of the early

1960s, produced a strong push of nomadic pastoralists towards the colonial cities of El Aaiun,

Villa Cisneros (today’s Dahkla), Smara and, to a lesser extent, Buyudur, Hausa, and Yederia, where an unprecedented number of Sahrawi men took on waged labour.

The employment market of these emergent colonial cities offered women negligible opportunities for waged labour. A 1974 Spanish census (albeit of questionable accuracy) registered 5,500 unqualified male workers (most of whom worked in construction or in the phosphate industry), 360 qualified male workers (mostly working as public servants), 1,000 men dedicated to commerce and 1,340 men integrated into the colony’s “indigenous” military branch known as Tropas Nómadas. With the exception of a handful of women working as caretakers and cooks for colonial administrations (Spanish settlers often preferred employing

Spanish domestic workers), most “native” women (the legal category for the Sahrawi people in the Spanish Sahara) were classified as “without profession” (García, 2010: 30).

The same census also suggests that by 1974 more than half of the population was settled near or around the three main cities of the Western Sahara - Dakhla, Smara and El

Aaiun (Aguirre, 1988:612). The emigration of young men to the cities during this period affected most Sahrawi families. In extreme cases, entire nomadic encampments were obliged to move, setting up new encampments in the outskirts of cities that now depended (in large part)

48 on the economic returns of their male labourers. However, most lived a semi-settled lifestyle, whereby it was only young male workers and their wives and children who abandoned the nomadic lifestyle and the in-land desert pasturelands known as al-badia that they continued to visit on a regular basis and for long periods of time.

Women who joined their spouses, settling semi-permanently into these cities, experienced affront to their customary fields of political action. The colonial state built 7,000 low-quality houses in a period of 6 years (Garcia, 2010: 30), designed for “natives” (Serrano &

Trastomontes, 2015: 21-32). Given that customary nomadic encampments were composed of members who belonged to the same kinship groups, women had been able to move freely across them without having to worry about modesty codes known as hishma 15. However, in the inter-tribal neighbourhoods of these colonial cities, women experienced new restrictions in their movements (Hernández, 66-77).

Unlike the horizontal model of governance whereby tribal assemblies could remove the power of any given shaykh when his redistributive capacities diminished, the colonial state, owner to most of the colonies’ businesses, became the single patron for the entirety of this new

“native” male working force. Much like in the rest of Franco’s fascist regime, public assembly was prohibited and, as a colonial measure of indirect rule, the colonial state established its own version of the customary jamaʿa, spelt as “djema” in Spanish colonial literature. “Distorting”

15 Hishma is a broad concept that describes a set of appropriate feelings (associated to shame) and behaviors (associated to restraint) one should have in relation to sexuality, rendering the very subject of marriage (and the sexual activities it implies) taboo between generations. For women: dancing, singing, exhibiting one’s body, and using a loud voice in the presence of non-related or older men are associated with provocative sexuality to be restrained through hishma. Hishma also dictates male’s comportment vis a vis their elders as well as prohibiting contact with their male in laws. Sahwa is a term used to describe a similar concept, yet hishma is more used in the Sahrawi Republic today. Importantly, adhering to hishma signals respect and deference towards individuals of greater social status and it was central to the moral order that legitimated gendered and other forms of social inequalities and hierarchies in a Saharan pre-revolutionary social and political order. See Abu-Lughod (1998) on the concept of hasham amongst the Awlad’Ali in Southern Egypt.

49 the democratic procedures of the jamaʿa (Isidoros, 2015: 177), Spanish authorities single- handedly appointed shuyukh to the djema and, if prior to this period, shuyukh had been responsible for the subsistence of a particular qabila through their own labour and defensive capacities, during this late colonial period, shuyukh became intermediaries between the colonial state and the larger groups they represented. The shuyukh of the Spanish djema were in charge of distributing the colonial state’s patronage: houses, jobs and other services and, in return for their favours, colonial authorities privileged them and their immediate entourage, providing them with the best employment and educational opportunities. A university was never built and only a few, mostly young men related to the djema’s Shuyukh, received scholarships to obtain higher education abroad (Mahmud Awah, 2015: 62). Out of a total of 4,862 school children,

911 high school children, and 38 university students, only 1,068 were women, and 97% of these women stopped their education at the age of 14. In this way, the colonial djema came to constitute a male elite with a new kind of legislative power that was sometimes used against women’s interests (Bengochea, 2016: 82)16.

The way in which Sahrawi women saw their decision-making capacities diminish during this period does not mean that the colonial regime excluded Sahrawi women from its governance. A fascist organization of civil engagement known as “La Sección Femenina”, operating in Spain throughout Franco’s regime, was transplanted to the Spanish Sahara from

1960 to 1975. At a time when the regime was under increasing pressure from the UN to decolonize the territory, Enrique Bengochea (2016) argues that the disciplining of Sahrawi women into “modern” subjects was presented as moral justification for Spain’s enduring

16 For example, whereas the bridewealth made mandatory by Islam to legitimate a marriage, known as sadaq in Hassaniya and mahr in Modern Standard Arabic, had customarily been negotiated between families in the khiyam of the bride’s mother, where she influenced the decision making process, the colonial djema made bridewealth illegal over a certain amount. Moreover, the price that women had to return in order to repudiate their husbands was fixed to an amount of 250,000 pesetas. In some cases, this exceeded a bride’s bridewealth making it impossible for her to solicit a divorce and contravening Islamic law (cf. Mateo, in Bengochea, 2016: 301).

50 presence in the region. When in 1966, the Spanish Sahara was given the status of a full Spanish province, and “natives” were given Spanish citizenship, “La Sección Femenina” appropriated symbolic expressions of Sahrawi women’s “culture” ─ the khayma, traditional dances, tea, the milhafah– and paraded them in representation of Spain’s tolerance for cultural diversity. This contributed to perform what Bengochea (2016: 200-298) has described as the regime’s

“Sahrawi Hispanism”, an allegedly race-blind imperialist discourse that attempted to assimilate

Sahrawi people into the Spanish nation, if representing them as essentially Muslim, thereby establishing a limit to their integration in Catholic Spain, and operating as a subliminal marker of difference that legitimated their secondary status as colonial subjects (ibid: 148). “Sección

Femenina” aimed to transform nomadic women’s work ethic and sexual mores (ibid: 302).

Training them into feeling a life-long devotion to their husbands and to the Spanish nation, they were also taught to work longer days, punctuality, reading, writing, mathematics,

“modern” child-rearing and domestic skills (ibid: 253-293)17.

The degree to which this decade and a half of Spain’s intensified colonial governance transformed pre-colonial political and economic systems, gendered relations, and subjectivities is a matter of contention between scholars18. Sahrawi adaptation into Spain’s colonial regime was, at most, partial, and reduced to those living semi-permanently in and around these coastal cities. However, there is evidence to suggest that there was at least the perception amongst

17 Instruction took place in any of the twelve Sección Femenina’s centers, yet teachers would also visit Sahrawi women’s homes, monitoring and rating their levels of hygiene, even their decorative tastes as part of their training (ibid: 250).

18 Historian Alejandro García argues that by 1974, the Spanish Sahara’s GDP was significantly higher than that of neighboring Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria and Tunisia18. Access to modern education and new practices of consumption differentiated families situated in the Spanish Sahara from their kin in southern Morocco, Southern Algeria and Northern Mauritania, “for whom it was becoming more important to buy a car or to provide education for one’s children than to belong to one tribal group or another” (García, 2002: 85). Pablo San Martín suggests practices of solidarity, including allyship and economic distribution between members of the same qabila (‘asabiya) were not effaced, rather the foundations upon which they were organized changed. By contrast, Konstantina Isidoros denies that this period significantly transformed the social fabric and subjectivities, arguing customary practices of ‘asabiya remain intact and substantiate the Sahrawi nationalism until today (2015: 175).

51 the Sahrawi that their customary values were under threat. For instance, one of the most trending poetry debates of the period was between a poet who defended the way of life of al- badia, warning society against the materialist seductions of the city, and a poet who defended the opportunities and futures of “progress” that cities had to offer (Gimeno & Ali 2007,

Mahmud Awah, 2015: 20-38, Robles & Gimeno, 2015: 4-17). The POLISARIO Front’s revolutionary ideology was successful in large part due to its ability to coalesce and recombine both of these intellectual trends. The movement’s modernist, socialist and revolutionary principles reconciled desires to adapt to global modes of production and reproduction with older practices of solidarity and economic distribution. Moreover, the call to armed struggle cohered with customary registers of a zealous desire for political autonomy and independence, what Pierre Clastres has described as the “centrifugal” logics of non-state societies (Clastres,

[1980] 2010: 274).

A similar balance emerged in relation to intellectual trends regarding models of female empowerment. In aiming to inculcate Spanish nationalism, “La Sección Femenina” unwillingly served as a platform to cultivate Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism. Some of the women who attended “La Sección Feminina” organized their first anti-colonial actions against “La Sección

Feminina” specifically and eventually became POLISARIO Front leaders (Bengochea, 2016:

290). Furthermore, the ideas regarding women’s modernization as well as the devotion for the nation that the colonial regime aimed to instil in colonised “natives” during this period sees some continuities in the political habitus that the POLISARIO Front aimed to engender in women through its project of revolutionary nationalism. In this way, the POLISARIO women’s demands of access to modern education, political leadership and inclusion into the labour market coexisted, not without tensions (Bengochea, 2016: 309), with the movements’ demands

52 to “restore” the rights women enjoyed prior to colonialism (cf. Aguirre in San Martin, 2010:

89)19.

1.2.3 Building a Female Republic (1976-1991)

While I was doing my fieldwork, some of my young interlocutors sometimes referred to the exiled-Sahrawi Republic as “The POLISARIO Front’s friq”. This tongue and cheek description is suggestive of the way in which the nationalist movement effectively took on the role of pre-national and pre-colonial shuyukh, whose political authority had derived out of their capacity to protect and to ensure the distribution of wealth and economic sustenance of their qabila. Between the years 1975 and 1991, the POLISARIO Front was able to provide just that: it protected a displaced Sahrawi population through its diplomatic alliance with Algeria, it defended the land left behind in the Western Sahara through armed struggle, and it mobilized, as well as administered, international aid to sustain the dispossessed population under its wing.

I second anthropologist’s Konstantina Isidoros’ (forthcoming) point, which insightfully argues the Sahrawi Republic is best understood —at least in its inception— as a space where the

POLISARIO Front’s male leaders gathered and protected matrifocal assets. Crucially, this cannot be taken to imply that women were understood as men’s property. Instead, as Isidoros makes clear, women’s guardianship over property is understood as the most precious of society’s assets as a whole. Extending Isidoros’ insight, and drawing upon a long tradition of female scholarship that has insisted that not only bodies but that states and political-economic processes too are gendered (Enloe, 1990; Gal & Klingman, 2000: 4), I suggest that the Sahrawi

19 From my conversations with elderly Sahrawi women who were young during the last few years of the Spanish Sahara, it is clear that male and female POLISARIO leaders, including Martyr El Ouali Mustapha al Sayyed ─ the POLISARIO Front’s charismatic leader who was a student at the University in Rabat (Morocco)─ visited the al- badia on a regular basis to learn from and to mobilise those who continued to live strictly nomadic lifestyles. Elsewhere, I have described the role that leaders such as El Uali played as “organic intellectuals” (Gramsci 1971) pursuing a revolutionary, nationalist and socialist critical pedagogy (Freire 1970) in ways that resonated with women who resided in al-badia and made them co-participant of the struggle (Solana, forthcoming).

53 Republic is best understood as a female polity. Moreover, this signification did not come about in the abstract; it was engendered through, in fact deposited in, women’s productive, reproductive, emotional, and political labour, and it is suggestive of the active valorization that the POLISARIO Front placed upon women’s contributions to their revolutionary nationalism.

In the previous section, we saw how Spain’s colonial regime competed to overtake the customary political authority of shuyukh, altering the horizontal model of governance that operated in pre-national, pre-colonial encampments, by becoming the sole patron of its colonized subjects. We also saw how the POLISARIO Front emerged out of a collective outrage at this twisted cooption of Saharan customary modes of governance, as well as out of a collective aspiration to become integrated into a global order governed by the same colonial or ex-colonial powers that had rendered tribally-affiliated political system ineligible for inclusion into the global order of things. In an attempt to reconcile some of the contradictions produced by this double bind, the POLISARIO Front, like other movements in the decolonizing world at the time, turned to socialism as a model of governance that was different to that of their

European colonial rulers, and nonetheless commensurable with a modernist global order of things.

Inspired by the intellectual movements of the time —Nasser, Guevara, Cabral, Fanon— the first militants of the POLISARIO Front sought to create a “new Sahrawi subjectivity that emerged out of the ashes of their former pre-colonial and colonial identities” (San Martín,

569). If, as the POLISARIO’s leadership currently argues, the Republic never strictly declared itself neither socialist nor communist (personal communication with the late President

Abdelaziz in 2009), its revolutionary nationalism prioritized the eradication of tribal and group status allegiances, replacing them for a model of radical citizen equality, national unity and

54 fraternity. To this end, the Republic’s 1976 constitution abolished tribalism and slavery, promising equal rights between men and women and an equal distribution of resources between desert pasturelands and urban areas that followed a socialist-inspired model of governance.

Implicit in the goal of replacing qaba’il identities with a single notion of Sahrawi citizenship was that of consolidating the ruling capacities of a future Sahrawi state. That is, the

POLISARIO Front’s embrace of the modernist and socialist-inspired commitments and principles of “citizen equality” simultaneously required developing an unprecedented unequal relationship between “the people” or “the masses” and “the leadership”. Nation-state building was thus a process that came hand in hand with the incorporation of “centripedal logics” of state power dividing society between “masters” and “subjects” (Clastres, [1980] 2010: 265) 20.

The labour of building a Sahrawi Republic drew on a pre-revolutionary gendered distribution of work. Similarly to the way in which women had taken charge of all the chores required to run customary nomadic encampments while men were absent for the purposes of war, commerce or raids, women’s physical, administrative and emotional labour was the bedrock upon which the Sahrawi Republic was built. During this early revolutionary period, every able-bodied woman was assigned into an administrative committee (attanzim alidari) and a political cell (attanzim alsiyasi), pooling their work together in the way that women

(albeit unequally, depending on age and status) had done in the encampments of nomadic pastoralists (Wilson, 2016). However, these committees were of mixed status and tribal origin

20 If colonial Spain had appointed shuyukh as intermediaries for their patronage, under the conditions of exile, the POLISARIO Front can only govern as a kind of intermediary as well, one with the capacity to distribute international aid and command labour over the population under its protection. Nevertheless, contrary to colonial forms of rule by intermediation, the POLISARIO Front invested much of its political attention to assuage this foundational inequality of state sovereignty, recovering its long tradition of horizontal governance by developing a system of participatory democracy or, as Alice Wilson has described it, a system of “partyless democrats” (see Wilson, 2016: 186-210), which involves the participation of men and women at all levels of the new Republic’s administration, albeit unequally, with the higher administrative positions taken up mostly by men, and the lower administratively positions being taken up, almost exclusively, by women.

55 and their labouring was entirely dedicated to their movement’s state-building goals. The volume and the intensity of the labour commanded from women were also new, requiring women to become disciplined into a faster pace of work.

The identity of the spaces this generation of women built, administered and run, were new too. Sahrawi women organised their households into neighbourhoods (haiyy) of mixed status and tribal affiliation, located within districts (dawair) that were situated within any of the five provinces (wilayat). If pre-revolutionary mobile encampments had been named after the eponymous male ancestor of any given qabila, the Republic’s provinces and districts were named after towns and cities left behind in the Western Sahara. Forging new forms of identification based on residence rather than patriliny (Wilson, 2016: 57), women built and run administrations at the intersection of each of the neighbourhoods that make up any given district of the Republic. These central areas typically include: a theatre for dance competitions, school graduations, artistic performances, conferences, parliamentary elections and political rallies, a health clinic, a nursery and a primary school. It was out of these new social relations and encounters that the POLISARIO Front started making “citizens out of refugees” (San

Martín, 2010: 87-125).

Women’s childrearing labour, understood as the foundation of a new social order, was policed during this period, instigating mothers (and other care-givers) to exercise silence over their tribal origins and pre-revolutionary status (Caratini, 2003: 110-115). Indeed, similarly to other socialist, socialist-inspired regimes (Gal & Kligman, 2000: 15-36) and movements of anti-colonial struggle such as the Palestinian (Kanaaneh, 2002), the political intervention into women’s sexual and reproductive capacities was framed as revolutionary praxis. The third article of the Republic’s constitution declared Islam “the religion of the state” and shar’ia the

56 judicial system of the nation (Hodges, 1983: 343) and, in an effort to encourage inter-tribal marriage and overall demographic growth, during this early revolutionary period, the

POLISARIO Front took on the Islamic duty to provide women with bridewealth that is mandatory to legitimate a marriage (sadaq in Hassaniya, mahr in Modern Standard Arabic).

Thus, similarly to how women in pre-revolutionary political systems acted as “the cement between men” (Caratini 2003: 103-108), in this early revolutionary context, women’s capacity to give birth, their emotional and childrearing practices were conceived as modes of political action, nurturing revolutionary and nationalist values through their labour of care.

Wilson (2012) has convincingly argued the spatial configurations of the Republic during this early revolutionary period produced a new “public domain”, aimed at reproducing persons with appropriate -that is “nationally affiliated”- kinds of “social identities” (cf. Moore,

1994 in Wilson, 2012: 19). However, from a point of view that centers women’s labour into state-making and revolutionary accounts, the ideo-spatial divide of the public versus the private is not useful to understand this period in so far as the national liberation’s movement’s command over women’s labour made no distinction between their productive, reproductive or political activities during the years of war. The POLISARIO’s leadership took up virtually all spaces of representation during this period, national and international. Resonating with what

Peggy Watson has argued for the ex-Soviet Union:

A public/private distinction could not be mobilized… women could not

be easily constructed as being outside of politics, or politics be defined as

masculine, for the simple reason that in this system both men and women

were outside of politics insofar as representation and voice were the

prerogative of the state. The unintended consequence of communism was

57 that the life of society was not ─ to borrow Marilyn Strathern’s

expression─ the life of men. In other words, under communism, although

the rulers were male, it was not men who ruled. (2004: 278)

The POLISARIO’s movement built a Republic based on the principle of a tight unity of the people, legitimating the single voice of this nascent Republic. Marking a continuation with the gendered roles of a pre-revolutionary political system, men took on (and remain in) most of the positions of the POLISARIO Front leadership; however, it is women who rule over the life of the society that constitutes the Sahrawi Republic. I argue that, as will be shown in the next section and throughout this dissertation, a private versus public dichotomy only becomes a useful lens to understand labour and political action in the Sahrawi Republic from the 1991 onwards when, as a result of a series of structural transformations, women’s labour became unwaged labour. Nonetheless ─recall the parade described in the prelude where women marched down in representation of each and every one of the Republic’s institutions─, a longstanding collective valorization of women’s everyday labour among the Sahrawi people remains key to understand the constitution of a Republic—as a “state” and not just a

“nation”—that is signified female to this day.

1.2.4 The Labour of Regeneration under the Conditions of a Colonial meantime (1991- 2015)

Prior to 1991, aid reaching the camps had been scarce and delivered mostly from socialist and non-aligned states. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, in addition to the

Algerian civil war of 1991-1995, diminished the POLISARIO Front’s financial reliance on its traditional political allies, obliging the movement to open itself up to receiving support from the humanitarian aid industry that expanded its presence worldwide from the end of the Cold

58 War onwards (Hyndman, 2000: xix). It was not until the late nineteen eighties that humanitarian aid organizations such as the UNHCR and the World Food Program (WFP) started operating in the Republic, providing the population with food, tents and other equipment geared at covering basic survival necessities. From the peace treaty onwards, the

UN Peace Mission MINURSO and the UNHCR established a base each in the Sahrawi

Republic’s administrative province of Rabuni, and with them, a plethora of development

NGOs, foreign associations and groups started operating in the camps, some temporarily, and others on a permanent basis. A Sahrawi Ministry of Cooperation was created in 2001, an institution that partners with all international organizations, working in and with the Republic.

In the year 2009 alone the Ministry received 18 million dollars in development aid (cf.

UNHCR, in Trastomontes, 2011: 291)21.

Last but not least, from the nineties onwards, a civil movement of solidarity with the

Sahrawi cause, based mainly ─although not exclusively─ in Spain, has gained a considerably important role in the sustenance of the Republic. During the early years of exile, when the infrastructures of the Republic were at their most precarious, hundreds of children and elders passed away from dehydration and infections, especially during the months of extreme heat, reaching up to 55-58 degrees Celsius on any given day of the summer. Alarmed by the high mortality rates experienced during those years, the Algerian government started hosting hundreds of Sahrawi children in summer camp programs located in coastal, Northern regions of Algeria; a practice that endures to date. The Spanish and French Communist parties

21 To name a few that I came across during my fieldwork: AFAD, CISP, Danish Refugee Council, Emmaus International (Sweden), Handicap International, Infocom, OXFAM, Triangle, Solidaridad Internacional Andalucía, Médicos del Mundo, Médicos sin Fronteras, Movimiento para la Paz, el Desarme y la Libertad, Mundubat, Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), Cruz Roja Española, execute development programs delivering aid and expatriating staff to live and work in the Republic fulltime. The main funders for these NGOs include national aid agencies such as USAID, AECID, and the international funder ECHO.

59 followed the Algerian example, and in the summer of 1979, they organised foster homes for

100 Sahrawi children in each country (Lehdad, 2015). Today, the numbers of Sahrawi children

(roughly between the ages of eight to twelve) that receive foster care from European families for a period of two months during the summer is close to ten thousand a year. This program, known as “Vacaciones en Paz”, is co-run between the Sahrawi Ministry of Youth and Sports and an umbrella civil organization based in Spain: “La Coordinadora Estatal de Asociaciones

Solidarias con el Sahara” that coordinates the work of the numerous civil associations of solidarity with the Sahrawi people that exist throughout Spain’s territory, known as

“Asociaciones de Amigos del Pueblo Sahrawi”. To provide an example of the scale of Sahrawi children’s movements on any given year, in the year 2006, Spain received 8,700 Sahrawi children during the summer, France 125, Italy 527, Germany 18 and Austria 10 (Trastomontes,

2011: 308). Contact between these children and their European host family often far exceeds the summer season. European (mostly Spanish) families often visit their foster children in the

Republic throughout the year, sending them semi-regular remittances to support them and their households. In many cases, such foster European families have helped their foster children receive citizenships and higher education in Europe once they become adults. The most committed amongst them become involved in development program initiatives run in the

Republic through their engagement in the associations of “Amigos del Pueblo Saharaui”. They often constitute part of the paid and unpaid labour behind solidarity events that take place in the Republic annually, such as: ARTifariti (www.artifariti.org/en), an international art residency, Fishara (www.fishara.es/en) a film festival, and Sahara Marathon

(www.saharamarathon.es/en), an international marathon, as well as participate in the protest

60 against Morocco’s military berm that is organized by the National Union of Sahrawi Women in the liberated territories every year during Easter.

A systematic study of the impact that this solidarity aid has over the Sahrawi Republic’s governance does not exist. However, the global expansion of an international development aid industry in the last decades of the 20th Century has merited the attention of multiple scholars who have elucidated the ways in which, allegedly, non-partisan, neutral, and “technical” development interventions have had considerable governmental impact worldwide (Ferguson,

1990; Escobar, 1995; Li, 2007). Similarly, many have shown how humanitarian organizations often assume the task of governing the populations they aid (Fassin & Pandolfi, 2010;

Feldman, 2008; Hyndman, 2000; Malkki, 2007; Pandolfi, 2003, 2008). Drawing on Foucault

(1991) and Agamben (1998), it is often argued that humanitarian interventions, entrusted with the narrow bio-political mandate to save lives, dangerously reduce human bodies to forms of

“life” devoid of “society” (Agiers, 2008), categorizing populations into the apolitical, ahistorical and universal category of “refugees” (Malkki 1995, 1996) that survive thanks to a

“colonialism of compassion” (Hyndman, 2000: xvi) towards those whose minimum requirement is to belong to the elusive political constituency of “humanity” (Feldman &

Ticktin, 2010)22.

Nonetheless, the POLISARIO Front has circumvented all such neo-colonial modes of governance, mobilising the sources it has received since 1991 from a diverse body of

22 Paul Amar (2013) has recently argued that such neo-liberal and neo-colonial forms of governance are morphing into new supra-national “humanitarian-state-security” governing structures operating in “semi-peripheral” regions such as Egypt and Brazil. The mode of governance he describes is certainly more reminiscent of a culture of fascism than it is of a culture of liberalism. Whereas the mode of governance that Paul Amar describes does not see considerable direct influence over the Sahrawi Republic just yet, it is reasonable to expect it could in the near future. For instance, I have been in more than one occasion informed of an increasingly strong presence of Algerian secret security forces operating in the Sahrawi Republic in the present. In some cases, rumour has it that Algerian humanitarian organisations based in the Republic operate undercover security forces.

61 humanitarian-development-solidarity actors to strengthen its own governmental capacities in exile. Thus, if in 1976, the first of the Republic’s governments was established with a total of six ministries, between the POLISARIO Front’s General congresses of 1991 and 2015 the number of its national ministries grew from eleven to twenty four (Sahrawi Press Service,

2016)23. Not only has the Republic’s institutional capacities increased since the ceasefire; this colonial meantime has allowed for the proliferation of “state effects”, those technologies or rules that perform a dividing line between “the state” and “society” (Mitchell, 2001), such as: the consolidation and disciplining of warriors into the aesthetic and practices of a mass modern army; the appearance of technologies or rules such as Sahrawi ID cards, Sahrawi passports,

Sahrawi license plates, Sahrawi driving licenses, and entrance cards for all visitors to the

Sahrawi Republic upon arrival at the Algerian airport of Tindouf; the development of governmental protocols for positions of public office; the establishment of a system of state surveillance organized around check-points and travel permits; and building infrastructures such as roads connecting the different provinces, establishing electrical lighting in some provinces, water systems and internet access24.

23 The Sahrawi Republic’s Ministry in 2015 included: A Prime Minister, a Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Justice, Ministry for the Occupied Territories, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Public Health, Ministry of Information, Ministry of Culture, Ministry of International Aid, Ministry of Professional Training and Public Function, Ministry of Youth and Sports, Ministry of Equipment, Ministry of Social Assistance and the Promotion of Women, Ministry of Water and the Environment, Ministry of Transport, Ministry of Development, Ministry of State and Presidential Council, and a Secretary of State for Security and Documentation. In addition to these ministries, the government is composed of a National Executive (the executive organism of highest political and ideological order of the POLISARIO Front) of thirteen elected cadres, including the President, the Secretary Generals of each of the Republic’s Institutions of the Masses, the governors of each of the Republic’s five provinces and the Military’s Generals (Sahara Press Service, 2016).

24 In 1999, UNHCR built a channeled water system in the provinces of Dakhla and El Aaiun. However, water supply to Smara, Ausserd and Buyudur is received in water trucks deposited in tanks that are shared between neighbors. Many families find their share insufficient, and they rely upon an informal water market to supply their households with a larger share. Especially during the months of summer, Rabuni, Buyudur and some districts in the province of Smara are today supplied with electrical light. The other districts and provinces use privately- owned solar panels which are often shared between a few households. Today there are roads connecting between all the different provinces of the Republic. Public transport exists but does not run on a regular basis. The

62 The development-humanitarian-solidarity aid complex financing the developments of this post-ceasefire Sahrawi Republic is contributing to consolidate an “uncertain line between

“the state” and “society” at once symbolic and material (ibid, 2001: 174). International aid has become a lucrative activity for the higher echelon of the POLISARIO’s leadership (Barona and

Gamaliel, 2016: 60), allowing for the consolidation of an elite class within the POLISARIO’s leadership that enjoys better access to foreign passports, foreign scholarships and visas, than the majority of citizen-refugees. In this way, the end of war, and the influx of humanitarian- development-solidarity aid complex is allowing for what Pierre Clastres ([1980] 2010) might have described as the displacement of the “centrifugal forces” of non-state societies for the

“centripetal forces” of state power. The leadership’s capacity to establish networks of solidarity worldwide has solidified its role of intermediary between citizen-refugees and international actors, brokering opportunities for paid employment in international organizations based in the

Republic or positions in the numerous embassies and the international offices the POLISARIO has across the world 25.

Whereas present conditions allow the POLISARIO Front to retain significant control over the “governmentality” (Foucault, 1991) of its exiled population, its capacity to command labour from its citizen-refugees has become severely compromised during this period. One of

Republic runs its own land-rovers and buses on marked occasions, such as when it needs to transport national and international delegates to government-run mass events. Most transport takes place in privately owned vehicles, some of which are used as collective taxis. See Penelope Harvey (2005) for a provocative description of how “state effects” (Mitchell, 1999) find material expression in state infrastructures.

25 If colonial Spain had appointed shuyukh as intermediaries for their patronage, under the conditions of exile, the POLISARIO Front can only govern as a kind of intermediary as well, one with the capacity to distribute international aid and command labour over the population under its protection. Nevertheless, contrary to colonial forms of rule by intermediation, the POLISARIO Front invested much of its political attention to assuage this foundational inequality of state sovereignty, recovering its long tradition of horizontal governance by developing a system of participatory democracy or, as Alice Wilson has described it, a system of “partyless democrats” (see Wilson, 2016: 186-210) which involves the participation of men and women at all levels of the new Republic’s administration, albeit unequally, with the higher administrative positions taken up mostly by men, and the lower administratively positions being taken up, almost exclusively, by women.

63 the outcomes of insourcing international aid into the Republic has been the propulsion of a construction economy. If in pre-revolutionary times, nomadic tents were made through women’s workforce, and during the years of war women’s working committees were in charge of building the edifices of the Republic, since the mid-nineties Algerian and Sahrawi construction companies have taken over the work of building and repairing the Republic’s institutions as well as the households of citizen-refugees who hire this labour privately.

Although there are reported cases of employed migrant workers who have arrived in the

Republic from elsewhere in Africa, Mali especially, most employees of these construction companies are Sahrawi men (Trastomontes, 2011: 300). However, perhaps the most important source of income in the Republic today derives from men’s commercial activities and immigrant labour in diaspora. The relaxation of borders in the region re-established Tran-

Saharan commercial routes, with a significant number of Sahrawi men procuring livelihoods transporting goods from the rest of Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco, the Western Sahara and Mali into the Sahrawi Republic, and sometimes beyond, sending remittances to the Republic semi- regularly and gradually inserting the Sahrawi Republic into a commodity-based economy.

Today each of the Republic’s provinces has at least one market, taxi services and other businesses such as restaurants and public baths26.

Whereas during the years of war, the POLISARIO Front was the only available patron for people’s livelihoods, the post-ceasefire period is characterised by the proliferation of

“trajectories of privatisation” (Wilson, 2012: 32-37) that undermine the movement’s command

26 In the mid-nineties Spain’s government also started delivering pensions to Sahrawi men who had been part of the Spanish Sahara’s indigenous branch of its military, known as “Las Tropas Nómadas”. A Sahrawi coin exists but for symbolic purposes only. The coin used in the Sahrawi Republic is the Algerian dinar, although Euros circulate for voluminous transactions and the Sahrawi people use a metric system of their own, known as “el duro”, which derives from the old-Spanish “peseta”.

64 of labour and have obliged the leadership to undergo a series of political and economic measures. On the political front, the POLISARIO Front has arrived at a series of

“compromises” with tribal authorities (Wilson, 2016: 81-165), a process that has opened up a political space for qaba’il that was entirely absent during the years of armed struggle.

Moreover, when in the mid-nineties, Salafi groups started gaining considerable presence in

Northern Algerian and beyond, the POLISARIO responded by endorsing spaces for a state- sanctioned Sunni Malikite religion, the school of Islam that the majority of the Sahrawi people identify with and that is typically described as “moderate”. For instance, Sonia Rossetti quotes point 7 of a United Nations International Human Rights Instrument that declares: “This is a moderate form of Islam, free from any sectarianism or dogmatism. Owing to its tolerance, it encourages solidarity, fosters unity, disdains violence and hatred and combats arbitrariness and oppression. It has been the truest unifying agent of the national” (2012: 342). Whereas religion was banned from the Republic’s education system in an early revolutionary period, from the mid nineteen nineties onwards Islam was introduced into primary and secondary school curricula. An office for the direction of religious affairs was established within the Ministry of

Justice and state-sanctioned mosques were built, leading public prayers on Fridays and in marked religious celebrations. Finally, if during the years of war all spaces of political representation were taken up by the POLISARIO’s leadership, in today’s Sahrawi Republic, citizen-refugees run a plethora of (usually short-lived) associations that are independent from government; there are media sources that are independent from the Republic’s Ministry of

Information, civil protests and groups critical with the leadership (Otis-Campbell, 2010), political poetry that circulates via the mobile phone and outside the Ministry of Culture’s control, and it is common for Sahrawi activists in diaspora or in the occupied territories to

65 speak on behalf of the Sahrawi cause without occupying positions in the POLISARIO’s leadership and/or government, whether it be through personal blogs, in conferences, journalist interviews or rallies. In response to these new expressions of political pluralism, while I was doing my fieldwork, the POLISARIO was working on creating a government-run civil society permanent forum that would bring together these new actors.

On the economic front, the POLISARIO’s government has established customs fees over tradesmen goods coming in and out of the Republic (Wilson, 2012: 32) and from 2003 onwards, the Sahrawi Republic’s institutions started to offer salaries to some of its citizens- refugees employees (ibid: 33). The aim, among other things, was to prevent “brain drain”, absorbing the skills acquired by the thousands of youth returning with university degrees mostly from Algeria, Libya and Cuba. In lesser number, they returned from the ex-Soviet

Union, Spain and other European States (Gimeno Martín, 2007: 30-33). Today, jobs that receive state-salaries include: the functionaries of ministries, army personnel, parliamentarians, journalists, teachers and health workers. With the exception of the army, Sahrawi women carry out a significant proportion of these professions, yet rarely do their households run on these humble and unstable state-salaries. Ranging roughly between 10 to 300 euros a month, these earnings are more suitably thought of as incentives than as wages. This means that, for the most part, households are mainly supported by men’s income derived through their participation in economies located outside of a Republic that continues to be populated, administered and run primarily by women27.

27 The Sahrawi Republic’s productive economic activity is minimal and it includes: the herding of families in liberated territories of the Western Sahara under the POLISARIO Front’s control, a few food gardens and greenhouses run at the provincial level and financed through development aid, a farm with 60,000 chickens financed by the Spanish development agency AECID (Trastomontes, 2011: 297) and a textile factory run by women in Buyudur, financed by microcredits administered by the National Union of Sahrawi Women. Most families own at least a few goats that are fed off the family’s leftovers and are tended by women in pens nearby their khiyam. However, these are kept mostly for sentimental reasons, rarely are these goats consumed.

66 Even though, as we have seen, this overall gendered distribution of labour has a long history among the Sahrawi, the moment when the Republic became inserted into a global commodity-based and cash economy, was also the first time (excluding the brief experience of semi-urban women during the last decade of the Spanish Sahara) that Sahrawi women’s labour became unwaged labour. The working committees and political cells that organized women’s work during the revolution were dissolved around the mid-nineties; however, it is women who continue to carry out most of the lower level administration of the Republic’s neighbourhoods and districts with close to no financial retribution. On top of their unpaid labour of care, nursing the young and the elderly and hosting visitors, it is primarily women who continue to fill the Republic’s auditoriums during its conferences, rallies, artistic competitions and political elections, voting, dancing, singing political poetry, clapping, publically crying (mourning martyrs), cheering and professing nationalist slogans. All such forms of labour constitute the labour of regeneration that sustains the Sahrawi Republic in place to this day.

1.3 Chapter Outline

As I will show throughout this dissertation, the fact that Sahrawi women’s regenerative labour has become unwaged produces new vulnerabilities in their lives in ways that affect the shape that their political contributions take. I show how those born into a colonial meantime, necessarily inhabit the “historical time” and the mass revolutionary subjectivities of Sahrawi nationalism differently from their elders. Drawing on David Scott’s ideas, I think of generations as “institutions of temporization” (cf. Manheim in Scott, 2014.b: 162), defining a generation as a cohort of those who share a similar experience of time, with its associated moral and political sensibilities (ibid: 167) and with shared “structures of feelings” (Williams,

1967: 128-135) that emerge out of the disjuncture between the official representations of a

67 Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism —fixed social forms, precipitated into discourses, art, memories and institutions that are, as Raymond Williams would say, “by definition, receding”

(1967: 128)— and their lived-in experience in the present (of my fieldwork 2009-2015). I describe youth’s challenges living up to the political dispositions and to the expectations of a project of revolutionary nationalism that emerged out of futures that are now past.

Chapter two introduces the reader to the affective cadence of these futures-pasts, tracing the public narrative of a generation of now elderly Sahrawi women, whose efforts during the early years of a Sahrawi revolutionary process helped to congeal the meanings and the sentiments attached to the figure of the munadila in the present. The chapter also reflects upon this generation of women’s collective silence over discussing the present. It argues that this silence speaks to the symbolic violence of a colonial meantime over the Sahrawi struggle but also to the unattainability of and the risks involved in reproducing the life-world of this older generation of women into the “coloniality” (Quijano 2000; Lugones 2008) of the present.

After describing the public, respectable, narrative of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism through my extensive conversations with the generation of women who first built the exiled-

Republic, every other chapter focuses on young women’s fraught exercise to meet the expectations placed upon them by an older generation. Focusing on women’s labour of hospitality, chapter three describes how the macro political and economic transformations taking place during this colonial meantime have had important repercussions over household morphologies and economies in ways that undermine a long tradition amongst the Sahrawi that valorizes the political valence of the khayma. Chapter four shows how the National Union of

Sahrawi Women’s convocation power and its mission to increase women’s political participation in all the administrative levels and decision-making spaces of the Republic are

68 compromised by the institution’s inability to offer young women wages for their collaboration in their activities. Moreover, it explores the tensions that emerge out of the institution’s dependence on an international development-humanitarian-solidarity aid complex, converging with its mission to increase Sahrawi women’s visibility in “public” spaces of the Republic, over and above its intervention (or lack thereof) in the less visible aspects of women’s lives.

Chapter five looks at how present marriage practices contravene some of the goals of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism, in ways that respond to the gendered geography and distribution of labour of this colonial meantime and are aimed to protect and to ensure Sahrawi women’s longstanding rights within relationships of marriage and divorce. Finally, chapter six analyses love talk as a site from where ambivalence towards the dominant model of Sahrawi female empowerment and its entanglements with the global are being expressed, reflecting upon how the shifting constitutive dimensions of women’s lives are also regenerating the Sahrawi

Republic’s “affective regime” (Song, 2014: 85, 93).

Each chapter shows a generation of women reckoning with: particular standards on their labour of hospitality (chapter three), the degree of participation in the institutional spaces of the Republic (chapter four), idealized marriage practices as per the standards of a revolutionary nationalism (chapter five), and the expectation that their labour of love should be orientated towards the nation and its liberation (chapter six). I show how coming of age under the conditions of a post-ceasefire Republic, Sahrawi youth’s demands of and contributions to their movement of national liberation are considerably different to those of their foremothers.

However, instead of framing youth’s inability to reproduce their elder’s political sensibilities, actions and dispositions (political habitus), as an expression of disagreement or dissidence, foregrounding young women’s labour of regeneration accounts for the way in which

69 generations inhabit political struggles differently, responding to presents unforeseen by older generations, if also accounting for the inter-generational continuities that exist in the expression of their political action, sometimes in ways that might appear to “skip” generations but that, most likely, signal that such valorisations were never “past”.

Thinking of regeneration offers a model of social and political transformation in which gendered and generational conflicts and tensions are deemed constitutive of the social. It foregrounds a conception of political movements as processes of reconstruction outside the dialectic of either reproduction or rupture, rejecting explanations of social change as predicated upon an anthropological trope of a “crisis of meaning”, precisely because, as Janet Roitman has argued, the very notion of “crisis” is deeply embedded in the dominant social scientific tradition of “critique” and in the conception of a “historical time” (2014: 15-39), I aim to decenter throughout this dissertation.

Thus, even if gendered private vs. public configurations of labour are discernible in today’s Sahrawi Republic, demanding new responses and political dispositions from Sahrawi youth, “residual” (Williams, 1977: 22) valorizations of women’s labour as a field of political action have far from disappeared. As Valentina Napolitano argues in her reading of Williams

“What is novel in sociocultural formation is not always oppositional to dominant culture and discourses. It can instead be defined as the residual, which becomes visible because of the default process of the dominant discourse…” (2002: 15). Indeed, despite being overshadowed in the dominant discourses of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism, the idea that Sahrawi women’s everyday labour—both that we might imagine as associated to “public” and “private” domains—fold into political action continues to underlay young Sahrawi women’s political demands, claims and sensibilities in the present. It exists in the anxieties produced around the

70 constraints that the new household economies and morphologies are imposing over women’s exercise of hospitality that I describe in chapter three; in the complaints against the Women’s

Union inability to attend to the new “private” lives of women lives that I describe in chapter four; as well as in young women’s efforts to bring matters surrounding marriage practices into public deliberation, described in chapter five.

The challenges Sahrawi women face are contingent to the present and they form the grounds upon which younger women organize their political action at present, yet they often do so drawing upon longstanding ethical codes and logics amongst the Sahrawi, ones that have always eluded the modernist language of the state and its associated, dominant, nationalist and revolutionary poiesis. In this sense, the concept of regeneration is also aimed at apprehending a

Sahrawi politics of the present that is free from nostalgic “melancholic attachments” (Brown,

1999) to “socialist-futures pasts” (Scott, 2014: 174).

The political expressions that I describe throughout this dissertation manifest themselves in micro-practices and structures of feeling that may or may not acquire collective representation in the official discourse of a revolutionary nationalism in the future. Applying a gendered lens to the scholarship on the temporality of revolution (Arendt, 1964; Koselleck,

2004; Lazar, 2014; Scott, 2002), I describe the way in which Sahrawi women are bringing attention to the vulnerabilities they face in the present, in ways that disturb, and sometimes speak past the “historical time” of a struggle in which they have been ascribed the duty to embody the respectability of the nation. In what follows, I trace the inochate ways in which

Sahrawi women are regenerating what it means to be a revolutionary woman, articulating demands and carrying out specific practices that attend to the priorities of their present and

71 contributing to multiply the possible futures of a revolutionary process initiated more than forty years ago.

1.4 Methodology, Positionality and Ethnographic Refusal

This dissertation draws on eighteen months of fieldwork, including three months in

2009 (before I started my doctoral program), two weeks in 2010, eleven months between 2011 and 2012, three months in 2013 and three weeks in 2015. I established contact with the

Sahrawi Women’s Union prior to my yearlong doctoral stay commencing in 2011. They agreed to support my research and visa application. In return, they asked me to teach English language lessons at their headquarters and for my assistance with other activities: translations, grant writing, report writing and help organising conferences during the length of my visit.

I spent the first six months of 2011 working at the headquarters of the National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUWS), in the province of Buyudur, found in what used to be the all- women’s school of the 27th of February (see chapter one). I lived with their Secretary General during the first month, and I visited her and stayed with her intermittently throughout my fieldwork. However, given that she was very frequently obliged to travel outside of the

Republic, I eventually moved in with a different family with whom I lived for the rest of my stay in the province of Buyudur. In order to get a sense of the contrasts between different provinces of the Republic, I spent another six months working at the Women’s Union centre in the province of El Aauin. There I lived with the family who had hosted me during my first visit to the Sahrawi Republic in 2009. Most of my fieldwork was carried out between these two provinces: Buyudur and el Aauin, although I also spent time in Ausserd, Dakhla, and

Smara, and carried out multiple visits to the administrative province of Rabuni, where all the central institutions of the Republic are found, such as UNHCR and MINURSO

72 headquarters, and the expatriate compound, mostly for interviews with government officials and employees.

I have studied Modern Standard Arabic since 2005, including two-month long intensive courses at the University of Damascus, Syria, in the summer of 2006, and another in the summer of 2010. Prior to commencing my yearlong doctoral fieldwork in the Republic, in

2011, I spent two months in Nouakchott, Mauritania studying Hassaniya, the dialect of Arabic spoken by the Sahrawi people. Whereas, during the course of my fieldwork I became fluent in day-to-day parlance and conversation, I have relied upon the translation of Sahrawi research assistants who spoke either Spanish or English for most of my recorded semi- structured interviews. I transcribed and translated all recordings, including interviews, but also speeches in rallies and/or conferences, poetry and music, translating them with the support of seven different research assistants.

My assistants’ contributions to my research have far exceeded the work of translation and transcription. They helped me identify and contact people for interviews and offered me company, protection, hospitality, language training, cultural queues, and intellectual insight throughout my entire fieldwork and beyond, as some of them continue to support my work answering my questions from afar. Some of my research assistants are thus also some of my key interlocutors and two of them feature into my ethnography directly. This is the case of

"Embarka", in chapters 1, 2 and 3, and of "Salka", in chapters 3 and 5. I have used pseudonyms for everyone in this ethnography except for when I mention well-known Sahrawi intellectuals

(poets, musicians, writers) and/or political leaders.

The choice of explicitly inserting my research assistants into the ethnography has forced me to make them anonymous even in my acknowledgements section out of concern that

73 providing their real names might make them identifiable within the ethnography to Sahrawi readers of this text. This means I have had to make the difficult choice of either honouring them and their labour by disclosing their names in the acknowledgements sections yet erasing their interlocution as research assistants within the text, or honouring their presence and labour in common within the text at the expense of erasing their real identities throughout. I think the latter is a stronger, if problematic and imperfect, choice. I am hoping that in making this choice, my dependency on their labour becomes immediately evident to any reader. I am hoping that it visibilises the fact that my methodological choice of working with research assistants was the conduit through which they also came to influence the piece theoretically.

Finally, this choice allows me to raise questions about the limits of ethical research in a context like the one I worked in, because it also allows me to write-in the forms of violence I am necessary complicit with in my capacity as a foreign researcher. For instance, in chapter two, the fact that I disclose that I am both a “guest” and “part time employer” in Embarka’s khayma

(making it clear that she was one of my research assistants) is necessary for the chapter’s larger argument, showing how even those who, like myself, act in solidarity with the Sahrawi cause, reproduce the coloniality of the present.

Western researchers’ access to locations in the “global south” has historically been —and remains— enabled by colonial and neo-colonial global structures (Asad, 1973; Kuper, 1996), and my own access to the Sahrawi Republic is enabled by the humanitarian-development- solidarity aid complex sustaining it. I developed my first investments in the Sahrawi cause while in Spain, while I was working in Madrid-based human rights NGOs that offered political and economic support to groups and organizations across the Middle East and North Africa, especially to Palestinian ones. In Madrid, the movements of solidarity with Palestine and the

74 Western Sahara often overlap and it is common to find the same faces in protests related to either struggles. My involvement with a research group from the Universidad Autónoma de

Madrid and membership in an association of applied anthropology called “Antropología en

Acción” provided me with my first research visa application to the Sahrawi Republic, benefiting from the trust that other members of “Antropología en Acción” had developed for years in research collaborations with the Sahrawi Ministry of Culture.

My association with them squarely positioned me as a political ally to the Sahrawi cause from the very beginning of my research. Moreover, I often found that even to those who knew nothing about me, or about the reason for my presence in the camps, my Spanish nationality inscribed me as political ally a priori. The reason for this is not, of course, that all Spaniards are in solidarity with the Sahrawi cause. The reason is that most of those who make the effort to visit the Republic are not just politically sympathetic with the cause, but usually involved in providing some sort of support to the movement and/or to Sahrawi families. Moreover, my affiliation in a Canadian university and my Canadian citizenship gave me an added kind of credential as many assumed I would be able to help the cause by increasing its visibility across the Atlantic. Only with time, after I became more fluent in Hassaniya and more culturally competent in general, did my presence become less overdetermined by the category of the

“visitor in solidarity with the cause”, or as representative of the “international community” that is aiding the Sahrawi Republic to stay put, if also complicit with the protracted irresolution of the conflict. If, with time, members of the families with which I lived would affectionally express a form of a kinship that was created between us through co-residence ─saying things like “we have grown used to you” (walafnak) or referring to me affectionately as “our

75 daughter” (mintna)─I found that, for those who I was less close to, my prolonged presence could be confusing and even suspicious to some.

Much like the practice of writing, the practice of participant-observation is a form of political intervention in its own right. Paul Rabinow (1977) argued violence is structured into the anthropological encounter and, whereas I agree with his argument overall, I do not share the sense of inevitability he evokes. There are many ways of learning from others: we can learn through extraction, or we can practice an ethos of learning alongside or with each other, respecting the resistance of informants and choosing the risk and the challenge of arriving at dead-ends in one’s own work and intellectual aspirations.

To Daniel Rutherford, the most important contribution of the volume “Writing Culture” was in its coupling of the empirical and the ethical (Rutherford, 2012: 469), understanding knowledge production, as Tyler put in, as a form of “poetry” in its classical ascription, that is

“a performative break with the everyday speech… which evokes memories of the ethos of the community and thereby provoked hearers to act ethically” (1986: 125). Our attention to the ethic-political implications of our work, our efforts to apply our creativity towards behaving, as

Crapanzano put it, like “Hermes” promising not to lie, but never promising to tell the whole truth (1986), should begin prior to the writing process. If many social scientists today see the value in a non-authoritative, insecure, and almost incomplete knowledge production as one that is not just scientifically valid, but in many ways more ethical and desirable, should this disposition to embrace an insecure stance not begin in the practice of participant observation itself?

Ted Swedenberg has argued in relation to his work in Palestine: “solidarity requires us to learn from and (to a certain extent be tactically complicit) with the silences and resistances

76 of the people with whom we live and study” (Swedenburg, 1995: xxviii). Veena Das, who encountered widespread silence surrounding the violence of the events of Partition in

India/Pakistan, nurtured a methodological respectful patience, which simultaneously allowed her to interpret the silence she encountered through an analysis of “the work of time” and a form of agency that involves a “descent into the everyday”. About the risks her method involved she says: “for me the love of anthropology has turned out to be an affair in when I reach bedrock, I do not break through the resistance of the other, but in this gesture of waiting I allow the knowledge of the other to mark me” (2007: 17).

Indeed, I would argue this patient form of knowledge-acquisition is implicit in the practice of participant observation that combines a solid commitment to the empirical and a fairly under-acknowledged capacity to read-between-the-lines more akin to practicing intuition than to any traditional understanding of positivist data-collection. Even at the time when anthropology was beginning to emerge as a discipline, Malinowski already referred to this non- intrusive quality of anthropological data collection. Responding to Lord Lugard’s “The Dual

Mandate in British Tropical Africa”, where he complains about the opacity of native land tenure rules for colonial administrators, Malinowski made a chilling case for the utility of anthropological enquiry that “would not easily alarm the native, he would often be not even aware that you are trying to take a survey of land tenure” (1929: 32). While I was doing my fieldwork, if adamantly rejecting Rainbow’s methods of knowledge extraction, following and inspired by Das’ patience and by Swedenburg’s research praxis of solidarity instead, I nonetheless became haunted by Malinowski’s deeply problematic methodological suggestions: is not the beauty of our method, one that allows for prioritising respect for the resistances of our informants, also one that easily blurs into a sleek practice all too proximate to that spying?

77 These are concerns that are no doubt particularly acute in the context of my field site.

The Sahrawi have been fighting against French and Spanish incursions in the Western Sahara starting as early as 1850. In a geographical expanse where the written word had little currency, housing a rich oral tradition of poetry and storytelling, for a long time, information spread across the desert almost strictly through word of mouth. Moreover, in a political context that divided Sahrawi families —sometimes openly, sometimes not so openly— into collaborators of colonial powers, discretion and secrecy have been hailed as one of the most important values of true Sahrawi munadilat (feminine) and munadilin (masculine). In fact, “Secrecy” was the 13th principle of the Sahrawi revolution since the POLISARIO Front’s first congress in 1973.

Today it is the 6th as the overall number of principles has been reduced from 16 to 12.

A concern with discretion and with nurturing the capacity to distinguish “internal” matters from “external” matters —that is, who can be told what and how— results from a long history and continuing experience of intervention and colonization, of a much rumoured and alleged presence of spies in the Republic ─something that has served as pretext for violent internal conflicts associated to power struggles within the POLISARIO leadership, especially in the later 1980s (Garcia, 2001: 256)─ as it is contiguous to a rich oral mastery of poetry and narrative, also reflected in the alluding, expressive, and highly metaphorical language of

Hassaniya which manages to convey a lot of information in very few words, but whose messages only the expert listener can fully comprehend. Thus, becoming a respected listener in the camps requires training oneself to understanding through inference. Asking too many questions tends to be treated with suspicion and, at times, almost attributed with vulgarity. In this context, the unsaid becomes as eloquent as the spoken.

78 The fact that my presence in the Sahrawi Republic was often not only enabled but also frequently overdetermined as a member of an “international community” in solidarity with the cause, at best, and as a potential spy, at worst, necessarily affected what many people choose to share with me or not in the first place, producing what I have come to think of as “practices of ignorance”. Indeed, I encountered an alleged ignorance over topics on countless occasions, an ignorance that in many cases I attribute to people’s active choice to not know or learn about topics deemed dangerous or controversial in the first place. Some topics I was prepared not to ask about even before I first traveled to the Republic. Others, I learnt of their controversial nature precisely through their aura of secrecy.

The ethical and political “red lines” I established for myself from the very beginning of my research were in relation to asking explicit questions regarding “islamism” and “tribalism”.

Given the current geopolitical context, I consider the former practice of ethnographic refusal self-explanatory, but the latter perhaps needs a little more elaboration. The POLISARIO’s early persecution against any display of tribal allegiance and other markers of status makes these topics a very sensitive subject in the Sahrawi Republic. The subject is distasteful amongst

Sahrawis (outside of their social circles of trust) who often consider questions over tribal/status origin rude, even offensive and sometimes dangerous. This history of a widespread resistance amongst the Sahrawi to disclose tribal/status origin is related to the political imperative of preserving a “national unity” that cannot be understood outside a colonial episteme rendering tribe and nation antagonistic (Isidoros, 2015) that remains dominant, substantiating accusations of “failed or weak states” that serve to justify imperialist form of interventions. Moreover, the way in which the Arab world today continues to be fraught with a “sectarianism” that is embedded in a long history of European colonial practices of divide and rule informs my

79 ethnographic refusal to produce any information regarding tribalism in the Sahrawi Republic at this moment. In the Western Sahara, the experience of racial difference is entangled with tribal affiliations and social status that I actively choose not to investigate for these ethical and political reasons. As a result, even though “status” and “race” intersect the categories of

“gender” and of “age” in ways that are significant to my investigation, the former categories are conspicuously absent from my ethnography. The only references to “status” I have included are ones produced out of citizen-refugees’ proximity to a humanitarian-development-solidarity aid complex and that are necessary to understand the enduring coloniality of the present that I aim to convey.

At every moment, I was determined to practice Das’ patience and Swedenburg’s methodology of solidarity, always preferring to put my lines of research at risk than to push any given line of enquiry, and yet there is a degree of violence, one structured into my very presence in the lives of my interlocutors, which I consider inescapable. Collecting silences does not stop us from writing about them, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, and in these methodological practices of inferences, one inevitably continues to reproduce the social scientific tradition of not letting the “subaltern speak” (Spivak, 1988) or be silent.

Acknowledging the limits of a truly ethical anthropological encounter, especially in a context such as that of my fieldwork, I have taken these methodological anxieties and often written them into my ethnography. Understanding my own body/subjectivity as attached to global regimes of power operating in the Sahrawi Republic, I have attempted to use the methodological conflicts and the tensions that emerged from my positionality and research practices as “data” in and of itself; moments and sites where the ways in which the symbolic violence of this colonial meantime can be observed.

80 2 Halted Narratives

2.1 Beginnings

Let’s start from the beginning: We organized into committees and into wilayat

(provinces), dawair (districts) and ahya’ (neighbourhoods). The POLISARIO Front

began with only a few people. They started visiting different groups in the cities and in

al-badia (desert pasturelands). They spread awareness of their values until the

Moroccans entered. I had just had a baby when they entered28

This was how Aminetu, a woman roughly 65 years old, chose to start narrating the story of her life to us. Aminetu had welcomed us in her khayma after my research assistant, a young woman I had met at the Women’s Union, had asked her if we could visit her one afternoon to record her life memories. Surrounded by some of her daughters and grandchildren, we sat, snacking on the cookies, milk and juice we had brought with us, and around a carbon lit stove and a low circular table, one of her daughters was using to prepare tea. We chatted until suddenly, if predictably, right after we had finished sipping the first of three customary rounds of tea, she said:“Well, shall we start?”

I agreed, reminding her of the sort of questions I would be asking her: her memories growing up in the Western Sahara while it was still known as the Spanish Sahara, her memories of the early years of the Sahrawi movement for national liberation, of the years that followed the Moroccan invasion of the territory, their exile, the years of war and of the events

28 “Aminetu”, 65 years old (approx.), 15th March, 2012

81 following the UN mediated ceasefire in 1991, but Aminetu needed no prompting. As soon as I pressed play on my recorder she began, from the beginning. From the beginning of the narrative she wanted to share with her daughters, grandchildren, my research assistant, and with me, a foreign researcher, a nasrania (a word that literally translates into “Christian”, although it is a term used by Sahrawis today to index Westerners more broadly)29.

Aminetu did not introduce her story with her full name nor with her place of birth, information that would have provided clues about her tribal descent. Neither did she begin with the name of year in which she was born. Had Aminetu re-casted her past starting from her birth, she would have invoked a tribal order of social relations that her nationalist and revolutionary education had encouraged her to break from. Instead, the beginning of her life- story was situated within the ethical-political imperatives and the temporality of a Sahrawi nationalist revolution, one bound up with the notion that, with revolution “the course of history begins anew” (Arendt, 1965: 28). Moreover, the constitutive dimension of this performed

“beginning” was substantiated through a description of the labour —at once collective and individual— that her revolutionary process entailed: organising into neighbourhoods, districts and working committees and nursing a newborn child. Not only do evocations of labour substantiate “the beginning” of Aminetu’s story, but her practice of narrating the past constitutes a form of labour in and of itself.

29 Only five of these interviews were carried out without assistance and during the final stages of my fieldwork. Nineteen of them were carried out with the support of seven younger Sahrawis. These friends and assistants helped me find and contact these women and they accompanied me to the interviews helping me with translation. We recorded all interviews and we sat to transcribe and translate them into Spanish afterwards. Translations of transcription from Spanish to English are mine. The only exceptions are poems, translated into Spanish with the help of the Sahrawi poet, Bahia Awah, and from Spanish to English by me. I have chosen to keep my research assistants anonymous because in other chapters I have included their own comments and observations during interviews as “material”. The conversations I had with them both during and after interviews became key sites for me to explore generational tensions and asynchronies. My research assistants are kept anonymous because, despite their invaluable contribution to my research, each of them was also a key informant to me.

82 I think about the process of individual remembrance as one rendered meaningful only within specific social contexts (cf. Halbwachs, in Cole, 2001: 23), something that Jennifer Cole has described as “one of the many ways in which the mind extends beyond the individual”

(2001: I). Indeed, remembering is so dis-individuated a practice that Edward Cassey has suggested memory exists only in relation to places and objects that supersede and give shape and content to the practice of remembering. He argues that associating memory to the space of the “mind ”─where mind is understood as the receptacle of representations— is “part of the problem rather than part of the solution to an adequate phenomenology of memory” ([1987]

2000: x). Drawing on such insights, scholarship based on the Palestinian liberation movement has often focused on the prominence of spatial referents in narratives about the past, highlighting the way in which the practice of remembering is to be understood as a mode of political action (Aburfarha 2009; Davis 2010; Farah, 2003; Swendburg 1995; Slymovics,

1998). Based on research in Madagascar, Michael Lambeck (1996) describes memory as ethical practice, a way of forging or reinforcing certain relationships or commitments to others.

This chapter draws on all of these scholarly traditions of memory, enquiring into Sahrawi women’s practices of remembrance as political and ethical praxis. It collects excerpts from ten out of a total twenty-five life histories I gathered from Sahrawi elderly women during my fieldwork. Bringing together the memories of women born between 1940 and 1962, where their narratives overlap most frequently, I reproduce the more dominant and repeated representations of these pasts, if selecting individual accounts, phrases and descriptions in which the “self- presence of the remember inheres in what is remembered” (Cassey, [1987] 2001: ix), so as to bring these recurring narratives to life most evocatively. I present their memories in a way that highlights a dominant narrative about the past, rather than the differences in their personal

83 narratives, contending that such patterns reveal something about the shared subjectivities of this generation of women, engaged in the narrative production of their histories as “agents or occupants of structural positions… and as subjects … aware of their vocality…” (Trouillot,

1995: 23-24).

The extensive material I gathered in my conversations with Sahrawi female elders was necessarily situated in the rich specificity of each woman’s life and, if I had chosen to present these life-histories in their entirety or in a different format, their memories might have revealed the heterogeneity of experience of the Sahrawi revolution, disturbing dominant accounts of a revolutionary nationalism that performs itself upon the values of egalitarianism, unity, and fraternity. However, I found the resemblances concerning the practices these women chose to highlight over others and the ethical values and the structures of feelings they conveyed in relation to distinct periods to be more striking than the more subtle discrepancies between the narrations of their experiences.

This observation, compounded to my methodological commitment to not probe questions regarding internal markers of difference (see methodology), led to my choice of presenting these narratives in the form of a composite. Authored either by Sahrawi men (Ismail Es-

Sweyih, 1998, Sayeh, 2001) or by foreign academics whose Sahrawi interlocutors were mostly male (Aguirre, 1995, Hodges, 1983, Garcia, 2001), canonical historical accounts of Sahrawi nationalism acknowledge the prominent role played by Sahrawi women in their struggle, yet the first-hand experience of Sahrawi women themselves is conspicuously absent. In documenting these female narratives, however, my aim has not been that of achieving the impossible task of letting the subaltern speak through my own writing (Spivak, 1988). The choice of a composite makes very explicit that, whereas this account is well informed and

84 empirically grounded in extensive conversations with elderly Sahrawi women, it does in no way aspire to represent an unmediated account of such conversations. I present a composite of excerpts from real life interviews that have been fragmented, shuffled, and re-shuffled, organized and re-organized by me, as author, in the way that best summates the most common narrative, anecdotes, principles, political dispositions, emotions, ethics and practices these elderly interlocutors insisted on recounting, not just to me, but also to a younger generation of

Sahrawi citizen-refugees listening in and often participating in these conversations.

The choice of a composite enables analysis of what I think of as a generational political habitus and frame of reference. Much like in Aminetu’s “beginning”, I found that descriptions of labour and every day practices featured prominently in the memories of this generation of women. Thus, I draw specifically on Jennifer Cole’s (2001) effort to bring the social and individual dimensions of memory together, focusing on those daily practices that form a habitus “a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which…functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions” (cf. Bourdieu, 1977: 82-83 in Cole, 2001:

27). They illuminate shared formative experiences: forms of labour, social relations, moral transgressions, artistic productions and traumatic events that punctuate and substantiate the collective memories of the generation of women who pioneered the Sahrawi revolution.

Moreover, I have used these narratives to “consider the slide between affective and moral economies” (Ahmed: 2010: 30), thinking about remembering as a practice that aspires to transact political desire and ethical values transgenerationally. For this reason, I have included into this account instances when a younger generation interjected and commented on their elders’ narration of the past to provide the reader with a sense of the multiples presences and presents around these conversations. The composite of voices I present here accounts for the

85 way in which Sahrawi female refugees are imagining the past in the present circumstances of an internationally assisted peace process, where historical representations are being produced, in part, through interventions such as my own (and my voice-recorder’s) in their lives. 30

This requires attention to how and what is being remembered by this generation of women as part of their collective history, but also to what is being left unspoken, perhaps even forgotten during these times. According to the Spanish anthropologist Caro Baroja, the Saharan tribes he studied in the mid-20th century, explicitly situated historical narrative within existing webs of social relations (1955: 422). The practice of remembering described in this chapter performs the respectability of the Sahrawi nation vis-à-vis an international community (through me as interlocutor), whilst providing a meta-commentary of the present and refrain for a younger Sahrawi generation. In this labour of remembering, I describe an older generation’s effort to transact ethical and spiritual values, political judgments and affect through time, regenerating their past in the present, and in so doing, preserving the possibility for certain futures.

These conversations offer a detailed sense of the shifts that the revolutionary project entailed for the subjectivities of Sahrawi women, evoking how gender and nationalism co- constituted one another through the experience of struggle, and the way in which the figure of the munadila has come to stand for the idealized female figure of the Sahrawi nation (Solana, forthcoming). Yet perhaps what most struck me from these conversations was encountering a

30 I visited each woman on a minimum of three occasions, typically sitting in their khiyam (sing. khayma) around a tea table for periods of one to two hours at a time, in the company of their granddaughters/grandsons, daughters, daughters in laws, sometimes members of their male kin and sometimes their co-generational kin, friends or neighbours and one of my research assistants. In this way, the narratives collected here were delivered with multiple audiences in mind: at times for members of their own generation that could potentially hold the truth of such pasts accountable, and always for members of a younger Sahrawi generation and for an international community (via my presence).

86 silence being produced that I had not quite anticipated, a silence that I observed in the almost unanimous reluctance amongst this generation of women to discuss the changes that came about their lives in the period following the 1991 ceasefire. Whereas abundant stories, rich descriptions and anecdotes of their lives prior to the revolution and about the revolution were readily shared and recorded with me, as soon as I asked about their memories of the ceasefire there was contrastable dearth of words.

Thinking of the past as a sort of hubris subject to reconfigured revitalizations that deflect off the priorities of the present, the composite of past narratives I present in this chapter has a dual purpose. The first is to reproduce the most dominant account of the pasts remembered by this generation of women under the conditions of the present, reproducing the version of the past deemed respectable enough by these women to share with a broad audience.

An account of the past that finds embodiment through the figure of the Sahrawi munadila; an exemplary, moral and political figure whose performance is reified through the very practice of remembering. The second aim is to reflect upon and analyse the silence I encountered regarding the period following the 1991 ceasefire, a silence that illustrates the way in which

Saharawi citizen-refugees experience and reckon with the symbolic violence that a colonial meantime imposes over their collective struggle. Examining the relationship between the past and the present of this generation of women reveals not only how “pastness” is always positioned in the present (Trouillot, 1995: 15), it shows how the past is positioned towards desired futures, or futures past (Koselleck, 2014) that are generationally specific.

Although the composite that follows is based on conversations that did not always follow a linear-progression of time —Aminetu’s choice of a “beginning” is a case in point— I have organized them into four distinct and consecutive periods: “Before the revolution”

87 (roughly 1940-1960s), “The emergence of the POLISARIO Front and the years of mass displacement (1973 – 1976), “Building a Revolutionary Republic” (1960-1991) and “No war and No peace” (1991-today) for the purposes of clarity, flow and comparison between different periods of marked significance in terms of the structural changes that provide the background for these narratives.

2.2 Before the revolution (1940 – 1960 approximately)

We lived in large, black khiyam made of camel hair, of 30 arms in length! We moved

with our friq (nomadic encampment), following the clouds and in search of green

pastures for our goats and our camels. We lived in peace. It rained more or less every

two years and when it rained any less there was a drought. We harvested cereal and

stored it in large bags made of goat or camel leather and into underground pits. When

there was drought, we uncovered the pits and we toasted the cereal on large stones to

make a special bread luksur, as well as different types of grains: bulgman, dhcicham,

aish and couscous. We made goat and camel butter31. If we ran out of animals, men

took their weapons and hunted ostriches and gazelles. Sometimes they would take the

materials we had, and exchange them for animals with other encampments. Sometimes

our neighbours would lend us goats that we could use for their hair and for their milk

but we always had to return them for their meat. Goats were borrowed all the time but

one could only borrow up to three camels at a time32. Milk was important; we had milk

with every meal. We ate meat. We drank tea, Allah is generous, tbarek allah. We

31 ‘Hebba’, 64 years old, 11th June 2013 32 ‘Suadu’, 65 years old, 26th May 2013

88 prepared our best foods in Ramadan. We dipped dates in camel butter… we had a good

life… 33. “We were content, calm” (muʿatinin)34.

Everything was written in the sky. The constellations: thuraya, dabaran, el

hak’ el yebha, el nazra announced the weather and they gave us directions when we

travelled… Our men left to the markets usually in the autumn or in the spring either to

the North (Morocco) or towards the East (Algeria), sometimes both. There were times

when all of our men left the encampment and, when they did, we had to do their work

and ours! They exchanged our animals and our grains for tea, sugar, oil, dates, and

clothes.35

We didn’t like money and barely used it” and, as she said this, Khuya, my

seventy four year old interlocutor let out a loud laughter, which her niece, my friend

and research assistant, responded to by exclaiming: “Badaouin”, shaking her head with

a smile. “Badaouin” means bedouins, a word used today with a connotation similar to

how it is used elsewhere, inheriting a late nineteenth century and early twentieth

century notion of popular Western imagination that has travelled (Said, 1983),

associating nomadism with a barbaric negation of civilization (San Martin, 2013: 34), if

oftentimes expressed through its corollary: the romanticized imaginary of the “noble

savage”, untouched by the temptations, excesses and greed of a “modern” way of life.

That is right! We were only Bedouins! affirmed Khuya, cheerfully, and added:

In those times we preferred a small and ugly goat to a fat stack of Euros…

Everything else (referring to the goods exchanged in markets) came from the wealth of

our land: the stones, the hair and the skin of our animals, from the leaves and the bark

of our bushes. We made our tools and kitchen utensils out of wood and stone. We made

33 ‘Khadaya’, 60 years old, 29th May 2012 34 ‘Mariam’, 61 years old,10th July 2013 89 35 ‘Embarka’, 60 years old, 12th June, 2013

90 our carpets, tents, bags and the buckets and rope for our wells from animal hair and

their skin. Back then, there were not so many illnesses, sadness, and strange deaths. I

think this is because we only ate things that came from the land and the land of the

Sahara is medicinal. They say shepherds end up looking like their camels… Like you

(she said, looking at me), you are from Spain but you look like you are from Canada

because that is where you live. Well, you see, because the land of the Sahara is

generous, our people were good and beautiful. 36

They taught us the Koran using plaques of wood (lauh). Each friq had its

own murabet (scholar of Islam), who was supported between all khyiam in the

encampment so that he would teach the young. The Koran gave us guidance for

everything. We had many systems to share between us. If a family that had lost

everything came to live with us, each household was obliged to provide newcomers

materials until they could get by on their own. We did the same with divorced women.

Everyone looked after them, at least until they re-married. Everyone was obliged to

contribute labour and gifts to celebrations: weddings, circumcisions, and religious

celebrations. Everyone looked after a woman after she had given birth, not just her

sisters. Women shared work in a system called twsa. If a woman’s tent needed repair,

all the women fixed it together. If a woman received guests, everyone helped her with

the hosting preparations37. Whenever a wealthy person accomplished something, he was

obliged to kill a lamb for poorer families to share his good fortune. This was called

sadaqa. Or silka, a system that obliged the sons of a wealthy person to sacrifice

36 ‘Khuya’, 74 years old, 30th May, 2012. 37 ‘Sumeya’, 70 years old, 20th June, 2012

90 an animal to share with everyone when he died.38 We had maaaaany such customs of

sharing between us. That is how we managed to live, separated from each other but still

belonging to larger groups. 39

We ran around the friq freely, just like the boys, we made and played with

dolls made from the bones of goats. We used kahla (ink used as makeup) to draw their

faces, and pieces of cloth to dress them. We would run as far as the river, with dates and

milk, even meat, and we stayed playing out with our dolls for hours. No one feared that

anything could happen to us 40. We climbed on the bushes and pretended we were

riding camels41. Adults would ask us to go find branches to make fire, and some

children had to work as shepherds but, mostly, they let us live content. “Older women

spent their free time practicing lhful (make up) on each other and lbluh, a special diet

that fattened the body and made it more desirable42.

We spent our free time organizing gatherings and visits. Our wedding parties

lasted at least a week back then and we received maaaany visitors, friends and family

who appeared with cattle and gifts. We combed our hair and decorated it with braids

and diadems. Men shot their weapons into the air and organized camel races!

Sometimes women raced too, but only when her elders were not around43. We danced

and we sang in the same tent but always with a curtain separating men and women

38 ‘Suadu’, 65 years old, 26th May 2013 39 ‘Khuya’, 74 years old, 30th May, 2012 40 ‘Khadaya’, 60 years old, 29th of May 2012 41 ‘Embarka’, 60 years old, 12th June, 2013 42 ‘Khadaya’, 60 years old, 29th of May 2012; for the most part, the labour of shepherding was performed by men, but not exclusively. One of the women I interviewed, ‘Bakita’, 55 years old, 5th of June 2013, belonging to the lowest echelon of the pre-revolutionary social hierarchy amongst the Sahrawi, an ex-haratin, a term that translates badly into slave, spoke of her work as a shepherd growing up. 43 “Suadu’, 65 years old, 26th May 2013

91 inside the tent (sitta), because there was a lot of respect back then 44. In those times we

were very modest.. For you did not talk about marriage and those things with your

elders…They did not even tell us when the day of our wedding was! I was playing near

the river with my girlfriends one day, and when we returned to the encampment, we

found they were preparing a big party! It was my own wedding! I did not even know I

was engaged!” At that point Khadaya was interrupted by one of her married daughters

sitting in the room with us. She asked a question that made us giggle:

- “That sounds like a bad thing to me. What if they married you to a man you did not

like? What if you arrive at your wedding and you husband is one-eyed?” Khadaya,

replied:

- “Well…look… If your husband only had one eye, or one leg, so be it. If that was

what the families wanted for you, and your father had agreed, you married that

man. That was it. Khalas... Our wedding celebrations lasted one full week back

then... That was our life… simple and natural until Morocco invaded us. 45 “

Whereas two out of the twenty five interviews I carried out described fatalities which overcame these women and their families during this period caused by exposure to harsh weather conditions and material scarcity46, as I suggest through the combination of women’s voices presented here, the most dominant picture of the ways of this pre-revolutionary period was one of self-sufficiency, independence and joyfulness.

44 ‘Mariam’, 61 years old,10th July 2013 45 Khadaya’, 60 years old, 29th of May 2012, but near identical stories about their wedding were recounted to me by: ‘Suadu’, 65 years old, 26th May 2013, Khuya’, 74 years old, 30th May, 2012, ‘Hebba’, 64 years old, 11th June 2013 and ‘Nana’, 58 years old, 25th of May 2012. In the case of ‘Bakita’, 55 years old, 5th of June 2013, a haratin (ex-slave), her first husband was not chosen by her own parents. 46 ‘Khadaya’, 60 years old, 29th of May 2012 & ‘Nana’, 58 years old, 25th of May 2012.

92 Khuya’s proud embrace of her granddaughter’s affectionate label “bedouins” is illustrative of the way in which the collective ethic associated to those pre-revolutionary times is often attached to bucolic nomadic lifestyles and to the memory of the beautiful landscapes left behind in al-badia (desert pasturelands). Resonating with Swedenburg’s (1990) observation regarding how notions of “the village” and the “Palestinian Peasant” constitute national signifiers for the Palestinian people, both the nomad and al-badia, are often mobilised in representations of Sahrawi nationalism, featuring prominently in Sahrawi revolutionary poetry

(Gimeno, et al., forthcoming).

The most dominant description of the social practices in these pre-revolutionary pasts was characterised by respectfulness, generosity, egalitarianism, simplicity and spiritual integrity.

When Khadaya’s daughter expressed her disapproval of the fact that Sahrawi women were not consulted over the choice of their first husbands, Khadaya did not defend this pre-revolutionary practice ─note the POLISARIO Front abolished it, and today, most would find it inconceivable not to secure a bride’s consent prior to her marriage. However, Khadaya disavowed her daughter’s fast rejections of an “older order of things”, responding to her by relativizing the practice, framing it within the moral codes that underwrote a nomadic system of political authority; within a life world that she insisted was “simple” and “natural” overall.

Conjuring a past of peace and social cohesion constitutes a pedagogical practice in the present. Above all, elderly women narrated pre-revolutionary pasts as times of peace and tranquility, omitting any reference to social conflict, either amongst Sahrawis or against

European colonizers. As Khadaya’s last sentence evokes most clearly: “life was simple and natural until Morocco invaded us”, the very presence of a Spanish administration in the

Western Sahara is largely omitted from descriptions of this period. In this way, these nostalgic

93 accounts convey values, morals and principles held dear in the present. They say more about the social values my interlocutors wish to preserve into the future than about how their lives looked like accurately47. Conjuring pasts of peace and justice animates presents; it seeks to mobilize them in certain directions, towards certain futures.

As the Sahrawi revolutionary poet El Khadra told me: “before people were not interested in recording details about the past but today, remembering the freedoms we enjoyed during those times helps us refuse our current situation”.

2.3 The emergence of the POLISARIO Front and exile (1973 – 1976)

I had been studying the Koran with the other children, and when I returned to my

khayma, I found a strange document written in Spanish. My older brother spoke

Spanish. When I asked him what it said, he snatched it from my hands and said: ‘you

should not look at that, it’s nothing important, it is men’s businesses. But I knew

something was going on because my mother was always leaving the khayma

mysteriously during those days. I dared not ask where she was going. It seemed as if I

could not ask her about that.

I remember al-falagha (the name given to the early POLISARIAN combatants)

started to visit us during the night. They came asking for the men. They wore sandals

with a special mold that imitated the footprints of a camel to dissuade those following

47 The fact that only one of my female interlocutors mentioned practices of resistance to colonialism during this period needs to be understood from a perspective that takes into account the priorities of the present. On the one hand, the nationalist revolution experienced by the women I spoke to fiercely sought to abolish tribal identities and allegiances. If the practices of early muhajidin were explicitly anti-colonial they were nevertheless also implicated in an intra and inter-tribal politics, which cannot be comfortably situated within the nationalist frame of the present. On the other hand, the romance of a friendly Spanish colonialism (Correale, 2015) is being produced in the present context of Morocco’s direct occupation.

94 them from their whereabouts. In those days, we began to hear the noise of weapons

coming from the hills. They say it was al falagha. They wanted to scare Spain.

Eventually, my mother started to share with me the documents of her revolutionary

committees. She told me: ‘read this but don’t tell anyone about it because if someone

hears you talking about these things they could kill you’. We did not know who we

could trust in those days. There were many people infiltrating the POLISARIO on the

side of Spain and Morocco as spies. We needed to be careful. She made me memorize

the sixteen revolutionary principles… walah (I swear) I still remember them:

Revolutionary violence (al-ʿnf el thawri)48, formulating problems and solutions in the

right place and at the right time (tarij el mashakel fi mwadyʿa49), perseverance

(istimraria), trust in oneself (thiqa fi nfsi)50, secrecy (sirya), responsibility (al-

masu’lya), equality and democracy (musawaa wa democratia), criticism and self-

criticism (anaqad wa nagad dati), and commitment (alitizam), etcetera. 51

My little brother overheard us studying these once and when he asked what we

were doing, my mother replied: ‘Nothing! I am teaching your sister the different types

of meats’. He was too young to understand anything about discretion and she worried

he would repeat those things outside the khayma. No one could find out our family

supported EL POLISARIO”52

later became Armed Struggle العنف الثوري Revolutionary violence 48 طرح المشاكل في مواضعها Discussing problems in the right positions 49 الثقة بالنفس والشعب(later became self-confidence and confidence in the people , الثقة بالنفس Self-confidence 50 الصراحة Revolutionary candor or frankness التضحية ,The rest of the revolutionary principles include: Sacrifice 51 الوقت المثالية,, yuiluutcnuP المحافظة على Idealismاالمانة , Honestyالصراحة البناءة, :which today is Constructive candor الثورية الزمني today has been dropped), Time factor) استغالل الفرص today has been dropped), Exploitation of opportunities) ,(new) االيمان today has been dropped), Faith) االستمرارية today has been dropped), Perseverance) العامل new) (these have all) االخالص للوطن new), Devotion to the homeland) التشبث بوحدة الشعب Clinging to the unity of the people been provided to me by the RASD Ministry of Information, 2012). 52 ‘Suadu’, 65 years old, 26th May 2013.

95 We distributed pamphlets, wrote on walls, we sewed flags of our country, we

spread awareness so that more and more people would join the POLISARIO. When

they saw how serious we were, Spain created its own party, the PUNS (Party of

Sahrawi National Unity). They asked all Sahrawis to register with their party but when

the PUNS celebrated its first congress, we showed up and started to raise the flags of

the POLISARIO’s instead! Then we ran away faaast!!!! Once, al-falagha entered the

PUNS office, stole their documents, passed them on to us, we hid them inside our

milafhat (female Sahrawi dress), carried them home and burnt them! The response from

Spain was brutal. Many men were detained, imprisoned and tortured after that. My

sister’s husband was hit in the liver with a bayonet and he suffered from it his entire

life. We (women) visited the jails daily. We brought the detained food. We even

blackmailed officers to let them out of jail. That was when they killed Martyr Hafed

Buyema (the first POLISARIAN martyr). They tortured him to death in jail. His death

destroyed us all 53.

The day that the UN planes landed in El Aaiun (in reference to a UN mission

sent to the Spanish Sahara in 1975 to discuss the decolonization of the territory), we

dropped the PUNS flags the government had given us, and took out our POLISARIO

flags from beneath our milafhat shouting ‘Spain OUT’ ‘We are not Moroccan nor

Mauritanian’, ‘We are Sahrawi’ 54.”

We saw the ‘Green March’ (the march of thousands of Moroccan military and

civilians marching down to the Western Sahara on the 26th of November of 1975)

coming in because our friq was on a plateau at the time. I remember the radio was cut

53 Embarka, 60 years old, 12th June, 201

54 ‘Suadu’, 65 years old, 26th May 2013

96 out that day. All the men left the friq immediately. We stayed behind in so much fear,

waiting for the men to return with news, but we could not sleep and when we saw the

Moroccans walking in our direction, we took our children and walked South until we

arrived in El Aaiun (the capital city of the “Spanish Sahara”). I found my parents there,

but I could not convince them to come with us, I never saw them again 55.

Hundreds of women and children were killed. Bombs shelled rows of men

down as they prayed for their families. The POLISARIO’s leaders told us to move

towards Algeria for safety. I remember seeing people burying their property under the

sand, many thought they were returning soon, but we lost our memories and treasures.

Our husbands stayed in the mountains with el POLISARIO and we walked for days,

with our children, with the elderly, with injured men. For days, all we heard was the

sound of bombs exploding around us. No one could continue living peacefully after

Morocco entered. It was unbelievable to see so many people escaping. Some died of

dehydration, some died of cold, some women died giving birth… some found food

along the way, and others did not…56 We saw how one of the planes that had

bombarded our encampment was taken down by the POLISARIO Front. We had

nothing to neither eat nor drink that night but we continued walking until we reached

Bir Taulat, a well nearby Rabuni (the administrative province of the Republic located in

Southern Algeria). When we woke up, a group of Algerian men came to our

55 ‘Khuya’, 74 years old, 30th May, 2012 56 Suadu’, 65 years old, 26th May 2013.

97 assistance. The land had nothing: there were no animal footprints anywhere, no one and

nothing seemed to live there, just a few birds…

I remember the night of the 27th of February of 1976 vividly… News spread that

there was a party to celebrate the constitution of our new Republic… my friends and I

cried with joy. We thought that meant we had already won! We went to Bir Lehlu (a

region found in the Western Sahara and in today’s “liberated areas”) and we heard

Martyr El Uali giving his speech. We thought we had found our independence at

last…57

While transcribing and translating this part of the interview (originally into Spanish),

Embarka (my friend and research assistant, a young woman who belongs to the generation born into exile; see chapter two for an introduction of her) and I exchanged an ironic smile. The anecdote Khadaya was recalling, that moment when she and her friends misinterpreted the proclamation of the Sahrawi Republic for the Western Sahara’s independence, took place in

1976. We were listening to her anecdote thirty-six years after, sitting in a Sahrawi Republic that was still on Algerian land. After a few seconds of a disheartened pause, Embarka said:

Our people live off dreams since we arrived here, especially in those times. Growing up, my mother always told me: My daughter, don’t worry. By the time you turn seventeen years old and start thinking of getting married, we will not be here. That is something I will never be able to tell my own children.

I typed Embarka’s comment into the interview’s transcription immediately. Her sore comment bespeaks the fraught exercise of transacting affect across generations. Expressing a contradictory set of affective attachments and investments, her resentment at having been the receptacle of false dreams is coupled with a longing to reproduce her mother’s emotional

57 ‘Khadaya’, 60 years old, 29th of May 2012

98 labour vis-à-vis her own children. Embarka’s words suggest an anxiety-ridden contradiction that produces fear; a fear of the consequences of not being able to pass on the hope her own mother diligently and lovingly cultivated in her, a fear that points to one of the ways in which the symbolic violence of a colonial meantime manifests itself in the everyday life of Sahrawi citizen-refugees.

2.4 Building the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (1975-1991)

What I most remember is that there was nothing in this land. It was bad land, but

Allah helped us and Algeria welcomed us. There were many of us there, but almost no

food, no shelter and no blankets. We lived for months with nothing above us, and

nothing beneath us.58 We only had our skin and our songs to battle against the wind

and the cold: “The revolution is beautiful and I… ‘ya lali’ (lyrics of a popular

revolutionary song. ‘ya lali’ is an emotive onomatopoeia, expressing being

overwhelmed).59

I remember when they started distributing gas bottles, we shared one between six

or seven families and the POLISARIO distributed food that Algeria and Libya gave

them. They were the only two Arab countries that helped us. We also started receiving

emergency relief tents. Families with more than six people or those with elders or

injured people were given priority. Everyone else shared, we slept like sardines in a can

until each woman could get her own tent. Women started weaving carpets from dry

58 ‘Khadaya’, 60 years old, 29th of May 2012 59 “Aminetu”, 65 years old (approx., she never told anything about her date of birth), 15th March, 2012.

99 grass like in al-badia, except this time we did not make them for our families. We gave

them to the government and it was them who decided who needed them the most. 60

We sent our children to Algeria, to Cuba and to Russia so that they could study.

That was before all those NGOs and those human rights organisations arrived, and with

the help of God we were able to create our Republic here, from nothing. For the first

few years, all we did was brick! There were no men then. We used our hands because

there were barely any spades. We had little material and little men. We built our

institutions, our hospitals, our nurseries, our government offices. We became more

educated and we worked so much, always respecting the orders of our government.” 61

Figure 11. Building the Republic. Image from the Sahrawi Republic’s National Archive based in the Province of Rabuni. Image taken in late seventies or early eighties, the exact date unknown.

60 Suadu’, 65 years old, 26th May 2013. She also described to me in detail how she assisted a woman’s birth during the displacement. A baby girl was born, and a POLISARIO car arrived in time to drive them both to Algeria. Napalm and white phosphorous, banned by the Geneva Conventions were used during these attacks. 61 ‘Mariam’, 61 years old, 10th July 2013

100

Whilst active men defended their territory through combat in and around the Western

Sahara, women in the Sahrawi Republic organized into administrative committees (al-tanzim alidari), specialized into different domains that included artisan production, resource distribution, education, health and justice/social affairs. All political cells had an appointed

ʿarifa, a female leader with the task of mediating between her cell (al-tanzim al-siyasi) and other structures within the Republic’s administration, such as the hayy (neighbourhood), daira

(district), wilaya (province) and the POLISARIO’s leadership (Lippert, 1985; Wilson, 2016:

58-59).

Figure 12. Women gathered in a meeting. Image from the Sahrawi National Archive, based in Rabuni. The picture was taken in the late nineteen seventies. The exact date of the photograph is unknown.

101 Khadaya worked in the artisanal committee, where they weaved carpets and flags for the government, as well as socks, hats and gloves for combatants. She remembers weaving large carpets with the faces of world leaders patterned into them for display on occasion of their visits to the Republic. Khuya worked in the justice committee, which looked after social affairs. They were trained by al-qudaa ─experts in the Malikite school of Islamic jurisprudence followed by the Republic─ on how to mediate conflicts between spouses in order to avoid and, if need be, facilitate divorces. Justice commitees also organized weddings, making sure the governor was available to officiate the ceremony.

Suadu’s second marriage took place in the Republic during this early revolutionary period. When we asked her to tell us about the celebration, she answered: “It was simple”.

“Just like her mother’s” she said, pointing at Embarka, and added: “And just like hers and her’s”, pointing her finger in several directions outside of her khayma as if indicating that her wedding celebration had been just as simple as that of any other citizen-refugee.

We married with lentils and white beans cooked with wood. Mahr (Islamic

bridewealth) was something symbolic. Each bride got an Algerian dinar or so. The

judge of the wilaya came and so did the head of the daira. They read us our rights and

responsibilities in marriage. There was no make-up and no one wore new clothes. A

woman from the committee of social affairs brought me a traditional and clean milhafah

dyed in nila (a natural dark blue dye found in al-badia). I wore it and then they passed it

on to another woman who was getting married right after me and in the same tent. We

celebrated one day and one night only. There was no music and no dancing. Someone

stood up to make a political speech, we sang a revolutionary song (al-nidal), but we

could not celebrate because everyone was mourning someone in those days.

102 At this point, Embarka interjected to tell me: “She has a martyr son”, to which Suadu replied: “Yes… I have a martyr son, but I also have Martyr El Uali and so many other martyrs whose names I can’t even remember.”

The way in which Suadu stoically equated the death of her son with that of the charismatic leader and first Secretary General of the POLISARIO Front, Martyr El Uali, communicated to us that, for Suadu, the life of her son was as important as that of the countless Sahrawi martyrs whose names she could not possibly recall. Sublimating the sacrifice of her own son to the larger, national cause, Suadu’s practice of remembering allowed her to perform herself as a revolutionary woman, a munadila. Importantly, Khadaya’s performance of her sacrificial duty to the nation acquired legitimacy through her descriptions of the politics of egalitarianism practiced during those times. Her wedding celebration, Suadu insisted, was just as simple as that of Embarka’s mother’s and just as simple as anyone else’s mother in her neighbourhood.

These were times when the little resources available to citizen-refugees were (at least imagined) to be equally shared by all. Everything was shared, including labour, everyone’s life contributed to the same cause and, because of this, everyone’s life was worth the same, from the life of Martyr El Uali, the first Secretary General of the POLISARIO Front, to Suadu’s son.

Whereas this pooling and gendered distribution labour resembled a pre-revolutionary organisation of labour amongst the Sahrawi—recall women pooled their labour in nomadic encampments and looked after all tasks when men were absent, either grazing for extending periods of time, for commerce or battle—the radical egalitarianism that a socialist-inspired

Republic aspired to cultivate in their citizen-refugees was new. This new version of the firgan housed women of mixed tribal affiliations and social status, requiring the development of new emotional dispositions and attitudes between them. Khadaya, who worked in the artisanal

103 committee until 1990, described the new forms of kinship that women established amongst themselves during these years like this:

We were forced to leave our babies in nurseries shortly after they were born

because we could not stop working, even while we were pregnant. This was new. Before

the revolution we would have never dreamed of leaving our children in the hands of

strange women, but those times things were different; we lived around strangers but we

looked after one another like family. In those times, you could go inside the tent of any

of your neighbours, pick up something you needed and use it, without permission…

everything was everyone’s back then, there was enormous fraternity between us62.

Everyone had to work during those times… Every morning the leader of the

committee checked on us to make sure we had woken up. Each committee was in charge of

cleaning neighbourhoods on a rotating basis. We had to inspect inside the tent of every

woman to see if she was being hygienic, we checked the schools and the clinics, and we

had to report when something was dirty. Look! Even what we cooked at home was an

order from the government: on Mondays lentils, on Tuesdays white beans…Money was

prohibited and so was saying who our families were (this is in reference to the tribal

identity). That was prohibited too63.

We had to volunteer for our struggle, we had no option, you know, we worked hard,

very hard all day, but when the night came we did not want to sleep. Sometimes we would

spend entire nights awake singing and dancing revolutionary songs like: ‘The war of

liberation is guaranteed by the people’, ‘The land of the Sahara is free; if anyone dares

invade us, the land will taste bitter’ ‘ya lali, ya halali, ya nas el watan nadali’: “Oh my,

62 ‘Suadu’, 65 years old, 26th May 2013 63 ‘Khadaya’, 60 years old, 29th of May 2012

104 Oh my me. Oh people, the nation is calling me. We dedicated many songs to our martyrs.

We had to sing to keep going… We sang in groups and now when you play these songs to

me I can’t even distinguish my voice from that of Khabuza, Salama Mint Shahed, Aisha

Mint Bauba… and so many others… We had to learn to live together and when we had

problems, we resolved them through music and theatre. For example, if a woman was lazy

or if a woman did not clean her baby well, or if she kept her khayma very untidy, we made

a theatre piece out of it, to shame her, politely. We would not use her name but everyone

knew whom the play was about. We had to make sure everyone participated in the work. 64

Indeed, women not only learned to relate to each other in new ways during this period, they were also disciplined into new work rhythms, standards of hygiene and trained to acquire skills and competencies that were unlike those that had been required of them in nomadic lifestyles. In 1978, an entire military camp, known as the school of the 27th February, was built to train women into becoming Sahrawi munadilat. The young women sent to this school experienced new ways of being that sometimes involved the transgression of established gender norms. Hebba belonged to one of the first promotions of students in the 27th of

February:

I’ll tell you the truth. I did not want to go at first. I was scared to go to the 27th of

February because over there women lived like men, like combatants. We could wear our

milafhat (female dresses) only inside our tent. Outside we always had to be dressed in

military clothes! We heard the whistle in the morning at 5 a.m. daily, we had to jump out

of our sleep, put on our trousers, and before eating or drinking anything we had to run

around the premises of the school! In the afternoon, we studied: one day we learnt to read

and write, another how to cook, some specialised in sewing, others were trained as nurses

64 ‘Senia’, 55 years old, March 2012

105 and teachers for small children. We learned typing and accounting... Some women did

things that were wrong: there were those who smoked cigarettes and there were those

who liked men too much and sometimes there were those women who did not like men…

when things went wrong like that, these women were excluded from the group until they

apologized publically. It did not happen often and they were always forgiven. It was not

their fault; it was… all those women living together65.

Our shared tents were built in rows, like those of soldiers. We reserved a tent for when our husbands visited. Most of our husbands were fighting, but they came to see us sometimes. We put a clean turban and a zaraʿa (customary male dress) inside the free tent so that men could wash and change from their dirty uniform into nice clothes for the night. We spent a night or two with them and when they left we would wash the clothes and leave them there for the next couple.66 It was hard for me to adapt at the beginning but soon I became close to everyone. I still visit my friends from the school, and when we remember those years, we cry together. We were like sisters.67

Figure 13. The premises for the old school of the 27th of February. Since 2011 the school has become another province of the Sahrawi Republic and renamed Buyudur. By author, 2009.

65 ‘Hebba', 64 years old, 11th June. 66 ‘Suadu’, 65 years old, 26th May 2013 67 ‘Hebba', 64 years old, 11th June.

106 In contrast to the bulk of academic and journalistic accounts, which tend to romanticize the role played by Sahrawi women in the construction of the Sahrawi Republic, the women I spoke to emphasize the self-sacrifice they exercised and the harsh discipline they were submitted to during this period. The revolution was portrayed as demanding and difficult and yet never ruthless. The time of revolution was memorialized as exhausting, sometimes shocking and unpleasant, but simultaneously thrilling and often joyful.

In Aminetu’s words “a true munadila works for her nation and educates herself. She does not wait to receive orders; she knows what she does best and she is not shy to do so for the best of her people”. Above all, these were represented to me as dutiful times, times when individual desires and projects were entirely collapsed into collective modes of desiring. Like the lyrics of the revolutionary song quoted earlier suggests “The revolution is beautiful and I…

‘ya lali”. The “I’ of this verse could come to stand for the subject of the Sahrawi munadila, a figure interpellated to surrender her wills to the revolution and to its overwhelming and fast paced temporality.

A partial breach of hishma (modesty codes) was a very important condition for the development of the Sahrawi munadila. Hishma is a broad concept that describes a set of appropriate feelings (associated with shame) and behaviours (associated with restraint) one should have in relation to sexuality, rendering the very subject of marriage (and the sexual activities it implies) taboo between generations. For women: dancing, singing, exhibiting one’s body, and using a loud voice in the presence of non-related or older men are associated with provocative sexuality to be restrained through hishma. Hishma also dictates male’s comportment vis-à-vis their elders, prohibiting contact with their male in laws, and requiring them to cover their faces in the presence of large female gatherings. Adhering to hishma signals

107 respect and deference towards individuals of greater social status and it was central to the moral order that legitimated gendered and others forms of social inequalities and hierarchies in a Saharan pre-revolutionary social and political order (see Abu-Lughod (1986) on the concept of hasham amongst the Awlad’Ali in Southern Egypt. the Awlad’Ali in Southern Egypt)

However, as opposed to the discretion and timidity of the virtuous woman prior to the revolution, the figure of the Sahrawi munadila was praised and rewarded for expressing her political (yet never her more personal) opinions and sentiments in front of large audiences. The munadila was praised for delivering speeches, poetry, songs and dancing, sometimes in front of video and photographic cameras, commended for mirroring the belligerence of the Sahrawi

68 mukatil (combatant) in her steadfastness, resolve, joyfulness, confidence and outspokenness.

Aminetu, who worked in the health committees running sanitary checks on clinics, recounted an anecdote of a theatre performance that took place in the province of Smara during the war: “Women from every daira attended and so did many combatants who were visiting the camps at that time. When the music started to play, a very beautiful young woman stood up from the audience and started dancing. Just like that! Everyone started to cheer for her, until a commander stood up and, looking at her, recited the following poem69:

“The eyes of one who has aged (ʿainin al-shab)

Over the dance of a modern young woman (fi raks ṭfla ʿsria)

The pain in his heart persists (lyh’atu fi el qalb yentafzu)

Oh God, Abida’s eyes (ʿainin Aʿbida alyuad)

68 Note how Khadaya earlier on in this chapter described women as being “very modest”. I found that most of my elderly interlocutors described hishma romantically, choosing to emphasize the respect for the elderly it is also associated with. Only one of my interlocutors, Khuya (74 years of age), described hishma to me through the register of fear: ‘As young girls we learnt to feel shame and if a girl didn’t behave well she had to be corrected by all so as to not dishonor her family. We grew up with the fear of our parents or our older brothers’ behavior towards us if we misbehaved, so we learned to suppress a lot of things. Sahwa is a term used to describe a similar concept, yet hishma is more frequently used in the Sahrawi Republic today.

69 These verses are attributed to the Sahrawi commander and poet Biga Uld Baali. The Sahrawi poet Bahia Awah translated these verses from Hassaniya into Spanish. The translation into English from Spanish is my own.

108

If they are still observing us (ltmu fina yentazru)

We will succeed, we will be sure to succeed (lahi ntsru u la ghatʿaa mafruz alina ntsru)”

These verses, whilst idealizing the eyes of a particular woman (a‘bida), produce a slippage between the courage his love for this individual provoked in the commander and a tribute to all Sahrawi women, especially to the modern figure of the Sahrawi munadila, who was not ashamed to dance for and in front of her nation. The commander reads fervor for the nation in this woman’s dance, a fervor that assuages the pain he carries from the battlefield and strengthens his moral conviction for “a sure success in war”. One could also argue these verses are telling of a larger conflation between women and the Sahrawi nation, a conflation that, in feminizing the nation, increases the moral imperative to fight and protect it (see also

Allan, 2014).

Narratives of the early revolutionary period have none of the calm, the peace and the tranquility conveyed in the accounts of pre-revolutionary times discussed earlier. No doubt, the nationalist forms imposed on a movement through an international politics of recognition, mass displacement, dispossession and the constant presence of death, required new social and political adaptations that broke with the way of life of a pre-revolutionary past, and some of these differences were made explicit to me. However, I suggest that the overriding narratives of these two periods are more aligned than juxtaposed.

There is a striking resemblance in the ethic conveyed through the descriptions of both periods. There is a way in which they form part of a single, dignified and proud narrative.

Narratives about the revolutionary period conjure imaginaries of self-sufficiency, unity, collective expressions of joy, egalitarianism and spiritual integrity that were similarly evoked

109 of pre-revolutionary pasts. To be sure, this early revolutionary period was a difficult time, yet it was possible for these women to account for these challenges in ways that cohered with a prior order, in continuity with the collective values of a nomadic past. Indeed, two of the most important collective principles of a prior social and political order were respected by the

POLISARIO’s leadership during this time, namely that of exercising a very distributive economy and of adhering to a fervent commitment for political autonomy. These were times full of resolve, saturated by the practice of building futures.

Whereas, what I am able to offer here is a staged account of these past narratives, their existence goes beyond the tape recorder. The memory of this early revolutionary period had a tangible, almost “ghostly” presence (Gordon, 2008) in the Sahrawi Republic during the years I was doing my fieldwork. It was present, in the two senses of the word, on placards with political slogans hung on the walls of the Republic institutional buildings, in poems sung in political commemorations and inscribed in the language employed by the POLISARIO leadership in their speeches and in that of their political supports. Memories of this period were shared with me, not just by an older generation but also by those born into this early revolution period, coming of age in the radically transformed conditions of a colonial meantime. It is not unusual to hear this generation of young adults mourn the years recounted to them by their parent’s generation; those years’ full purpose and hope. Years when everyone lived simple material lives, when inequality appeared to be virtually non-existent and everyone worked in concert towards the same goal.

The composite of memories presented here substantiates the most dominant narrative of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism in the present (of my fieldwork). The POLISARIO leadership has not changed significantly since those times and younger generations play a role

110 in keeping the memories of this early revolutionary period alive. Consider the following images from a social media website created by one of the branches of the Sahrawi Youth

Union (UJSARIO) in the year 2015. The text superimposed on to the photographs translates into English as: “There are people who narrate history”; a meta-commentary of this group’s own labour contributing to the collective memorialisation of these early years of revolution in which the symbolic figure of the Sahrawi munadila features prominently.

Figure 14. Female combatants holding riffles and babies based in the rear-guard of the Republic.

111

Figure 15. Training as nurses. Picture taken in the nineteen eighties. The exact date of the photograph is unknown.

112

Figure 16. Studying. Picture taken in the early nineteen eighties. The exact date of the photograph is unknown.

Figure 17. Organising. Picture Taken in the early nineteen eighties. The exact date of the photograph is unknown.

113 Nevertheless, as Embarka’s comment in the previous section suggests, the affect attached

to these memories does not necessarily mirror the emotional states of those who celebrate

such pasts in the present. Recall the complex set of feelings she described when she said she

could not herself instill the same hope as her mother did in her to own children.

2.5 A Colonial Meantime: No War and No Peace (1991-2013)

“I remember when we heard about the ceasefire, of course. My son was born in 1991 so I felt relieved he would not have to fight. Our sons would stop dying, alhamdulillah (thanks to

God). We thought independence had arrived. We all felt a strong joy” At this point, Aminetu, the woman who had received me in her khayma numerous times, the same person who had agreed to share close to four hours’ worth of anecdotes, stories and commentaries about her life history with me, now fell into a silence. I asked further:

- “And how was the period that followed, the first years of waiting for the referendum? How

did your life change after that?

- “People became more comfortable and less nervous. Before, we were always living with

the fear of death…but we were also fighting… well you know how we call this life we live

in now: without war, without peace. Hag.”

The ambivalence in Aminetu’s “hag” sealed our conversation. Hag, short for “hakika”

(meaning “truth”), is used regularly in speech by way of affirmation. After her “hag” our conversation lost intensity. I switched my recorder off. Aminetu’s “hag” sounded to me like a painful and pensive sigh, which also seemed to communicate a disinterest to continue talking.

Her eyes drifted from us slightly, as if announcing, politely “and now, I have nothing left to add”.

114 Prior to 1991, aid reaching the camps had been scarce and delivered mostly by socialist and non-aligned states. From the peace treaty onwards, MINURSO and the UNHCR established a base each in the Sahrawi Republic, and with them, an entire plethora of development NGOs, foreign associations and solidarity groups started operating in the camps, some temporarily, and some on a permanent basis. The working committees and political cells that organized women’s work during the revolution dissolved around the mid-nineties. From

1991 onwards, money began circulating on an everyday basis. Economies outside of the control of the Sahrawi government started emerging and, with them, a certain sense of comfort and normalcy installed itself in the daily life of the Sahrawi Republic. Meanwhile, the peace process initiated by the UN seems to be getting nowhere. As the political satire of the following image circulated by Sahrawi youth in social media suggests, the UN is stuck in the desert, it seems.

Figure 18. Meme circulated in social media shared by Sahrawi youth, 2010.

115

To a proud Sahrawi driver, the Land Rover of today has inherited the symbolic association with resilience and virility that riding a camel through the desert had for Sahrawi nomads. Driving through the desert and surviving it requires endurance but also a specialised knowledge of the landscape. One needs to be a connoisseur of the hills and the stars in the sky that provide direction. One needs to be familiar with the paths one should follow to avoid getting wheels stuck in the sand. The circulation of this picture of a UN’s land rover stuck in the sand is hence meant to inspire pathos, with the UN being represented here as a maladroit meddling foreigner.

Despite the profound impact that these structural changes imposed on the everyday life of the Republic, Aminetu was by no means my only interlocutor to display a lack of interest in talking about the period initiated by the 1991 “peace process”. I tended to feel that I had to pull my interlocutors’ tongues in order to discuss the ceasefire or the period that followed it: “Yes, I remember the day of the ceasefire…” Silence. “What do you remember?” “I was here in the camps when I heard about it…”70. Silence. A tension enveloped these discussions and I too became silent, intimidated by the feeling that my questions were becoming intrusive.

More eloquent answers on the immediate post-ceasefire moment produced ambivalent accounts about the present that quickly blurred into accounts about the future and its promises:

Things have changed since, circumstances have changed, we live more comfortably,

we have more things but we still maintain good customs, like showing respect for the

elderly and things like that, even if it is done differently now. You know… before, if

70 ‘Khadaya’, 60 years old, 29th May 2012

116 someone came to visit you it was very important that you treated them very well and all

that, now all of those rules are more relaxed… but we have kept some things, like the

milhafah (women’s wear) and the zaraʿa: (men’s wear). Each country has their customs

and things are changing here because so many of our children have grown up in other

countries, Cuba, Spain… but some families still conserve good customs, it depends on

the family…and our women now have a good education; they have more training and

responsibility. We have female ministers and parliamentarians. We have brought our

level up as women. Now our daughters speak languages and they have other tools to

fight71

Other times, the post-ceasefire period was altogether skipped, omitted from accounts that blended immediately into futures:

Yes, I remember the day of the ceasefire, we went out and we did asqarit (female

ululations), we yelled, we cried of joy, we sang and we danced. We had a big party,

everyone danced in front of everyone, the old, the young, the men, the women. Nothing

else mattered on that day (in reference to modesty codes). We thought we were finally

returning to al-mantiqa. When we finally return, we will have very beautiful things to

share with you72

Or:

Since 1991? Well I stopped my work in the artisan factories in 1990. Look, our Sahrawi

family will not sell our land and no one has the right to do that in our name because it is

shared. Our land is something we share amongst us; you understand? We share it between

us. If your parents leave you a house, can you take it away from your brothers and sisters?

71 Suadu’, 65 years old, 26th May 2013 72 Nana’, 58 years old, 25th of May 2012

117 You can’t because it wasn’t your house to begin with! The sons of our martyrs will never

forgive us if we don’t return with independence. The Sahrawi family will return to al

mantiqa when there is dignity, independence and peace, like there was before. I don’t

know when I will die, but it will either be in my free country or here. 73

The person who pondered the longest with me over the post–ceasefire moment was a slightly younger woman in her late forties, the Secretary General of the National Union of

Sahrawi Women. She told me:

When we heard the news of the ceasefire all our thoughts were projected on our return.

Women began to take the roofs off their houses, making chests with the tin to store their

belongings for their trip back. Those with children studying abroad looked for telephones

asking them to come back. I remember that time as a kind of storm… You know? At the

beginning of a storm everything feels strong and it all happens so fast and then it slowly

fades away and suddenly everything feels slower than ever. It was a very strange

feeling… then there were all those talks, the talk of the peace process that, for us, feels

like a retro-process.... During the war we knew many important countries did not care

about our struggle but we didn’t notice. We found consolation in the successes of our

soldiers. Now important countries are helping us, but this waiting is very difficult. I

always say there are many types of violence and this waiting is a violence which is

invisible.

Paradoxically, the 1991 peace-process introduced an invisible form of violence in the lives of citizen-refugees, a form of violence for which there also appears to be a scarcity of words. The Sahrawi present is marked by neither victory nor vanquish. The present is inserted into a prolonged waiting that produces a sense of time as time stopped, or suspended, a stasis

73 Hebba', 64 years old, 11th June, 2012.

118 that challenges signification within the vocabulary available to this generation of women.

However, the same passage of time has seen the production of new affects, practices and materialities. The peace-process’ protraction, its inability to secure the return of citizen- refugees, the increased presence of expatriated workers in the Republic, the construction of roads, electrical grids and other infrastructures with foreign money, all feel at odds with the revolutionary goal of return to a decolonized Western Sahara. The chasm between these two times: the “historical time” in which the struggle finds dominant representation, versus the experience of the “attritional time” (Lazar, 2014) of the struggle as lived might simultaneously be raising the unutterable and perhaps unthinkable suspicion: did we lose the war and has no one told us?

The “strange feeling” that the Women’s Union Secretary General is at pains to describe points to the symbolic form of violence that is embedded into the misnomer of this peace- process. She said “it is called a peace-process, but it feels like a retro-process” and this feeling points, not to the misrecognition of the enduring colonial interests and relations suspending the conflict in time, but to its opposite: precisely because such power relations are recognized by my interlocutors, because they are felt, they hurt and they are uncomfortable, they are silenced.

If silence can be thought of as a heuristic device that “best exposes when and where power gets into the story” (Trouillot, 1995: 28), this collective silence signals this generation of women’s refusal to allow the powers regimenting a colonial meantime over their struggle to enter their story.

2.6 Conclusion

During the war, the practice of building a state in exile was understood as constitutive of the revolution. It translated the ideological substance of the movement for national liberation

119 into a tangible and practiced reality, a form of combat. With the end of war, reality became a lot more uncertain and confusing. As if mirroring global geopolitical investments to maintain the status-quo across the region of North Africa, the period initiated by the unproductive peace- process of 1991 is turning the project of the Sahrawi Republic, originally conceived as an instrument for revolution —a temporary laboratory for the national movement— into the very substance of its opposite: a status-quo.

The Sahrawi Republic ─once coherent in its temporariness─ is rendered contradictory by the conditions of a peace-process that begins to feel permanent. The Republic is now both an established nation-state and a movement; a contradictory ‘state’, in the double sense of the term, resourced by, sometimes, dubious political allies, and sustaining itself out of the

“confusing ruins of socialist futures past” (Scott, 2014: 174). The Republic is in a state that challenges signification. The increased robustness of the Sahrawi Republic is an expression of an ad hoc resilience of the Sahrawi struggle that has also come about inadvertently. The length of this prolonged waiting had escaped the predictions of a leadership left to improvise. This prolonged waiting elapses largely outside the regeneration of an officially articulated political narrative that maintains its legitimacy through its capacity to continue to declare the Republic temporal. There are no words for these times.

How does a woman like Aminetu, for whom “the beginning” of her story would be the

Sahrawi revolution, continue to affirm herself as the subject and the author of her own history during these estranged times? How does the revolutionary subject of the Sahrawi munadila, honoured as well as performed through the narration of these pasts, resume a public narrative of her struggle when her destiny appears to be so profoundly marked by agents as abstract as an end to a global cold-war or as remote as agreements signed in the offices of the UN?

120 Aminetu’s silence might constitute her quiet acknowledgement of the fact that those ethical and political values that her generation’s labour represented cannot be reproduced through the labour of a younger generation in the present. The period initiated by the 1991 ceasefire has transformed household morphologies and economies (chapter 2), consolidated the institutions of the exiled Republic (chapter 3), reformulated marriage practices (chapter 4) and affective regimes (chapter 5) in ways that make the revolutionary ideals of the war-period increasingly challenging to live up to. A collective silence reveals the discrepancies between the political habitus of different generations and of the difficulties of producing a language to represent this new habitus under the discursive conditions of a colonial meantime.

After 1991, the strong egalitarian values that characterised the narratives of these revolutionary and pre-revolutionary pasts, the ethical disposition sustaining the figure of the

Sahrawi munadila (and, somewhat by extension, of the Sahrawi nation) can no longer be easily framed into the same narrative of self-sufficiency, collective expressions of joy, of a clear unity, egalitarianism and spiritual integrity. So, instead, there is a collective silence.

These halted narratives are protecting the future from the confusing ruins of the present.

The Sahrawi women whose pasts have been presented in this chapter are resisting any memorialization of the quarter of a century that has passed since the UN-mediated ceasefire, at least in intergenerational and international conversations such as the ones described here and for the time being. Their silence keeps alive a time that has already become past, yet their work of salvage is not an effort in archiving, it is not an exercise of historical tribute; it is the work of preserving a possible future, a form of labour in and of itself. It is through a silence that makes

121 the revolution present how an attachment to the futures this generation of women once dreamed of is being protected.

2.7 Coda

Perhaps no conversation evoked the future-motivated temporality of these halted narratives better for me than my conversations with El Khadra Mint Mabruk. She was the daughter of

Mabrouk, a haratin (which translates into a freed slave) captured during a battle or raid

(ghazzi) in Mali. As a young girl, she remembers breaching the modesty codes associated to her gender, joining spicy poetic competitions between men during wedding celebrations: “No one” she said “…and nothing has ever been able to stop me from saying what I wanted to say”.

Today her poetry enjoys popular acclaim and the Sahrawi Ministry of Culture presents her as one of their official national poets.

Several Saharawi national poets affirm poetry is a gift from God. A poet is gifted with talent (muhiba), external to the poets themselves and, as such, it is considered spiritually and morally flawed to profit individually from it (Gimeno et al., forthcoming). El Khadra’s own narrative sacralises the revolution, framing it as the source of her talent: “you see, the revolution made poets into every one of us”. She told me the might of her tongue was infused into her by the revolution and, for years, El Khadra brought solace to her struggling compatriots through her verses, glorifying the political leadership of the POLISARIO, finding words and rhythms to shame their enemies elegantly and to describe the details of the

POLISARIO’s victorious battles. Not without good reason is she known as the poet of the rifle,

“shʿra albunduqia”.

When I asked El Khadra if she had dedicated any verses to the ceasefire, a silence opened between us. She changed topics, making a passing comment about the radio program playing

122 as background to our conversation. I changed my question: “Do you still compose poetry?” To that she replied: “I sing only when I see good things… When our army put down its weapons, my tongue stopped.” 74

74 The word used for poet in Hassaniya is mgani and it derives from the Arabic to sing (mughani). El Khadra can neither read nor write, her entire poetic composition is oral, although many of her poems have been collected in a forthcoming anthology (Gimeno Martín, et al.).

123 3 Living up to Hospitality

In one of the scenes from the ethnographic documentary “Legna: Sahrawi Poetry

Speaks”, poet Bachir Uld Ali explains: “The Sahrawi people are characterized by their generosity (karam). In the old times, someone who was known to have received guests and not fed them properly could no longer serve as a witness in court: that person was no longer be trusted in the eyes of a judge” (00:13:21-00:13:37)75.

In Bachir Uld Ali’s account, hospitality performs respectability; it procures status and legitimacy, constituting a virtuous form of behaviour that renders people dependable and known to the larger society; the mark of a trustworthy person. With this declaration, the poet evokes a pre-revolutionary order in which political authority was contingent upon a person’s hospitality (García, 2010: 12), a political order in which women, through their labour of hospitality and from the customary fields of power of their khiyam could influence their husband’s political reputation and, by extension, that of their kin. The poet’s assertion animates a past-order of things that, like the narratives of our elderly female interlocutors discussed in the previous chapter and envelops pre-revolutionary times with a nostalgic aura that speaks more of present aspirations than about such pasts. That is, he mobilises the affective cadence attached to these pasts, using them to represent and to furnish Sahrawi nationalism with meaning in the present.

This chapter suggests it is impossible to understand the importance of performances, such as Bachir Ali’s, outside consideration of the fact that it is, in part, thanks to an enduring moral economy of hospitality, that the Sahrawi Republic is able to sustain itself in place to this

75 “Legna: Sahrawi Poetry Speaks” was directed by Bahia Awah, Juan Robles and Juan Carlos Gimeno, and was awarded first prize at FISAHARA Film Festival 2014. I assisted this project through my affiliation with its production company, the association “Antropología en Acción”.

124 day. Specifically, it demonstrates how women’s labour of hospitality constitutes a key social practice to the Saharawi Republic’s exercise of sovereignty-in-exile as well as for the performance of a Saharawi revolutionary nationalism as political movement. Furthermore, focusing on the transformations undergone by the space of the khayma over time, it shows how the exiled-Republic’s incorporation into a global commodity-based economy is transforming the materiality and the morphology of households and the associated livelihood arrangements of families within them in ways that beget new challenges for women’s labour of hospitality. In this way, it shows how anxieties produced over the perceived political paralysis of a Saharawi struggle need to be thought in relation to defies that a prolonged exile imposes over the

Republic’s capacity to assert its sovereignty through hosting.

In order to establish the connection between the labour of hosting and the Sahrawi

Republic’s governing capacities in exile, my analysis departs from new anthropological approaches to sovereignty. These approaches have elucidated the way in which the capacity to rule over a given population involves more than the control over the legitimate use of violence within a defined territory (Weber, 1965). Arguing for the need to decenter state power from our notions of sovereignty, Alice Wilson (2016: 8-11) focuses on how the making and unmaking of particular social relations enables the POLISARIO Front to govern over Sahrawi citizen- refugees. Based on her work with the Seminole American Indian tribe of Florida, Jessica

Cattelino (2008) frames sovereignty as a practice forged within interdependent and unequal economic relationships with “other” political communities. Finally, Audra Simpson’s notion of a “nested sovereignty” for the Mohawk in the USA/Canada (2014: 115-146) suggests spaces of sovereignty exist within and often across the borders of sovereign nation-states. Allowing us to account for gradations of sovereignty both within and between polities, in these approaches,

125 sovereignty is understood as a relationship of power that emerges out of concrete social practices that are necessarily unstable, requiring permanent reformulation and negotiation between different political actors.

Moreover, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s notion of “hostipitality” (2000) —a term he coined to express the close etymology between the words “hostility” and “hospitality” and the paradox inherent to the latter, ethically aspiring to welcome “the other” while retaining the power of invitation and expulsion over a “guest”—, scholars have already ascertained convergences between hospitality and sovereignty (Candea, 2012; Dagtas, 2014; Shryock,

2004, 2012). Involving a permanent negotiation between “self” and “other”, the practice of hospitality is discursively predicated upon asymmetrical power relations that inscribe visitors as “guests” expected to depart. However, whereas modern state power is typically performed through registers of solidity and permanence via violent technologies of rule such as the law, bureaucracies and physical borders, Andrew Shryock adverts us to how hospitality is an inherently unstable social domain, where the act of welcoming easily lends itself to the risk of trespassing and subordination (2004: 42). Drawing on this important insight, and in adhering to a conception of sovereignty as a capacity that originates in practices that, like those of hospitality, are subject to overriding structural conditions that make it inherently unstable, I think of hospitality not so much as an instrument of sovereignty but as a “test of sovereignty”

(Shryock, 2012: 20). That is, it is a practice situated in an interpretative ethical tradition (ibid) that I described as “a moral economy of hospitality”, out of which political legitimacy, a pre- requisite for the exercise of sovereignty, is derived. More specifically, I show how women’s labour of hospitality is one of the key practices enabling the Sahrawi Republic to exercise a de

126 facto sovereignty despite its location in Algeria and its extra-legal status and “liminal” (Turner,

1967) inclusion into international legal parameters, norms and forms.

The first section of this chapter describes the rhetorical temporal/spatial displacements, forms of labour and materialities that are involved in assembling hospitality into performances of Sahrawi nationalism. Similarly to what Anne Meneley has described for Yemeni families in the city of Zabid during the 1990s, hospitality is at once a collaborative and competitive effort that cultivates the status and reputation of entire families (1996: 58). Poet Bachir Uld Ali’s presentation of a Saharawi culture of generosity erases the way in which, in a pre- revolutionary order, hospitality was implicated in generating differential status between

Sahrawi tribes, families and individuals. However, significantly, he does so, not by eliminating competition altogether, but through a rhetorical move that scales up and displaces such competition from within the social fabric of a national-sphere to that of an international-sphere.

Implicated in the politics of a moral economy that performs legitimacy and seeks international recognition for Sahrawi nationalism, the poet’s temporal conflation of past and present lends itself to a second, spatial, conflation whereby the hospitality practiced in the domain of

Sahrawi households comes to stand for the morality and respectability of the Sahrawi nation at a global scale. The first part of this chapter describes how similar temporal and spatial displacements are involved in generating a metonymic relationship between practices of hospitality, the object of the khayma and the project of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism as a whole. Rather than describing this process of “scaling-up” as one that is merely metaphorical

(Hertzfeld, 1987: 76; Candea, 2012), I describe specific governmental practices and administration ─known as the systems of al-istikbal and al-tishirifat─ implicated in these performances of political legitimacy. Through these administrative systems, the POLISARIO

127 Front mobilises the labour of hospitality they carry out in the domain of their households to offer support for the government’s activities. Moreover, in participating in the administrative strategies of al-istikbal and al-tishirifat, women forge national and international social relations that derive legitimacy for the POLISARIO Front and allow the movement to exercise and perform an unstable sovereignty.

The second part of the chapter explores the tensions created in the disjuncture between nationalist representations of hospitality and its lived-in reality. One could say the legal category of the “refugee” —a “guest” denied assimilation into any given nation-state— represents the quintessential object of hospitality. In contradiction with the temporality of emergency upon which refugee camps are built, the Republic is undergoing processes of urbanization similar to those observed amongst refugee populations elsewhere in the world

(Agiers, 2002). The second section of this chapter shows how the Republic’s households

(khiyam) are undergoing spatial and morphological changes that are structurally intertwined with larger infrastructural transformations, changing economic arrangements between families, women’s agency and capacity to respond to changing gendered labour relations ─chief amongst them is the fact that most of Sahrawi women’s labour has become unwaged. The chapter discusses the challenges that such transformations impose on women’s labour of hospitality, with repercussions for the way in which Saharawi revolutionary nationalism regenerates into the present. That is, in reflecting upon the contradictions generated out of

Sahrawi citizen-refugees prolonged status as “guests” in Algeria, I show how the Republic’s traffic of guests offers women the opportunity to forge empowering relations through hosting, whilst simultaneously accounting for the frailty that the conditions of a colonial meantime superimposes upon these encounters.

128 The third and final section illustrates the way in which these contradictions come to surface in everyday life. Through an ethnographic description of a particular event: a household conflict that implicates Embarka ─as both my research assistant and my host─ and me ─as both her guest and her temporary employer─, the vignette shows how the disjuncture between the khayma’s signifier and signified becomes expressed and experienced through tensions over women’s capacity to exercise their labour of hospitality. I think of this anecdote as an illuminating moment “in which the intransigencies and irresolvable tensions ingrained in social and personal life (the two being inseparable) boiled to the surface and became, if only momentarily, part of public awareness for the participants as well as for the anthropologist”

(Kapferer 2012: 2). The vignette describes mundane frictions that emerge out of the historical contingencies of the present, illustrating how anxieties over hospitality simultaneously reflect and deflect off the specific challenge of procuring a fraught sovereignty in the liminal space of the Sahrawi Republic. Examining how the enduring colonisation of the Western Sahara makes living up to hospitality’s “test of sovereignty” (Shryock, 2012: 20) increasingly challenging, this chapter thinks of hospitality as a prism that allows for a bridging of the gap between small- scale ethnographic description and international political economy (cf. Hertzfeld in Candea &

Da Col, 2012: 15).

3.1 Scaling-up Women’s Labour of Hospitality onto the Sahrawi Republic

The Sahrawi Republic receives thousands of national and international visitors in any given year. Whereas most Sahrawi visitors (usually Saharawis in diaspora visiting their families) tend to travel over land, for security reasons, Algerian authorities prohibit foreigners to travel in private vehicles across the desert and I was told informally that Air Algerie doubles its yearly profits from its revenue for the Algiers to Tindouf journey alone. The

129 thousands of foreign visitors that the Sahrawi Republic receives annually constitute a mixed bag, anywhere from: journalists, representatives of organizations and associations in solidarity with the Sahrawi cause, development and humanitarian workers, professional politicians,

European families (mostly from Spain) who foster Sahrawi children over the summer through the program “Vacaciones en Paz”, and researchers, such as me. The peak seasons for international visits coincide with European holiday seasons and the Easter-week break is an especially popular time for visits.

Moreover, in any given year, the Sahrawi Republic hosts a minimum of five nationalist festivities. Typically, these include: the 12th of October, day of national unity, commemorating the day when Sahrawi elders agreed to hand over power to a younger POLISARIAN leadership in 1975; 27th of February, day of the proclamation of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic in exile, 1976; the 10th of May, day of the POLISARIO’s first national congress, 1973; the 20th of

May, the first day of armed struggle, 1973; and the 9th of June, the day in which the Martyr

Mustafa el Uali, the POLISARIO’S first Secretary General and charismatic leader, fell in battle in 197776. The Republic’s government stages these festivities with both a national and an international audience in mind, the former including Sahrawis in diaspora and residents of the occupied Western Sahara, who may either travel to participate in such festivities or participate as spectators, consuming the events through the Republic’s media (radio, TV, digital press).

International delegations ─composed of politicians, associations and journalists─ are mobilized through the political networks that operate in and around the dozens of the POLISARIO’s embassies and representations located abroad to attend these and other festivities of this kind every year.

76 The distinction between an embassy and a delegation depends on whether the nation-state hosting these officially recognizes the Sahrawi Republic as an independent state or otherwise as a movement of national liberation.

130 National and international delegates are similarly encouraged and invited to attend the

Republic congresses that take place every four to five years. The congresses that gather most international support tend to be those of the Women’s Union, the Youth Union, and the

POLISARIO Front’s General Congresses. Last but not least in international popularity are the

Sahrawi Ministry of Culture’s festivals such as the Festival of Sahrawi Culture (2008, 2009,

2010), the Conference of Sahrawi Arts and Artisanship, or others events that are co-run with foreign (mainly Spanish) associations of solidarity, most notably: the annual Sahrawi Arts

Festival, ARTifariti and the Sahrawi Film Festival, FiSahara. Other events that are particularly popular amongst foreigners are the annual marathon in the desert, Sahara Maratón, and the yearly march of protest to the Sahrawi separation wall in April.

Government-run programs for national festivities and/or congresses are events packed with conferences, political rallies, military marches, musical, dance and poetic performances that will typically exhibit large leather tents, the traditional khiyam (plural for khayma) that

Sahrawi nomads used as households in pre-revolutionary times. The following pictures provide a few images of these exhibitions:

131

Figure 19: The 10th of May Commemorations nearby El Aaiun. By author, 2013

Figure 20: Festival of Sahrawi Culture in Buyudur. By author, 2009.

132

Figure 21: The Seventh National Congress of the Sahrawi Women’s Union, Smara.

By author, 2015. As the first image shows, these tents are typically full of women, some of them dressed in the black and white silk milhafat, worn by Sahrawi nomads in pre-revolutionary times on special occasions such as weddings or religious celebrations. The tents typically display artisanal artifacts made out of animal hair, leather, metal, wood or stone: cereal grinds, seats used to ride camels, musical instruments and/or the wooden plaques used to study the Koran.

Inscribed with symbols from pre-revolutionary times, women’s bodies and these material artifacts mediate between the past and the present.

If war and displacement forcibly separated Sahrawi refugees from the means of producing khiyam, they have remained useful to the project of a revolutionary nationalism, serving as a unifying, national symbol that all displaced citizen-refugees can relate to, irrespective of their kinship group or prior status. These folkloric exhibitions sometimes enable the commodification of “Sahrawi culture”, allowing foreigners to consume nationalist

133 paraphernalia in an exercise of solidarity tourism77, and figure 19 provides a visual example of this, where the khayma shown is also a souvenir shop, a venue to sell decorated teapots, flags, jewelry, amongst other items. However, most frequently, these khiyam serve purely exhibition purposes, endowing the Sahrawi nation with symbolic content for both local and global audiences. With Micheal Herzfeld, I think of this cultural exhibit, not merely as a

Braudrillardian displacement of “the real” by empty signs, but as an attempt to project familiar social experience into new contexts (1997: 6-7). The object of the artisanal khayma transposed the moral economy of pre-revolutionary pasts into the national present, conjuring a past life- world in which prosperity and hospitality triangulated with social and political legitimacy, a past life-world that nonetheless cohered with the practices of radical collectivity required from citizen-refugees to build the Sahrawi Republic in exile during the early revolutionary period.

In pre-revolutionary times, living in large groups was a sign of social and economic bonanza amongst nomads. The previous chapter ─which looked at remembering as a form of labour that aspires to transact affect transgenerationally─ I described how Sahrawi elderly women’s memory of pre-revolutionary times were characterised by nostalgic registers of dignity and joy that cohered with the structured feelings conveyed in their accounts of an early revolutionary period. Importantly, such “structured feelings” (Williams, 1977) were brought to life through images of intense sociality, endless visitors, large gatherings and celebrations, a bustling social life that was sometimes framed as a matter of obligation or custom (adat).

Recall Suadu’s words when she talked about the post-ceasefire moment: “Before, if someone came to visit you it was very important that you treated them very well and all that, now all of those rules are more relaxed…”. With rain and green pastures, numerous khiyam, typically

77 Note the Republic is sometimes portrayed as a site to engage in “solidarity tourism” http://www.tourism- watch.de/en/content/tourism-western-saharan-refugee-camps»

134 belonging to the same, patrilineal tribal group, could afford to live together in nomadic encampments (firq sg. firgan pl.). Whereas each khayma managed its individual wealth and resources, living in groups came with the obligation of respecting distributive systems of wealth and labour. The wealthier the firgan, the larger the amount of resources it could afford to pool, and the greater the number of khiyam it could afford to incorporate. Conversely, in times of drought, firgan dispersed. In the most extreme cases, individual khiyam were obliged to take their animals and fare on their own, a situation that entailed physical and emotional hardships as well as risks. Escaping epidemics and/or misfortune was also a reason that propelled such dispersal. For example, Khadaya’s parents left the area of Gleiminin near Tan

Tan, where they lived alongside her grandfather’s family, escaping the buhyʿmruna (chicken pocks) that killed four of their newborn babies. For years, her nuclear family lived a nomadic lifestyle entirely on their own, until years passed, and they came across a nomadic encampment from her father’s patriliny that invited them to live with them.

The denominations ʿa’ila kabira (large family) or khayma alkabira, as opposed to el

ʿa’ila esgaira (small family) or khayma esgaira, are used to denote a prosperous and respected family, a reputation that is conferred, in large part, through the practice of hospitality. Today the adjective “large” continues to denote a well-reputed family. However, despite the size adjective, intelocutors of different generations explained to me that “large” does not necessarily speak to demography. Instead, “large” describes, first and foremost, a way of being, which derives out of the family’s adherence to social convention, including modesty codes (hishma), piety and respect for the rules of distribution and hospitality. In this way, the “large” family continues to stand for the sociable, socialized, generous, and therefore, powerful family, implying that the reputation of families remains contingent on practices of hospitality.

135 The khayma, an archetypal space for the practice of hospitality in the Sahrawi context and beyond (Shryock, 2004), is the property and domain of married Sahrawi women. In the event of a divorce, women keep their households as per customary law. Like Alice Wilson notices, in hassaniya the word mutakhayyama means “married” or bikhamatik (endowed with a khayma in the feminine) (2016: 138). In this way, the legal, religious and ritual act of marriage is synonymous with becoming endowed with one’s own tent; a process that is tantamount to obtaining a certain political and economic autonomy from one’s own nuclear family. Indeed, it is through the practice of hospitality that women continue to assert their sovereignty over their households. During the last week of my first visit to the Sahrawi Republic in 2009, the Director of the school where I had taught Spanish for two months invited me to her khayma in a gesture of appreciation for my work with them. She prepared a delicious meal, showered me with gifts

(a milhafah, bracelets, a watch) and insisted I spend the night with them (another gesture of hospitality). We spent the night chatting until we fell asleep. When I left her home the next morning, she mentioned she would be spending the summer in Spain, visiting her daughter.

Excited by the prospect of being able to reciprocate her hospitality, I suggested she should pass through Madrid and stay with me for a few days. To my surprise, she looked at me slightly displeased. Revealing the strong connection between a woman’s personhood and the status she derives hosting within the space of her khayma, she replied: “Maybe one day, dear, once you are married and all that”. Seen in this light, there had been something presumptuous in my attempt to match a married woman’s hospitality.

Over the years, I have become very familiar with portrayals of the Sahrawi people as remarkably generous and hospitable. I could recount endless anecdotes of astonished

Europeans who, packed with medicines, food, old toys and clothes, arrive in the Republic with

136 the expectation of fulfilling the role of providers, to invariably becoming moved, surprised and sometimes overwhelmed from finding themselves showered with perfume, incense, gifts, clothes, turbans, the coziest spots and blankets of the house to lie or sleep on, the family’s best foods, their scarce water, and all the company, protection and assistance one could ever anticipate and more. In my first visits to the Republic, I too remember having to reckon with my own mixed sense of gratitude, awe and discomfort at receiving these generous gestures of hospitality: the performativity it seemed to require from me, as well as the guilt that came with being unsure if this was an exchange I could ever “reciprocate” (Mauss, 2000). After all, whereas I could travel in and out of the Republic with either my Canadian or Spanish passports with relative ease, most of my hosts would not be able to enter neither Canada nor Spain with their Saharawi passports.

With time, it became very clear that efforts to host guests formed part of the everyday moral order of things. Such gestures (particularly towards family members visiting from the occupied Western Sahara or beyond) sometimes obliged hosts to incur significant debt with shop-owners and/or some of their relatives, and sometimes, with their friends and non-related neighbours. Hospitality was as a matter of obligation and an everyday female chore. I remember one day coming home from the Women’s Union, to find the youngest daughter of my host family unusually alone in the household. Her sisters, aunts and mother had left for a wedding taking place in another daira (district) of their wilaya (province). My host mother, she informed me, had arranged for one of their cousins to drive me to the wedding. However, the daughter looked so upset to be missing out on the wedding celebrations (we had even planned what to wear on the previous day together), that I decided to stay behind with her, telling her cousin to let my host mother know I was very tired and preferred to stay in. When I asked the

137 youngest daughter why her mother had not allowed her to attend the wedding, she explained:

“We could not leave the house empty and my mother said it was my turn to stay”. Still confused, I asked her why we could not simply lock the house behind us and go, and she replied. “Well… it can be done, but it is not good to leave the house empty like that… it doesn’t give a good impression. What if something unexpected happens and no one is in the house? What if we have visitors? What will people think if there is no one here to receive them?”

Andrew Shryock observes a rule amongst the Balga Bedoiun of Jordan whereby past forty days, guests are said to become “one of us (i.e. Balga Bedouins)” (2012: S31). Whereas, I never came across a description of a similar rule, with time, my status as “guest” somewhat waned as my host families normalized and stopped resisting my contributions to everyday household chores. That said, I was never expected nor recriminated for not contributing to household chores, and lacking a khayma of my own, even if I sometimes received guests in my host’s household, I could hardly be considered a full host. As a nasrania (Christian/Westerner), most expected me to eventually “depart”, but even if I was never directly held to standards of hospitality, I got a sense of the weight of the collaborations involved and the competitiveness inherent to this everyday duty, being implicated into it through forms of play. For instance, whenever I left one family to stay with a different family (usually when I moved between wilayat), upon my returns, I became accustomed to being greeted with playful recriminations such as: “How are you “lost-one” (gadya)? Where have you been? Did family X treat you better than ours? Come on! Tell us! Who treats you better? Where are you most comfortable?

What wilaya (province) did you like best theirs or ours?”

138 This last question points to the way in which practices of hospitality carried out at the level of the household are “scaled-up” to the domain of the Republic in everyday conversation.

The pride derived out of being good hosts in any given khayma, often overlaps with spheres that lie beyond it, transposed into assertions of pride for the wilaya (province). Whereas such spatial overlaps operate at the level of the symbolic, they are simultaneously manifested, as well as encouraged through specific governmental strategies that scale up the hospitality expected from a familial domain on to the domain of the nation-state in ways that are not only metaphorical. Government-run events that take place on a regular basis (conferences, congresses, elections) and these require delegates from different institutions to move between wilayat (provinces). Within an average of 30 km between each other and in a context where access to transport is limited, these events typically require government representatives and employees to stay overnight in a wilaya that is not their own. To ensure delegates receive hospitality, the Republic’s provincial government provide women willing to host delegates with a stipend to cover the extra food and drink costs. These stipends are delivered through the offices of the district (daira). I was told such funds are rarely enough to cover the expenses associated with this hosting. However, women’s participation in this system was also motivated by a desire to establish connections with Sahrawis holding positions in government, weaving relations and national (sometimes international too) forms of social capital. This system of hospitality is known as al-istikbal (meaning the reception/the hospitality) and it is run by the central government, yet operated in a decentralized manner through the offices of the wilayat (provinces) and of the dawair (districts).

On top of offering potentially empowering opportunities for the individual hostesses, these government events encourage encounters and possibilities for the kind of inter-tribal

139 relations that Wilson (2016) shows the POLISARIO Front actively propitiates to sustain national relations of sovereignty. Indeed, by ensuring the wellbeing of those who participate in the government’s activities, the system of alistikbal envelops the Republic’s undertakings with the respectability that adhering to the moral economy predating a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism elicits. Recall when poet Bachir Ali squarely connected hospitality to the legitimacy of a witness vis-à-vis the law: “someone who was known to have received guests and not fed them properly could no longer serve as a witness in court: that person was no longer trusted in the eyes of judge”. Adhering to this pre-revolutionary moral order, the

POLISARIO’s exiled-government mobilises women’s hospitality in support for its nationalist activities and, in so doing, derives political legitimacy. In this way, women’s labour of hospitality is one of the mediums through which the Republic is able to exercise sovereignty in exile.

The system of al-istikbal applies slightly different rules in relation to international guests. When the POLISARIO Front mobilises international guests to attend congresses and its national festivities celebrated in the Republic, the movement’s exiled government provides a similar allowance to families who agree to host foreign guests. However, this is not the case for foreign visitors who arrive with purposes other than participating in these government-run events. There is a specific institution, known as al-tishritfat or el protocolo, in Spanish, in charge of managing all matters pertaining to international visitors. These include: managing government transport for foreigners to and from the airport, delivering permits for foreigners to use private vehicles across the Republic’s provinces, and liaising with the appropriate security measures/protocols. There are tishrifat offices in every province and most have their own residences to accommodate foreigners if these do not wish to stay with families. The tishrifat is

140 the first stop a foreigner is required to make upon entering the Republic for registration purposes. Sometimes it is there where foreign guests are informally advised either by local employees or by other more experienced foreign visitors to offer host families “cash-gifts” in return for their hospitality, although most international guests are informed about this informal protocol, before they arrive, through others who have visited the Republic before them. Like all true gifts, a fixed amount does not exist; rather it is left to the moral and economic calculations of the giver78.

The way in which cash mediates encounters of hospitality between international guests and Sahrawi hosts, necessarily undermines the social obligations of mutual defense and respect that rites of hospitality (Shryock, 2004: 43) otherwise elicits in an intra-Sahrawi sphere.

However, if Shryock has suggested “the Balga Bedouin would never confuse karam (the hospitality practiced by families) with the hospitality offered to tourists or the bureaucratic handling of foreigners by the state” (2012: 31), the boundaries between these two are much more blurred for a nation in struggle such as the Sahrawi.

For many Sahrawi citizen-refugees, whose presence in the Sahrawi Republic is rendered meaningful by their participation in a movement of national liberation, there is much

78 I have seen foreign guests arrive in a Sahrawi household for the first time and clumsily try to ask their hosts how much money they should contribute, only to be confronted by a vehement silence and refusal from their hosts to participate in conversation. I remember advising a visiting German student, who asked me, confused, about the appropriate etiquette for this exchange. I shared the methods that had worked for me in the past, telling him to decide what amount he felt comfortable contributing for himself, hand it in a sealed envelope to the female head of the khayma during a semi-private moment, neither at the very beginning, nor at the very end of his stay. I suggested all other gifts (usually medicine, clothes, books, toys, makeup, perfume, chocolates and technology) could be transacted at the beginning of his stay and in a more public view. I will never be certain if I mastered the etiquette of this, admittedly uncomfortable, ritual because I am convinced that it has no fixed-rules and because appropriate rituals of “giving” and “receiving” varied considerably according to my relationship from family to family. However, I soon realized that even though “cash-gifts” were expected from visitors (and not only from foreign visitors; cash-gifts are standard between families and expected from relatives living abroad), being a “good guest” required finding ways of presenting cash as a non-alienable gift (Mauss, 2000), rather than as income. Efforts to calculate appropriate retribution for the service of “hosting” following a market-orientated mentality were considered offensive (and met with silence) because it was important to deliver gifts in ways that appeared to reciprocate, rather than pay for, hospitality.

141 more at stake in their everyday interactions with foreign guests than opportunities for economic gain. At stake in these exchanges is transposing the moral fabric behind the denomination of the “large family” onto the domain of the Sahrawi nation in ways that also open up points of articulation for the recognition of Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism in international spheres.

During the inaugural ceremony of the 2012 edition of the International Art Festival, known as

ArtTifariti, the First Lady and Minister of Culture, Khadija Hamdi, affirmed her gratitude towards the event’s foreign funders and organizers and expressed her desire that all guests would feel at home in the Sahrawi Republic. She trusted Sahrawi women would receive each and every one of the program’s participants warmly in their khiyam, and added: “If everyone is made to feel welcome in a Sahrawi woman’s home, that alone will turn the event into a success”. In this way, the First Lady’s speech framed ARTifariti as an opportunity for the contested Sahrawi nation to produce an honourable image of itself, calling upon Sahrawi women to transpose their longstanding role as governors of their households on to the domain of the Republic, transmorphing their domestic and emotional labour to a form of ambassadorial labour for the nation. Given that hospitality offers the opportunity of extending the visibility and the breath of the nation’s social ties into the global, the Republic’s First Lady presented hospitality as an opportunity to perform the respectability of the nation, a way of cultivating trust, and in so doing, political recognition for the Sahrawi cause, through and thanks to, women’s labour.

References to Sahrawi hospitality abound and yet, unsurprisingly, the everyday reality of practicing it is not as harmonious as it often comes to surface in ordinary representations of

Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism. Women, whose labour is fundamental to hosting operations, are necessarily the most attuned to the challenges of maintaining a culture of

142 hospitality. In another scene from the ethnographic documentary “Legna: Sahrawi poetry speaks” (00:13:39- 00:14:21), another poet, known as Beibuh states:

- “My khayma is as simple as any other Sahrawi khayma; it is not just my khayma; it is

open for all good people; all are welcome in it”.

Hearing this, his wife, who was sitting behind him, preparing tea, interrupts her husband’s interview with the filmmakers to emphasize:

- “In the Sahara, the khayma is made so that it is open at all times. Look, you can

count how many doors it has: ‘una, dos, tres, cuatro (in Spanish) open doors!’ no

one can ever be prevented from entering!”

Beibuh, surprised and seemingly somewhat annoyed by his wife’s interruption, reacts to her comment with a friendly and sardonic expression:

- “Look at you! Why don’t you translate me into Spanish to these men, given that

you master the language so well”, but his wife laughs his comment off and

continues making her point, unbothered:

- “Our khiyam’s doors are all wide open, welcoming everyone; their doors are open

from the East and from the West!”

In this interview with the filmmakers, Beibuh elicits a respectable image of himself and, by extension, of the Sahrawi nation, through the image of their welcoming khayma and his wife’s intervention in the conversation. It can be read as a way of procuring visibility for the fundamental role her labour plays to make their khayma, a welcoming space. Her interruption can be seen as an affirmation of her expertise, as a woman, in the domain of hospitality. It brings attention to a longstanding valorisation amongst the Sahrawi of women’s labour of

143 hospitality as a mode of political action. After all —she reminds the spectators and her own husband— it is she who has the proximate knowledge of what managing a household with

“four wide open doors”, entails.

Moreover, her intervention into the scene’s narrative might also point to tensions underlying procuring hospitality under the current conditions of a prolonged ceasefire, tensions that are felt unevenly between the genders. If it is women who are expected to perform the labour of hospitality, it is primarily men who are expected to provide the economic means and resources for it. Unlike the pre-revolutionary times of life organized into nomadic encampments, when resources and labour was largely shared between households, the settled, as we will see, urbanizing processes that the Republic is undergoing increasingly, nuclearize these household tasks. Moreover, the enduring conditions of exile propel men to work outside of the Republic to secure the finance of their families, yet in practice, their absence makes their family’s income insecure and unstable.

Indeed, when I first saw the scene between Beibuh and his wife, I was reminded of my friend Suelma, and the story of the recurring visitor who we came to know by the unusual name of Salam aleikom (a standard form of greeting in Arabic). Salam aleikom was a young man who lived in Suelma’s neighbour’s place and came by her khayma frequently in the late afternoons to drink tea, chat and sometimes stayed over for dinner. Suelma, who never knew if her husband would be able to return home with income on any given week, one day complained discreetly to me about her recurrent visitor:

“You know, here, people come by your house all the time, unannounced. It is not easy.

When you go to the market in the morning, you have no idea if you have to buy food for just

one family or for two or three families! Because people just appear, like that guy who you

144 see here all the time. He arrives, and it is just ‘Salam Aleikom… just Salam aleikom (hello)

and never maasalama (goodbye)”. Ever since her humorous comment, we referred to this

man as “Salam aleikom”.

The next section turns attention to the uncomfortable resemblance between “Salam aleikom”, a guest over-staying his welcome in Suelma’s house, and Sahrawi refugees prolonged stay in Algeria. When the inscription of “guest” is applied to the Sahrawi Republic, its failure to say “maasalama” contradicts the performance of sovereignty I have argued it otherwise derives out of the scalar slippage between the women’s labour hospitality exercised in their households and the hospitality and respectability of nation.

The following sections describe the material and morphological transformations undergone by the Sahrawi khayma through time, illustrating how these are taking place alongside larger infrastructural transformations in the Republic. The aim is to show how the historical contingencies of the present make it increasingly challenging to live up to hospitality in ways that further accentuate the experience of the contradiction between the status of

Sahrawi refugees-citizens as both “hosts” and “guests” in Algeria.

3.2 The khayma during the War Period

Following the material dispossession that came about Sahrawi families during their immediate displacement into Algeria, emergency relief tents replaced the leather khiyam used by nomads in pre-revolutionary times. Whereas the khiyam of nomadic encampments were made through the collaborative labour of women in a system called atws’a, these emergency relief tents, such as the one shown in the picture below, were provided by humanitarian aid and distributed by the POLISARIO Front.

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Figure 22: A Gueton, 2009. Photo by author.

If in pre-revolutionary times, the women of a nomadic encampment had endowed brides with their own khiyam upon marriage, in revolutionary times the government took on this responsibility and the government-in-exile that started bestowed women with an emergency relief tent upon marriage. Given that their first providers were Algerian, such emergency relief tents are known to Sahrawis by the French term gueton.

In the newly proclaimed Sahrawi Republic, khiyam were agglomerated into dense, urban-like and settled spaces, housing families of different kinship groups into single neighbourhoods. (Wilson, 2016: 56-57). As described in the previous chapter, women’s labour continued to be intensely collective during this early revolutionary period. Crucially, however, the bulk of this collective work was now dedicated to the construction of the exiled

Republic. Child-care was collaborative and institutionalized through the insertion of nurseries.

However, outside of nursery hours, the labour of preparing food, looking after children and the elderly fell on to individual women more than it had prior to their exile. During the years of

146 war, childrearing and household related tasks were shared when possible, especially when a woman had members of her extended family in her vicinity; yet the new spatial distribution of households and the intense dedication to the building of the spaces of the new nation-state also led to a certain nuclearization of women’s domestic work during this period. This is true for those who had always lived nomadic lifestyles. Sahrawi women living in the semi-urban spaces of the final years of the Spanish Sahara’s colonial regime had begun feeling the effects of the increasingly atomised households.

Prior to exile, only once the bride’s extended family had finished putting together everything needed for her new khayma ─the tent itself, but also the pots, blankets, tea utensils and carpets that makeup a household─ did the new couple initiate “rhil”. Rhil, a derivative of the Arabic root r-h-l (to go away, to depart) describes the displacement of the bride from her own nomadic encampment to that of her husband’s. However, the practice of rhil lost resonance in the sedentary context of the Sahara Republic (Wilson, 2016: 141-144), and, given that the majority of young men spent most of their time on the battlefront and outside of the

Republic, there was a shift from patrilocality to matrilocality (Caratini, 2000). Women who married during the years of war started to choose placing their new khayma next to that of their mother and sisters. This shift is sometimes associated to the POLISARIO’S policies of female empowerment in international representations of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism.

However, not only was this new matrilocality not unanimous ─I encountered numerous women who placed their khayma next to their husband’s family during the war, without any sense of having betrayed a revolutionary or political principle─ but it is one that seems to have developed as an ad hoc, temporary adaptation to a drastically transformed experience of space and time. Women's decision to place their khiyam in the vicinity of their own nuclear family

147 during the war was invariably explained to me as a way of being able to look after their mothers in their old age, and sometimes other members of their family. The decreased collectivization of women’s labour of care during this time increased the individual obligation of women vis-à-vis their closest and maternal kin. In this way, this ad hoc matrilocality has resulted as an expression of women’s structured agency; it cannot be dissociated from their response to new impositions over women’s labour of care for the young, the elderly and the disabled.

Alongside residential reconfigurations, the material object of the gueton itself began to lose its raison d’être. In the same way as living in tents had been a condition for the possibility of nomadism —with its requirement to always be ready to pick up one’s possessions and find a new location— during the years of war, the temporariness of the exiled Republic was consonant with the temporariness of pre-revolutionary encampments. However, as the conflict prolonged itself in time, households started incorporating more resilient and less-labour intensive mud-brick rooms. By the late 80s, most households were comprised of anywhere between one to four mud-brick rectangular rooms, including: one or two living/bed rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom, all of which were typically built around a courtyard, known as elkhoush. Most households continued to upkeep a gueton (emergency relief tent) and in keeping with the hospitable tradition of the khayma’s doors being wide open, guetons are frequently placed either right outside the walls of the dwelling’s courtyard or embedded into the wall itself so that the household may continue to be accessed from the outside and through the tent. The following pictures (shot in 2012) show images of two such households:

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Figure 23: Gueton embeded into household’s wall, 2014. Photo by Walad Mohamed.

Figure 24: Gueton right outside wall of household, 2013. Photo by author.

The different mud-brick living rooms of a household sometimes correspond to different married couples, that is, there can be a khayma (the mud-brick room where a married couple and their children live) within a khayma (usually belonging to the woman’s mother).

Eventually, daughters usually move out of their mother’s compound; often building their own khayma right next door, or in very close proximity. In this way, it is common to be able to identify large extensions of neighbourhoods by extended, matrilineal, families.

149 3.3 The khayma in times of “Neither War nor Peace”

The UN-mediated agreements between the POLISARIO Front and Morocco promised

Sahrawi refugees a hasty return to the Western Sahara. This meant that when combatants first returned to the camps, their insertion into largely matrilocal neighbourhoods continued to be considered temporary. During the years of war, the POLISARIO Front provided households with all goods needed to survive. In turn, refugees provided the movement with the physical and political labour needed to sustain the Republic, making cash transactions virtually inexistent. However, from 1991 onwards, a cash economy became operative in the Republic, deriving into new consumption practices and desires and into new patterns of labour. Today, much like other resources supplied by humanitarian aid and administered by the POLISARIO

Front, guetons have entered the market. To some extent, this is because humanitarian aid to the camps has not increased at a rate that matches the Republic’s demographic growth. Nowadays when a couple gets married, the government does not have sufficient guetons for all, so, instead, the Ministry of Provisions (wisarat eltajhiz) of the names of newly wed women to a waiting list until a gueton becomes available for the new couple. The average wait to receive a gueton is approximately of 2-3 years after any given marriage. On the other hand, the demand for guetons has also changed. Whereas older women often continue to maintain guetons as part of their households, younger women tend to find them too labour intensive. Sometimes youth lack the skills to preserve their textiles, under the constant batter of strong winds, in good shape. Nevertheless, even though the gueton is considered increasingly impractical, it is simultaneously romanticized. Lined up with textiles of beautiful colors, furnished with cushions and carpets swept off dust daily, guetons are considered spaces of tranquility, the

150 ideal spaces to host guests and to procure a jovial atmosphere. Older people especially, but not exclusively, told me they only enjoyed a good night’s sleep when they slept under a tent.

Figure 25: Inside a gueton, 2011. Photo by author.

In its resemblance to the traditional goat or camel skin khayma, the gueton is undergoing a process of folklorization. Today tents are routinely bought and sold in the markets of the Republic out of social convention. The object of the tent, in its association with a culture of hospitality, is considered a compulsory item in weddings. Large tents (known as qu’aa) are rented in the Republic’s markets to host large gatherings and celebrations. Smaller ones, usually the size of a gueton, are used to house newly-weds in the period immediately following a wedding. After the three day long celebrations of first weddings (shorter for consecutive marriages), couples typically move into a gueton, purchased by the groom’s family as part of the wedding gifting practices.

Much like the temporary textile tents (banya) that were set up for newlywed couples until their nomadic encampment finished making their leather khayma (Wilson, 2016: 141),

151 today guetons are also placed next to the bride’s family compound. During this period, the couple is expected to host guests in their new gueton continuously, especially their young family members and friends. In fact, the length of time that the couple stays in this gueton was described to me as contingent upon how long the couple could afford hosting gatherings (both financially and physically, because it involves lack of sleep) and, following an average of about one or two weeks, the gueton is sold off in the market again. Given that newlywed couples are usually on the government waiting list to receive their own tent, once they receive it, usually years after their wedding, many couples sell it immediately for cash.

The location of households continues to be contingent upon considerations made over the looking after of kin. At times, extended families include the location of a couple’s khayma in the marriage contract. For instance, if the bride’s parents do not have other daughters living nearby them, they might ask for the couple to live next to them as one of the conditions for their marriage. Sometimes it is the other way around. Even when these kin oriented obligations are not established in marriage contracts, they typically inform the couple’s choice of residence locale. Matrilocality continues to be common. Today, a considerable number of young men work abroad and it continues to be common for young women to establish themselves next to their mother’s compound, often waiting to see if they can find a way to join their husbands abroad.

However, when a couple decides to build their own khayma in the Republic, the most desired form of household today is neither a single gueton nor the courtyard with several mud- brick rooms around it. Today, the most desired and popular form of household is known as the keikota. Keikotas ─a word that derives from the French brand of a pressure cooker cocotte- minute─ is used colloquially to describe a house with many rooms under the same roof

152 (pressed inside the same space, as if inside a pressure cooker). The fancier versions of them include living rooms decorated with columns and arches, sometimes with geometrically decorated frescos on the walls or window-frames. Below is an image of a keikota:

Figure 26: A Keikota, 2014. Photo by Walad Mohammed.

From the inside, households are increasingly furnished with tiles and equipped with household appliances such as fridges, washing machines, and ovens that are bought and sold in the camp’s markets and beyond. Although the keikota allows for nuclear families to enjoy greater autonomy and privacy, when they are built in the proximity of either the bride or the groom’s family, it is common for women to enter into shared arrangements of domestic labour with either her sisters or sisters in law, nonetheless. The word youmiya, which means “my day”, is used to mean something like “my turn” to do housework (although it is also used in other contexts). A similar variant used for this is noubiya, which derives from tanaweb

(changing turns). Such arrangements are always subject to negotiation, depending on the presence/absence of husbands and number of children amongst other factors. Sisters sometimes

153 excuse young women who receive incentives from their jobs in the government administration from some of the housework.

It is also possible to find keikotas built entirely isolated from extended families of either the husband or the wife. The most common place for this to occur is in the old school of the

27th of February, renamed as Buyudur when it obtained the official status of a province in

2010. Because the province of Buyudur grew out of this all-women’s school (see chapter one), its first residents were mostly young women who left their families behind to study, train and board in the school. Although most of these women returned to their original province after one year of training, some were required to stay to work for the school permanently. Such women eventually set up their households in the school, living at a long distance from their extended family ever since. Moreover, Buyudur`s proximity to Rabuni, the administrative province where all the central institutions of the Republic are found, makes it an attractive choice of residence for government employees. The khayma of the Republic’s President himself is located in Buyudur. From 2010 onwards, all provinces have been promised electricity but, for a decade, Buyudur and Rabuni were the only ones with electrical light. Overall, Buyudur has a greater feeling of urbanity than the rest of the wilayat. Perhaps for this reason, some refer to it today as the Republic’s capital city.

Buyudur’s distance from extended families appeals to some couples. Nanaha, a woman who I came to know because she was the neighbour of my host family in Buyudur, had grown up in the occupied Western Sahara and arrived in the camps upon marrying her husband, a patrilineal cousin of hers whose parents had been displaced to the Republic during the war.

Initially the couple lived with her husband’s family in the province of Smara, yet Nanaha, who barely knew her husband’s nuclear family and missed her own, could not adapt well to her new

154 living arrangement. Her husband was reticent to give her a divorce and, as a compromise, she managed to convince him to build a keikota for them in Buyudur, where she lived when I met her. Nanaha explained to me she felt much better in Buyudur because she had time alone with her children and she could spend her free time visiting friends in the afternoons. She enjoyed being able to choose her company, a liberty she felt she did not have whilst living next to her husband’s family.

This did not mean that Nanaha and others like her who I met in Buyudur, could not and did not rely on family networks. Indeed, Nanaha continued to visit and receive visits from her husband’s family on a very regular basis. Families rely upon related and non-related neighbours extensively. Practices of sharing are engrained in the very sociality of the Republic.

To provide one of many examples: whilst I was living in Buyudur, I spent an afternoon accompanying one of my host sisters around a large perimeter of houses nearby our own keikota, asking and collecting plastic basins, tea sets, and other kitchen utensils from neighbours. My host family was organizing and hosting a wedding party and they needed as many of such utensils as the neighbourhood could spare. Sometimes, though rarely, one came across a keikota that was “socially” enclosed. That is, it was not only physically closed up, but their families were unknown to neighbours. The few I learned about were typically commented upon and criticized, labeled anywhere between “strange” and “selfish” (anani).

Most, if not all nuclear families, whether living in a household organized around a courtyard, in a newer keikota, or anywhere “in-between” (such as Embarka’s household arrangement to be described shortly) are embedded into larger, extensive families/tribes (qaba’il) that practice their own systems of distribution across provinces and borders. Thus, here, my point is not to suggest that practices of distribution are less extensive in the Sahrawi Republic today that they

155 have been amongst Saharawis in the past; it is to show how the spatial configurations of the present offer the possibility for a more autonomous life for those nuclear families who so desire it.

Measured against the standards of nomadic lifestyles and the war period, it is common to find citizen-refugees who lament a loss of collectivism in the present. Despite a celebration of the material and social comforts associated with the Republic’s increased infrastructures and insertion into a commodity-based economy, for some Saharawi and their international supporters, these new housing geographies and morphologies are implicated in generating the perception that the principles of a Saharawi revolutionary nationalism are being eroded, thus, producing anxieties over whether or not this signals citizen-refugees’ decreased commitment to their political movement overall. Indeed, it seems impossible to think of these anxieties outside of an overriding moral economy of hospitality and outside consideration of the limits that a prolonged exile is imposing over the Republic’s capacity to exercise sovereignty through hosting.

The contradiction that the Sahrawi Republic is consolidating itself, despite the fact that its utmost political objective —that of achieving full sovereignty over the Western Sahara— has not yet been met, is one that Sahrawi citizen-refugees are patently cognizant and weary of.

The following section turns to an ethnographic vignette about Embarka and me to show the contradictions that the urbanity emerging under the conditions of a colonial meantime generates; how it is experienced in the everyday and how it becomes expressed through registers of “cultural intimacy” (Hertzfeld, 1997), specifically through the moral tropes of sharing and hospitality.

156 3.4 Betwixt and Between khiyam

I first met Embarka during my first visit to the Republic in 2009, when she hosted me in her khayma for a period of two weeks. Embarka, a woman roughly my age, enquired incisively about my life and recounted unsolicited stories on end about hers and others. It felt extraordinarily easy to connect with her and we became close from the very beginning. I still remember the first time she surprised me when she finished one of her stories with a wink:

“You love this, don’t you?” “What do you mean?” I asked… “I mean you like stories, I know you…! You are an anthropologist! I know anthropology…” Indeed, Embarka, who had a university degree from Algeria, would become an invaluable research assistant and language teacher to me. She helped me find and coordinate over half of the women whose life histories I collected during my fieldwork, accompanying and assisting me with translation.79

Yet Embarka was much more than a mediator and a translator in these encounters; she formulated as many questions as I did, often the best of them, and always more spontaneous than mine, more personal, managing to juice out the most vivid information with her charisma and familiarity with the women we interviewed: “What did you think?” she would ask me after an interview in anticipated pride. “You were amazing, Embarka… the interviews I do with you are like no other” “I know anthropology…,” she reminded me, smiling. And there is no question that she did: “You have to make people feel comfortable, make them understand they

79 Embarka was patient and diligent with my Hassaniya like no other: “No Spanish!!!”, she would shout, telling me off when she caught me lazily turning to Spanish with her or with someone else. She always took the time to correct and teach me. Embarka and I have sat long hours transcribing interviews, intercepted by long breaks of gossiping and cooking. Our method was the following: she would repeat what interviews said strictly in Hassaniya, but much slower and clearly than what was recorded on tape. I would then translate her words out loud at my own pace, asking her to explain the things I didn’t understand and she would correct me when my translation was wrong. Embarka went out of her way not only to translate words I didn’t know but concepts, often illustrated with examples and anecdotes. Those were the best language lessons I have ever received.

157 can trust you so that they don’t repeat the typical story to you, as if you were a foreign journalist or a politician”, she explained.

Embarka’s dream had always been to live and work in Spain, anywhere outside of the

Republic really, but she had always imagined Spain because her husband had studied abroad and mastered the Spanish language. She had hoped they would emigrate shortly after their wedding but, so far, it had not happened. Instead, her husband had a government job in one of the Republic’s institutions based in Rabuni. He, like his wife, also dreamed of emigrating, but not at any cost. They had not moved yet because they had not found a good opportunity abroad.

To her husband, a good opportunity was one that would allow him to continue working for the

Sahrawi cause internationally. To Embarka, a good opportunity meant something much broader. She would always speak of her husband fondly to me, yet her ambitions exceeded their economic situation and she often expressed this frustration with me:

“I tell him we should just go… anywhere… find work, any work, and make real

money for our family. We could even return to el mantiqa (literally the region, yet in

the camps, it is used to index the occupied Western Sahara)…but he would NEVER

80 return… He is a munadil (militant). He would never return…”

She would say, with a lift of her eyebrows and a smile that expressed her annoyance and admiration towards her husband’s unshakable ideals all at once; an expression which conveyed the ambivalence shared by many other Sahrawi refugees towards their revolutionary goals, values and everyday practices: a mixture of attachment and alienation to the emotional force of dreams, hardened by their lack of fruition in time.

80 It is important to note that returning to the occupied Western Sahara is not always perceived as disloyalty to the cause. Embarka herself disagreed with her husband on this matter. She thinks one could return without losing one’s nationalist convictions (also see: Boulay, 2014).

158 Embarka would always remind me of how much she cherished the opportunity of working with me. She, like many other citizen-refugees born in exile, has grown up with the expectation that she would be able to use her investments in education to obtain a paid employment in a free, independent, Western Sahara (see chapter one when she talked about

“dreams”). She told me she enjoyed breaking the routine of her work at home, putting her education to use and contributing to her family’s economy, and she, like many other educated young women I met, was always on the lookout for paid employment (see chapter three).

Embarka’s knowledge of Spanish, her husband’s contacts in Rabuni, her outgoing personality, and her determination, once in a while, procured her with temporary jobs similar to the precarious work I could offer her, typically, working for Spanish associations running different sorts of short-term projects in the camps. Even if the income she received from such jobs was relatively low and always temporary, there were months when Embarka contributed more money to the household than her husband, who despite having a relatively high position in the government’s administration, received a very low salary. Unlike many other men who sometimes combine their government employments with commercial activities to survive, her husband was a devoted munadil, dedicating all of his labour to his position in the Republic, and

Embarka sometimes complained about this lovingly, explaining to me that the precarious income she made was necessary for them to cover for everyday expenses.

Upon her marriage in the late nineties, Embarka built her new khayma next to her mother’s. That is, next to the household where she and her siblings had grown up. When I asked her how they had decided to do so, she explained to me that her husband’s mother had daughters living in her vicinity who were already looking after her mother-in-law. By contrast, she was the eldest of her mother’s children and, she complained, even though her siblings were

159 all of marriageable age, none of them was doing so, nor were either of her two younger brothers, who worked in construction, managing to earn a decent living.

Embarka’s father, a combatant during the war, lived in the liberated territories with the rest of the Sahrawi army. However, he had stopped supporting the family years back. Her parents married during the early war period, but only years later, did Embarka’s mother find out her father had been married to another woman all along. “Imagine that?” Embarka said, giving me a scandalized look: “everything was so chaotic during those years that my mother had no idea he had another family when she got married! She found that out after she had had five of his children! Imagine!”. Her mother was so furious he had deceived her in such a way that she refused to talk to him ever again, and after their quarrel, Embarka’s father stopped returning to their khayma.

Thus, for years following their marriage, Embarka and her husband became the breadwinners for both their khayma and for Embarka’s mother’s khayma, although, she made clear: “whenever my mother in law’s khayma needs anything, my husband always contributes too”. Embarka’s mother household had a gueton, two rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom all built around a walled courtyard. Embarka’s household next door was identical, except for the gueton. She, like so many women from her generation, did not find incentive to invest in the labour of maintaining it in good condition. When I first met Embarka, she took turns with her four sisters to prepare food, run errands and look after their mother. It was Embarka’s responsibility to look after her own children but one of her sisters was typically available to relay her when necessary. Embarka, her mother, her sisters, and I always ate together and, when Embarka’s husband was home, in keeping to the custom of a gender-segregated commensality that most households follow in today’s Saharawi Republic, he often ate with her

160 brothers. In short, even though from the outside the two households appeared to be independent spaces, from the inside they ran like a single household.

On my third visit to the Republic, in 2011, two years after the first time I met Embarka,

I was surprised to find her father lying over a cushion in her mother’s khoush (courtyard). After we had returned to Embarka’s khayma, she explained: her father was ill and could no longer live with the rest of the army. He had stubbornly never agreed to divorce Embarka’s mother.

Her mother had tried but because she barely had any family in the Republic to advocate on behalf of her divorce, she had found herself unable to repudiate him. The couple continued to be married and given that Embarka’s father’s other wife had passed away, he had nowhere else to go, so her mother had taken him in.

However, his presence imposed changes to everyday household arrangements.

Adhering to modesty codes (hishma), Embarka’s husband could no longer frequent his mother- in-law’s khayma, given that it would have been considered disrespectful for him to be in the presence of his father-in-law. Hence, Embarka explained, referring to her and her sisters: “now we often make food separately… sometimes we share, it depends. If my husband is at home, my sisters sometimes bring plates with food for us, or the other way around, but it is not like before when we always ate together…” Whereas before, Embarka and her husband had distributed their wealth equally between the two households, this new situation allowed them to keep some of their resources strictly for themselves. The return of her father also meant the return of the official provider (and his humble incentive from the military), somewhat absolving Embarka and her husband from filling in that role. Nonetheless, as the following story will show, this new economic arrangement rendered ambiguous the criteria for what a fair distribution of labour and resources between the sisters was.

161 Walking back to her khayma on a morning we had spent carrying out an interview for my research, we passed by the market and I asked if we should pick something up for lunch. It was somewhat late; we were tired from the heat, and Embarka told me not to worry about it. It was one of her sisters’ turn to do the housework that day (fiha el youmiya). Embarka’s husband was not coming back from Rabuni. We could just eat with them.

Through her casual assurance that it was her sister’s turn to make lunch, Embarka discursively collapsed the divide between their two households, implicating herself (and by extension, myself, as her guest) into the same economy as that of her mother’s household.

When we arrived, we walked straight into Embarka’s mother’s khayma, where her youngest sister was making tea for the mother. We sat with them, as Embarka recounted the stories of our day, who we had interviewed and who we had seen. Then, the sister whose turn was to make lunch, entered the room from the kitchen, her eyes fixed on her mobile phone, listening to tunes coming out from it as she texted. She looked up at us fleetingly, barely acknowledging our presence and taking a seat at a distance from the rest at one of the room’s corners.

Her unfriendly entrance did not go unnoticed by Embarka, who, both probing and engaging her, asked: “Hey, sister, what is there for lunch? “Rice” her sister replied, dryly.

“Rice on its own?” Embarka asked, and her sister replied: “If you want anything on it you should buy some tuna or some eggs”. Hearing this, noticing the tension, and fearing the menu was undergoing extra scrutiny due to my presence, I felt compelled to volunteer to go to the shop to buy any of these items myself, but halfway through my sentence, Embarka interrupted me with a determined gesture. As if reading my mind, she grabbed my arm, stopped me from moving, she took a few coins out of her own wallet, and threw them across the room towards

162 her sister. The sister, however, did not look up from her phone nor grab the coins. She simply continued texting.

The rest of us resumed conversation, chatting in a pretension of normalcy until

Embarka, who had remained unusually quiet and visibly tense, asked: “My sister, are you going to the shop already?” but her sister did not respond. Instead, she stretched deeper into a lounge, in a gesture of absolute passivity and indifference to her older sister’s interpellation.

Now she was making it clear: she not only expected Embarka to pay for the extra food; she also wanted her to labour for it. At that point, Embarka snapped: “Khalas! (Meaning, in this context, “that’s it”) Vivian and I are eating at my khayma… Vivian! Come with me!” she said.

We both stood up, but instead of leaving the room, Embarka initiated a vociferous back and forth with her sister. Noticing their mother’s embarrassment, I, who had already stood up in response to Embarka’s previous imperative, decided to step out from the room somewhat awkwardly. Embarka joined me in her khayma half an hour later or so, entering the room in a loud apology: “Ya lali! Ya lali (an onomatopoeia that expresses being overwhelmed), Vivian”

She exclaimed, putting her hand to her face… “I am so sorry… I am going to find some food in the shop right now and come back” but I managed to convince her not to do so. All shops nearby would have been closed by then, we would have had to walk for far too long under a scorching midday sun in search of a shop that was open, and possibly to no avail. So, she sat, continuing to apologize to me.

Discomforted by her embarrassment, I tried consoling her, saying things like “If you had ever heard how bad it gets when my sister, my mother and I fight you would not feel embarrassed right now”. Yet, Embarka continued, expressing the grievances she had with her sister: “It is just not right how she is behaving. You see, my sister has a ‘new’ mentality. She

163 thinks the way many other young girls think these days. She doesn’t understand why I live with them, why we share things as one family”. For years, Embarka complained, she and her husband had supported them, sharing everything they earned with them. Back then, her sister could not complain or question why they all lived together. Now, that their father had returned and they had a little more than before, Embarka and her husband were no longer sharing everything with them, so her sister resented making food for her, especially, she explained, while I was staying with her:

“She thinks I am eating the money you give me on my own; she doesn’t

understand I have my own children to think about too. And you know what the worst

thing is? You will see how she will live once she gets married. I tell you, she will get

married and build her khayma as far away from us as possible. You will see. It is not

just my sister. It is many young girls now; the mentality is changing a lot. My

neighbour always tells me: ‘be careful, Embarka… one day your sisters will force you

to leave the house…’ she says that because her own sisters made life so uncomfortable

for her that she had to leave. I always tell her, jokingly, ‘that only happened in your

family because you are from Morocco!”

The neighbours Embarka was referring to, like many Sahrawis who live in the exiled

Republic, were displaced during the war from the region of Tan Tán, located in Southern

Morocco. Even though kinship groups who tend to consider themselves Sahrawi primarily populated this region, the POLISARIO Front does not claim the territory, because it was ceded by Spain to Morocco in 1957, before the POLISARIO Front’s first congress in 197381.

81 The Algerian Front of National Liberation started carrying out a war of liberation against France in 1954. In 1956, Morocco obtained its independence from France. That same year is known to Saharawis as ‘the year of the epidemic’ resulting, in part, from a period of drought that lasted well into the 1960s. At that time, most of the Moroccan army of liberation had integrated into the newly formed Royal Moroccan Armed Forces. However,

164 Embarka did not, in earnest, think of her neighbours as “Moroccan”. Rather, by describing their predicament as a Moroccan attribute, she playfully mobilized a Sahrawi enmity with Morocco to engage in an everyday performance of Sahrawi nationalism. Her joke is an expression of what Herzfeld has described as “the mutual dependence between nationalism and cultural intimacy” (1997: 8). However, if to Herzfeld, “cultural intimacy” involves “the familiarity with perceived social flaws that offer culturally persuasive explanations of apparent deviations from the public interest” (Ibid: 9), in Embarka’s observation at least, the same culturally intimate process operates in reverse. Sharing, generosity and hospitality are the practices that give meaning and content to the project of a revolutionary nationalism that

Embarka came of age in. It is because a culturally persuasive explanation of Sahrawi nationalism allows no deviations from the protection to a collective interest and the common cause of national liberation that Embarka’s joke makes sense. Those who are seen to deviate from a moral economy of hospitality and collective practices of sharing are seen as Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism’s “others” (i.e. Moroccans, Europeans, etc.).

factions that sought to liberate regions in Northern Morocco, as well as regions of ṭrāb [land] al-biḍān (an area populated mainly by Hassaphones that includes: Souther Morocco, Western Algeria, Northern Mali and Mauritania and the Western Sahara) that remained under Spanish rule, built alliances with Saharan qaba’il (tribes), carrying attacks on Spanish posts from Northern Mauritania and Southern Algeria. Their insurgency was crushed during Operation Teide-Ecouvillon, an attack carried out in 1958 by French, Spanish and, surprisingly for some, the newly formed Moroccan Army. Spain ceded Tarfaya to Morocco in return for its support, a region located in present day southern Morocco bordering with northern Western Sahara. Saharan qaba’il groups were the many of whom experienced this as a moment of re-colonization. The shaykh (head of a tribe) of the Izarguien described this moment as: “One night, without moving our khayma, I went to sleep Spanish and I woke up Moroccan. They decided to imprison us into four cages (Morocco, Spain, Mauritania and Algeria)” (in Garcia, 1994: 85, my translation). The aerial attacks of Operation Ecouvillon destroyed the wealth and infrastructure of entire nomadic encampments. This, added to the dire environmental conditions of the early 1960s, produced a strong push towards the colonial cities of El Aaiun, Villa Cisneros (today known as Dahkla), Smara and, to a lesser extent, Buyudur, Hausa, and Yederia, where Spain had been settling for decades. Alarmed by these disturbances and by the waves of decolonization in the region, from the 1960s onwards, Franco’s regime started strengthening its grip over its colony, increasing policing measures as well as introducing an array of social and economic incentives aimed attracting nomads to cities and assimilating them into the colonial order; a period described by Campos and Trastomontes as a “second colonial occupation”. For this reason, Gimeno (2007: 11) argues it only makes sense to refer to “The Spanish Sahara” from 1960s onwards.

165 “I joke with her (the neighbour she described as “Moroccan”) because, really, I don’t want to believe we are becoming this way (less prone to sharing and hospitality, and by extension “less Sahrawi”), but I tell you it is not just them… it’s the new mentality”.

Embarka’s venting was interrupted by one of her sisters entering the room, carrying a tray with a bowl of white rice and canned tuna. She sat with us, saying hello in a light-hearted way as the three of us ate together, pretending nothing had happened. When she left, carrying the leftovers and the dirty plate away with her, Embarka was in a much better mood: “this one also has a new mentality but she is always kind (amʿdila)”. Comforted by the way in which this conflict seemed to have settled into something in the order of the mundane, Embarka and I lay down for a midday rest, as I took the opportunity to take notes on what had happened.

A year after, when I returned to the Republic in 2013, Embarka was in her fourth pregnancy. She was also turning her household into a keikota. She showed me around the construction proudly, emphasizing how the new house would have a private room for the married couple situated right at the end of the house: “We built it as far away from the entrance as possible!” She laughed. Next to it was a room for the children and then a corridor that gave way to a kitchen, followed by a guest room near the entrance. Outside of the entrance, they had kept a separate room intact, where they would continue to host gatherings as usual: “It has become very difficult for us to live here otherwise”. Embarka explained:

This way we have some private rooms for ourselves, some privacy. Now

everything has changed: I always cook for us and my sisters always cook for them. I

know we might seem selfish but Vivian, look, now we have a bigger family. I want to

feed my children well. I want them to grow strong, without illnesses. Slowly people are

starting to understand such things here. We are beginning to understand that things

166 would work better if each couple were only responsible for their own children. I tell

you, if it was not because of my mother and that she is getting older, we would have

moved to Buyudur already. There we would live with electrical light and more freedom

than here.

The subtitle for this last section is an indirect reference to Victor Turner’s “Betwixt and

Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage” (1967: 93-112). Like the youth entering manhood of Turner’s classic example, “structurally invisible” because he belongs neither to the symbolic and material structures of childhood nor to those of manhood, the Republic is found in a similar predicament, caught between the structure and ideo-spatial logics of a movement for national liberation and those of a settled nation-state82.

The mundane conflict between Embarka and her sister illuminates how the Republic’s liminality manifests itself in the microstructures of households, economies, families, affects, ethical practices and subjectivities of citizen-refugees. Embarka’s desire for greater autonomy from her natal family, the desire to generate more income and to live a life where she could focus on her nuclear family’s needs, are indicative of the way in which the Republic’s insertion into a global commodity-based economy now makes it difficult for households to maintain the same kind of sharing practices that characterised both a pre-revolutionary and an earlier revolutionary period.

In this colonial meantime, households survive finding strategies to obtain income that flow in from economies found outside of the Republic. The fact that, since the 1991 ceasefire,

82 Although Turner described the symbolic characteristics of liminality through the example of a man undergoing a rite of passage from the state of youth to that of manhood, through the use of the word “state”,Turner explicitly says that his analysis could be applied to “a society in a state of war or peace or a state of famine or plenty. State in short, is a more inclusive concept than status or office and refers to any type of stable or recurrent condition that is culturally recognized” (1967: 94).

167 women’s regenerative labour has become unwaged and that the salaries of public employees such as Embarka’s husband’s count more as incentives than as salaries (see introduction), is part of ─note that the desire to apply the skills of her higher education also had a lot to do with this desire─ what explains Embarka’s desire for paid employment and her motivation to seek income from international actors who frequent the Republic, such as myself. Moreover, these structural political and economic changes are also part of what explains the tensions she experiences with her sisters. Her, albeit precarious, access to cash made the appropriate pooling of resources (including labour) between her and her mother’s households uncertain. Not only had Embarka’s role in her mother’s home, as a “guest” and a “host”, become ambiguous, crucially, my presence, and the limited income I could offer her, rendered my role in her khayma ambiguous too: I was both a “guest” and a temporary “employer” in her home.

Crucially, Embarka’s ethical sensibilities and considerations ─juggling between prioritizing her nuclear family over that of her mother’s─ generate out of tensions that erupted over her perceived inability to adequately procure me, as “guest”, with hospitality. For the duration of the quarrel at least, the ambiguities of our contradictory roles were revealed and so too was the liminal and unstable sovereignty of the Sahrawi Republic: that eerie and excruciatingly painful fear that Embarka almost put into these words: “I don’t want to think that we are becoming less

Sahrawi”.

Embarka’s ethical predicament, juggling between her duties to her nuclear family, her natal family and to her nation as a whole, reveals the way in which the hospitality that takes place at different scales: person, household and nation, are not merely indexical (Candea, 2012) but structurally intertwined, much in the same way as my presence in Embarka’s life is entangled into the larger structures of a colonial meantime that continue to prevent the

168 Saharawi Republic from exercising sovereignty over the Western Sahara. The temporary breach of hospitality we lived through put into full view the paradox that the Sahrawi

Republic’s liminal sovereignty is being sustained by international and humanitarian aid, hosted, in fact, as well as supplied, in the territory of a different nation-state.

3.5 Conclusion

This chapter has shown how the image and the materiality of the khayma with its doors wide open “from the West and from the East” bears a metonymic relationship with the performance of Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism. It has shown how this symbolic process involves temporal and spatial shifts that allow for the moral economy of a pre-revolutionary order and early revolutionary order to become displaced into the present. Such a process is substantiated in rhetorical and administrative strategies that involve “scaling up” practices of hospitality from the domain of households on to the domain of the Sahrawi Republic, exercising sovereignty and performing Sahrawi nationalism in neither a “top down” nor

“bottom up” process, but “in a host of refractions of a broadly shared cultural engagement”

(Hertzfeld, 1997: 3).

Whereas the khayma and the practices of hospitality associated with it has remained a stable symbol for the Sahrawi nation well into the post-ceasefire period, the materiality and morphology of households have not. The households of the Sahrawi Republic have adopted different spatial arrangements that respond to the transforming political and economic conditions of the present in ways that make living up to a moral economy of hospitality increasingly challenging. To be sure, the vigour with which Embarka passionately denounces the ways of the present speaks to the enduring vitality of a moral economy of hospitality.

Similarly, the POLISARIO’s adherence to these longstanding ethical values is evidenced

169 through administrative strategies such as al-istikbal and al-tishfirat, highlighting the project of a Saharawi revolutionary nationalism’s enduring valorisation and reliance upon women’s labour of hospitality. Notwithstanding, Embarka’s complaint simultaneously reveals how fraught living up to hospitality’s “test of sovereignty” (Shryock, 2012: 20) is becoming under the conditions of a colonial meantime.

170 4 Inside and Outside the Women’s Union

Figure 27. The National Union of Sahrawi Women, by author, 2011

The picture above shows the entrance to the main headquarters of the National Union of

Sahrawi Women (hereafter, the Women’s Union). The Women’s Union is one of the Sahrawi

Republic’s four “Organizations of the Masses” (munadamat jamahiriyia)83. The sign over the door displays the name of the institution in the Republic’s two official languages ─Spanish and

Arabic─and the Union’s logo contains an image that situates women at the heart of Sahrawi nationalism: the profile of a woman’s face dressed with a milhafah in the colours of the

Republic’s flag: red, white, black and green84.

83 The three others include: the Youth Union (UJSARIO), the Worker’s Union (UGTSARIO), created in the late 1980s, and the Student’s Union (UESARIO), created as recently as 2011, while I was doing my fieldwork.

84The 1976 Saharawi constitution made Spanish the second official language of the Republic, a moral practice of remembering and reminding Spain of the relationship that binds them and that Spain actively erases, but also

171

Figure 28. Women’s Union Logo

Symbolically merging woman and nation into a single image, the logo speaks to the hypervisibility of the Sahrawi munadila [feminine for militant but carrying the broader meaning of and used almost interchangeably with mukafiha, fighter (f.) or thawria, revolutionary (f.)]. Drawing on Fanon’s notion of “phobogenic” bodies, Paul Amar describes

“hypervisibility” as: “the spotlighting of certain identities and bodies…in ways that actually render invisible the real nature and power of social control” (2013: 17). Amar uses the concept to discuss sexualised, racialized and classed bodies that become targets of intense securitisation. The figure of the Sahrawi munadila is almost the exact reverse to what Amar describes, yet the logic of the concept is applicable to her. Applying Amar’s notion of hypervisibility to the Sahrawi struggle ─ a movement striving for recognition in a world stage of photogenic and phobogetic performances─I think of the Sahrawi munadila as the photogenic female figure of a Saharawi revolutionary nationalism, casting shadows over many

practicing difference with Morocco, whose second official language is French. Spanish is compulsory up until the end of secondary school and spoken widely in the Republic, especially by a younger generation that received foster care during the summer in Spain.

172 other ways of being a Saharawi woman. Burdened with the purpose to perform the honour and respectability of the nation, the Sahrawi munadila is defined by her duty to the Sahrawi cause.

She is a photogenic figure because the model of female empowerment she represents is pleasing to a broad spectrum of actors—Sahrawi nationalists, humanitarian workers, development aid expatriates, members of an international left and even to those with more imperialist drives—who often have little in common other than the strong valorisation they place in women’s visibility and participation in “public” spaces.

This chapter will describe the strategic role that the Women’s Union plays in sustaining the munadila’s hypervisibility. The Women’s Union logo circulates and forms part of a much larger repertoire of discursive and iconographic representations that contribute to emplace women under the spotlight and scrutinizing gaze of local and non-local actors for whom the respectability of the Sahrawi nation become interpretable through discourses over and about women. However, this chapter also suggests our analysis cannot stop there. I suggest the

Women’s Union logo must simultaneously be read as tribute. The image of a women’s profile, dressed in a Sahrawi flag condenses a longstanding valorisation of women’s regenerative labour, one that pre-dates Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism and bespeaks a widespread recognition amongst the Sahrawi people that the endurance of their struggle depends upon it.

More specifically, I focus on the tensions produced out of these coexisting interpretations and circulations of the Women’s Union logo. Through an account of the physical encounters and imaginaries that constitute the organization of the Women’s Union and make its space possible ─including encounters between Sahrawi women of different generations, status, kinship groups as well as encounters with transnational feminist networks and other non-local actors such as myself─I describe how some use the space of the Union to

173 reproduce consensus for the most publicised model of female empowerment attached to a

Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism, yet others use the space to contest this model, revisiting the meanings attached to the figure of the munadila in the present in ways that often mobilise logics that pre-date her symbolic emergence. Moreover, I argue that these two apparently oppositional political forces do not represent fissures or fractures within a Sahrawi women’s movement. Instead, I show how they reveal differences in generational positioning vis-a-vis the struggle, bespeaking regeneration rather than stagnation or crisis. I contend that a key factor explaining these differences in inter-generational positioning is the bureaucratization of a

Sahrawi women’s movement into the Women’s Union in and of itself. I will show how this process of bureaucratization needs to be thought of in relation to practices that forge nodes of equivalence with political organizations worldwide, in part through a performative adherence to the ideo-spatial and gendered logics of the modern nation-state.

The Women’s Union precursor is the POLISARIO Front’s “female-wing”, a movement within a movement, first declared in 1973 by the POLISARIO Front’s first Secretary General and charismatic leader Martyr el Uali Mustapha Al Sayyed. The POLISARIO’s “female wing” trained female political cadres and organised women’s clandestine activism against Spanish

Sahara’s colonial administration. Some of the most prominent figures of this “female wing” became the leaders (known asʿarifat) of the political and working committees that organised women’s exiled labour during the early revolutionary period (1975-1991). The Women’s

Union was not inaugurated until 1985, with a Congress named after one of the POLISARIO’s first female Martyrs Jueita Hammad Hadda, imprisoned by Morocco in 1976 only a few months after she had given birth to a newborn baby85.

85 Jueita Hammad Hadda was released as early as April 1977 because she became severely injured in what is known as the “Black Prison” of el Aaiun. She passed away in the town of Smara only a year after her release, in

174 The transition from the POLISARIO’s “female-wing” to the Women’s Union is situated within the larger process of consolidation of the Sahrawi Republic’s institutions in exile, especially after 1991, when the POLISARIO Front abandoned armed struggle as a political weapon altogether. Expecting the UN to follow through with its promise of foreseeing the self- determination of the Western Sahara, and hoping to absorb the skills of the thousands of youth returning to the Republic with higher education from abroad, channelling development and humanitarian aid towards the structures of institutions that could be transported to an independent Western Sahara seemed like a reasonable next step for a revolutionary struggle that has turned nation-state building into a site of resistance.

The Women’s Union, like the Youth Union (UJSARIO), the Workers Union

(UGTSARIO) and the Students’ Union (UESARIO) do not belong to the administrative branch of the POLISARIO’s government. Instead, they are connected to the executive branch of the movement and they are first and foremost conceived as instruments for the mobilisation and representation of its constituents—women, youth, students, workers— within the POLISARIO

Front. “Organizations of Masses” (munadamat jamahiriyia) operate through a vertical structure, linking them directly into the POLISARIO Front body of highest political authority: the National Secretariat. Their four-yearly congresses elect their Secretary Generals and

Executive Directors and, whoever is elected Secretary General is guaranteed a seat in the

POLISARIO’s National Secretariat.

“Organizations of Masses” are therefore explicitly different to the Republic’s institutions (almuassasat) of the POLISARIO’s administrative arm of government. However, I

February 1978. Elghalia Djimi, the Vice President of ASVDH, an human rights organisations based in the Wetsern Sahara told me many Sahrawi activits regularly her grave is visited in the occupied Western Sahara.

175 speak of the bureaucratization of the women’s movement into the Women’s Union because the

Union operates an administrative structure of its own that was largely absent prior to its creation. This administrative structure is significant because it provides the Union operative equivalences with bureaucratic organizations and institutions worldwide, allowing the

POLISARIO’s women’s movement to collect and to channel humanitarian-development- solidarity funds that guarantee its endurance, as well as providing spaces for women to gather, debate, and receive different types of training, such as the English classes I offered in their premises during my fieldwork.

Roughly from the end of the Cold War onwards, women’s movements have experienced a wave of bureaucratization worldwide. In large part, this has responded to the success of a transnational women’s movement in mobilising and delivering development and humanitarian funds to non-governmental organisations around the globe (Grewal, 2014). The

Sahrawi Women’s Union emerged in the wake of this historical contingency and its activities have benefited from and continue to be sustained, in large part, through flows of transnational feminist economic and political support. The general consensus amongst critical feminist scholars of the Middle East and North Africa is that the NGOisation of women’s movements in the region has stunted rather than bolstered the decolonising impetus that lay at their genesis

(Mojab, 2011; Tadros, 2010). They have shown how channelling women’s energy─once catalyzed in and around the multiple decolonising movements of the 20th Century─ into the bureaucratic work and professionalised structures that tend to be funded by international NGOs has transformed holistic political projects of national scope into microscopic “projects of feminism”, producing an increased fragmentation within women movement’s across class and sectarian lines, co-optation from patriarchal post-colonial

176 regimes, and ultimately depoliticising such movements at the service of larger Western imperialist and militaristic agendas operating in the region. It is in large part due to these neo- liberal and neo-imperialist alignments that many women in the region are said to have steered away from and discredited the work of these feminist organisations (Abu-Lughod and El-

Mahdi, 2011: 684-687).

Nahla Abdo (2010) seconds this anti-imperialist critique of NGOization in relation to

the Palestinian women’s movement. She argues the vitality of women’s grass roots

mobilisations that were so instrumental to the success of the first Palestinian uprising waned in

the aftermath of the failed 1993 Oslo “peace” accords, becoming either absorbed into the more

bureaucratic, patriarchal and internally funded Palestinian National Authority or fragmented

into independent and, mostly elitist, NGOs. Nevertheless, she also describes the present

situation as a “dilemma” for feminist activists and academics for whom choosing to join or not

to join an institution or an NGO is hardly a matter of choice (ibid: 248). Organizing in this

way, she explains, is the way to make use of the only spaces that are available for Palestinians

pushing for a combination of nationalist and feminist agendas under present conditions of

possibility.

As this chapter will show, there are some important parallels between the trends that

Abdo notes for the Palestinian women’s movement post-Oslo and the Sahrawi women’s

movement since the beginning of the 1991 UN-mediated “peace” process with Morocco.

However, in thinking about how the Women’s Union has adapted itself to the conditions of a

colonial meantime, my analysis departs from the dilemma with which Abdo concludes.

Charged with the mission of representing “Sahrawi women” politically to both national and

international audiences, the political activities of the Women’s Union are forced to reckon with

177 multiple regimes of power, including: orientalist, imperial, humanitarian and gendered discourses that cast “women-and-children” refugees as passive victims (Enloe, 1990) in need of

“saving” (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Eisenstein, 2007), a Moroccan military occupation of the

Western Sahara, a neo-colonial complicity with this occupation from Western powers (mainly the governments of France, USA and Spain) and a male dominated POLISARIO leadership.

Finally, as will be further described in this chapter, the Saharawi women’s movement is forced to reckon with what Amal Amireh has described for Palestinian nationalism as a “prioritization paradigm” (2012) that externalizes certain women’s agendas from Sahrawi nationalism and makes them secondary to the goal of national liberation.

The Women’s Union reliance upon humanitarian-development-solidarity aid converges with these regimes of power in ways that necessarily circumscribe its work, producing tensions and contradictions that this chapter explores. However, responding to Saida Hodzic’s call to resist a nostalgic gaze over women’s revolutionary movements of socialist pasts (2014), I show how the Women’s Union is allowing the Sahrawi women’s movement to regenerate itself in space and time under the dire political circumstances of a colonial meantime, in part by sustaining spaces where women gather to discuss and to problematize the very contradictions that the Union’s alignments with a humanitarian-development-solidarity complex generate, as well as questioning the priorities that such alignments encourage. Specifically, I show how the

Women’s Union’s activities enable spaces of contestation, in and around which Sahrawi women express their critiques of a dominant Sahrawi national model of female empowerment, breaking taboos and bringing attention to the “private” lives of women, encroaching during this colonial meantime, yet rendered secondary to the priority of national liberation.

178 4.1 Inside the Women’s Union

When I entered the Women’s Union’s main headquarters in mid-September of 2011, its corridors were ignited by the movements of dozens of women walking in and out of its rooms dressed in colourful milhafat. This was the first morning after my arrival in the Republic initiating a yearlong period of doctoral research. I had arrived the night before from Madrid,

Spain, in the company of the Women’s Union Secretary General who was travelling back to the Republic on the same flight as me, after spending a few weeks of holidays with her husband and children in their home in Spain. Like most of the other institutions in the

Republic, the Women Union’s significantly reduces its activities during the months of intense heat in June, July and August. I walked into the Union right behind their Secretary General. We were the last to arrive at the general meeting inaugurating the Union’s year of work ahead after the summer break.

After a good hour of casual greetings and introductions around the corridors and the different rooms of the Union, all the approximately forty women found in the Union on that day started to trickle into one of its carpeted salons, taking spots on the floor around the

Secretary General, who sat over a low table she was using to write notes. As I was walking towards the room, a young woman I will refer to as Salka introduced herself to me. Salka was born in the exiled Republic, and like many of her generation, she had spent much of her youth abroad receiving higher education with the expectation of obtaining paid employment in a liberated Western Sahara. When, in 2003, Salka was obliged to return to the exiled-Republic instead, she was unable to find an opportunity to apply her skills as an engineer, so she took on

179 an unwaged lower-administrative position at the Women’s Union where she goes to work

86 daily.

Salka asked me about my work and I explained I wanted to research the history of the revolution through women’s narratives, to learn about the creation of the Women’s Union. I wanted to understand how Sahrawi women conceived their struggle today and, as I spoke, I sensed I was boring my interlocutor. In fact, Salka promptly cut me off saying: “We have already done that work… wait!” And, leaving the room abruptly, she returned with a printed booklet entitled: “The Strength of Women: The Experience of Sahrawi Women”. She handed me a copy saying: “Here, we have already written the history of the Union and said what we are fighting for, you can keep this”. The following image shows the cover of the booklet.

86 Salka receives an incentive of around ten euros a month when the money is available but as I explained in the introduction, I do not find it accurate to consider this a “wage”.

180

Figure 29. Cover of Booklet

The booklet is written and assembled by the Women’s Union and yet, reading through its pages, it is difficult to say whether it is primarily designed to promote Sahrawi women,

Sahrawi nationalism, the Saharawi Republic or the organization of the Women’s Union in and of itself. Amongst providing other important information (this history of the conflict, the

Union’s goals and organizational structure), the document describes the different “phases” of the Sahrawi women’s movement. The first phase (1960s-1973) describes women’s participation in the movement led by the disappeared Brahim Bassiri: Harakt Tahrir al Saqiya

181 al-Hamraʿ wa Wadi el Dhahab, the second phase begins with the POLISARIO Front’s first

General Congress in 1973, announcing the creation of the movement’s “feminine wing”

(Booklet: 89). The third (1976-1985) describes the “Phase of the Union of Women”, those years when women of all kinship groups and status united and took on the labour to build and administer the nascent Republic. The final, fourth phase (1985 - 2011), is marked by the constitution of the Women’s Union.

Despite the decades of evidence for Sahrawi women’s active involvement in their political struggle, the modernist narrative the booklet employs necessarily presents women’s political participation as lagging behind that of men. Fusing Martyr El Uali’s socialist-leaning rhetoric with the developmentalist rationalizations of the United Nations Development

Program (UNDP) whose reports are cited in the booklet, demonstrating how the most

“advanced of nations are also the most inclusive of women”, the booklet notes the Women’s

Union’s priorities are to invest in women’s education, working on all the obstacles that prevent her “political participation” (Booklet: 75). The subtext for a statement like this is the modernist assumption that “political participation” takes place in “public spheres”, naturalising the ideo- spatial logics of the modern nation-state, whereby women’s labour in “private” spheres becomes an obstacle, rather than one of the spaces, for their political participation.

When in the mid-1990s women’s working and political committees of an early revolutionary period were dissolved, the Women’s Union took over quite a few of their tasks, by default. For instance, the Women’s Union took on the responsibility to provide special assistance to elders in vulnerable situations, delivering them medicine, food, and sanitising towels, and they took over the work of managing centers for the disabled at the provincial level. When in 2003, the current Secretary General of the Women’s Union was elected for the

182 first time, she made it her mission to counter the assimilation of women’s labour entirely into the labour of providing welfare, redefining the Women’s Union as an organisation that secures autonomous spaces for women’s organizing within the Republic (booklet: 92). This initiative is one that the Secretary General has talked to me about on a number of occasions. The ceasefire, she noted, gave Saharawi women opportunity to travel and to meet women who had undergone similar struggle to them and encountered hundreds of examples of women who had participated actively in their nation’s revolutionary processes and yet who, once in power, their male counterparts had, time and time and again let them down, excluding them from the highest decisions bodies of government and often legalising against their most basic rights.

Taking note of this global cautionary tale, the Secretary General had made it her priority to turn the Women’s Union into a platform that would focus on providing women opportunities to be seen, heard and trained, multiplying the numbers of Sahrawi women in the highest positions of the POLISARIO Front, so that once the Western Sahara became independent, there would be no turning back. For this reason, when in 2003, the Secretary General convinced the National

Secretariat to create a special Ministry for Women and Social Affairs with the aim of relaying the Women’s Union from these welfare provision practices, she considered it a huge success.

Foreclosing the possibility that the provision of welfare could be considered an empowering mode of political action—so close to the labour of care associated with the “private sphere” that modern nation-state logics depoliticise— from 2003 onwards, the Secretary General was able to focus on strategies that look towards the “future of Sahrawi women”, that is futures of modern “progress” that would align Saharawi women’s trajectories with those of women worldwide. Thus, today one of the explicit missions of the Women’s Union is to partner with international NGOs, connecting Sahrawi women with women undergoing relatable struggles,

183 whilst procuring visibility and support for Sahrawi nationalism worldwide (Booklet: 89, my emphasis).

The last pages of the booklet collect portraits of the different executive committees the

Union has had over the years, but not exclusively. Their portraits are followed by those of famous female dancers and musicians, of female ministers and parliamentarians, even black and white portraits of pioneers who were part of the POLISARIO’s “female wing”. Blurring the boundaries between the Women’s Union and all other institutions of the Republic, situating the activism of all these figures into a single temporal and structural axis that makes them appear equally sublimated to their common goal of national independence, the portraits collected in the final pages of the booklet constitute an iconographic homage to the nation’s most prominent munadilat (female militants).

The Women’s Union’s goal to address female-specific agendas sits uneasily with the dominant discourse of a Saharawi revolutionary nationalism. The first edition of the Women’s

Union magazine “The 8th of March” ─note how the title of the Women’s Union’s magazine, named after International Women’s Day speech speaks to the organization’s efforts to commensurate their movement with an international feminist struggle─ published the late

Republic’s President and Secretary General of the POLISARIO Front Mohamed Abdelaziz’s speech during the Women’s Union inaugural Congress in 1985: “The Sahrawi Woman has obtained equality and social liberty. Her liberty resides in her maturity, in the degree to which she is attached to her national identity and to the values of her people. Her combat is imposed by her national reality…” and he adds “women have successfully become incorporated into the struggle aware that the progress of their emancipation cannot be conceived outside of their national liberation…” (1985, 8 de Marzo, nº1, translated from a version in French).

184 With these words, Abdelaziz mobilized a framework that presents women’s emancipation as tantamount to that of her nation. As a result, his rhetoric erases Saharan women’s longstanding political contributions to their larger society, ones pre-dating the POLISARIO’s nationalist and revolutionary project. Assuming the ideo-spatial logic of the modern nation-state, women’s political action in the domain of the khayma passes inadvertent in his speech, allowing women to appear as having been “incorporated” into the national struggle. Abdelaziz’s speech reminds me of Anne McClintock’s poignant critique of Franz’s Fanon’s analysis of women’s participation in the Algerian revolution (1986). Declaring Algerian women were “invited” to participate in the revolution, Fanon ironically reduced women’s agency to a designated form of agency by “invitation” (McClintock 1997: 98). Drawing on her insight, I would suggest that the Sahrawi struggle’s adherence to modernist frameworks of female empowerment, ones that heavily associate the “political” to public spheres lends itself to exactly the mistake Fanon made. It lends itself to the erasure of the fact that the POLISARIO Front’s men did not “invite” women to the revolution. If anything, the exact opposite is true: the fact that women welcomed and invited men and women into their khyiam was one of the conditions of possibility for the

POLISARIO Front’s very emergence.

“Thank you”, I told Salka, as we entered the room were the Women’s Union general meeting was convening. “This is great!” I added, in genuine appreciation for the document, if also feeling uneasy about the way in which her helpful gesture seemed to have been part of an attempt at dissuading me from pursuing my research topic. The room fell silent when the

Secretary General started to speak. She convened the meeting, introducing me as a Spanish researcher who had come from Canada to learn and write about women’s role in the Sahrawi revolution. Much like Salka’s reaction to my work, I felt this introduction did not arouse much

185 interest around the room. My feeling was that these women found my curiosity predictable, almost banal. I was yet another foreign woman, another nasrania (Christian/Westerner) looking to do the work that Salka had just told me “had already been done”.

Indeed, I am far from alone in my investment in Sahrawi women and their struggle.

There have been several female writers to have visited the Republic before me, and who, with exceptions (Allan, 2014; Cazón, 2004; Fiddian-Quasmiyeh, 2014) have written pieces of unequivocal praise for the role of Sahrawi women in their society and political struggle

(Coconi: 2008; Juliano, 1999; Lippehart: 1992; Perregaux: 1993; Pineda: 1991; Tortajada:

2002). This body of literature highlights the spectacular accomplishments of women building and managing an exiled Republic, often emphasizing the aspects of a Sahrawi “traditional nomadic culture” that “have always made Sahrawi women free” and, in their view, remarkably different to other Arab and Muslim women.

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2014) has usefully argued how these accounts largely reproduce the POLISARIO Front’s own official discourse who “has developed a gynocentric policy to international relations directed specifically to certain Western audiences” (2014: 10).

According to her, their policy relies on a discourse qualified by depictions of “uniquely liberal, secular and empowered refugee women” (ibid: 2, 126) that is substantiated by a series of misrepresentations that she organizes into four domains: dress (an alleged absence of the

Islamic veil), marriage practices (an alleged absence of the Islamic practice of bridewealth: mahr), violence (an alleged absence of gender based violence) and movement (women’s alleged freedom of movement) (2014: 126-71). Seeking support from Western political and humanitarian actors, such discourses distance Sahrawi women from “other” Muslim women,

186 whilst reproducing longstanding orientalist and colonial representations of Muslim women as passive and oppressed by men.

However, the performance of this particular kind of liberal feminism says more about the political culture of a global, liberal and hegemonic feminism and its exclusions (Grewal,

2005; Mahmood, 1991; Mohanty, 1988) than about the political culture of Sahrawi nationalism in and of itself. At a time when military interventions are being waged in the name of

“women’s rights” and of Muslim women’s rights in particular (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Eisenstein,

Zillah, 2007; more recently #saveourgirls), the mobilization of these gendered discourses of

Muslim exceptionality are, arguably, of vital strategic importance, not only for the movement’s political and economic survival (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2014) but also to avert any potential for military aggression. As Sonia Rossetti (2012) argues, the role that Saharawi female ambassadors and political representations play abroad, as well as Sahrawi women’s participation in international political spaces and fora more generally, has been important for the movement’s efforts at overcoming orientalist pre-conceptions about Muslim women, as well as predictions that an independent Western Sahara would become a “fragile” state (also see Solana, 2011). In 2011, the Women’s Union was member of eleven different transnational feminist networks. For many Sahrawi citizen-refugees, participating in the Women’s Union allows them to attend these international meetings, training them in political participation in

“public international spheres” from an early age. Indeed, all of four current female Ministers in the Republic today, as well as the Sahrawi Parliamentary for the African Union, have at once point in their careers held an Executive Position at the Women’s Union87.

87 In 2011 the networks that the Women’s Union belonged to include: The Democratic International Federation of Women, The Pan African Organization of Women, ECOSOC (The Social, Cultural and Economic Council to the African Union), The Women’s Socialist International, the Global March of Women, Women Advancement or Economic and Empowerment in Africa, Women Together, Women for Communication, The General Union of

187 Crucially, the performances of a culture of liberalism that Fiddian-Quasmiyeh describes, circulate, mostly, at global scales—international conferences, international press, the blogs and comments of those Sahrawi and foreign supporters who often live outside of the

Republic—and they are, for the most part, disconnected from the nationalist discourse engaging Sahrawi women in their everyday life. Constituted in struggle, the model of female empowerment espoused by Sahrawi nationalism is one that demands women’s political, domestic, reproductive and emotional labour to be invested into the collective cause, conjuring a powerful female subject that a “liberal” feminist would hardly identify with. Consider the speech with which Minister Khadiya Hamdi inaugurated the 2011 edition of ARTifariti, a speech I already referred to in the previous chapter, in which Hamdi called upon Sahrawi women to deliver hospitality, acting as ambassadors to the nation and extended her greeting to:

“all Sahrawi mothers who carry a potential martyr in their wombs”. A form of greeting that was received with claps of fervour and that assigned revolutionary and nationalist subjects with a duty to submit the spaces of one’s home and one’s womb to the collective good.

The dominant model of female empowerment espoused by Saharawi nationalism finds embodiment in the Sahrawi munadila who represents a mass revolutionary national subject associated with her participation in the public and visible spaces of the Sahrawi Republic: neighbourhood and district councils, schools, hospitals, radio programs, newspapers and international conferences. Encouraging women to express their political opinions in front of large audiences and cameras, the figure of the munadila is constructed upon the reformulation of modesty codes known as hishma that, like the practice of hospitality discussed in the previous chapter, is embedded in processes of political legitimacy, whereby sexual

Arab Women, Organization of Women for Peace. This list includes only transnational networks, excluding the dozens of different international NGOs and regional governments that have partnered with the Women Union’s over the years to run specific projects.

188 comportment, and that of women in particular, marks the honour and the respectability of her larger social group.

Crucially, Saharawi revolutionary nationalism’s reformulation of hishma did not extend to women’s public expression of their more desirous or romantic sentiments. Instead, in its efforts to make, unmake and absorb pre-revolutionary “social relations of sovereignty”

(Wilson, 2016), the POLISARIO Front reformulates yet also adheres to the code of hishma, by turning women’s sexuality into a matter of national concern. The movement mobilises discourses that actively police women’s sexuality making it stand for the morality of the nation itself (Allan, 2010) accompanying such discourses with specific governmental practices that similarly frame women’s sexuality as matter of national concern. For instance, the Republic runs a centre that detains women who become pregnant out of wedlock (Allan, 2010; Cazon,

2004; Fiddian-Quasmiyeh, 2009). Given the strong reactions this prison elicits amongst liberals and feminists of most kinds, this is a not a fact that the POLISARIO Front publicises widely.

Cognizant of the political sensibility of the matter, and of the implications, of me, enquiring about it as representative of an “international community”, despite its relevance to my research,

I never actively investigated or gathered information about this imprisonment center (see methodology/positionality). Nevertheless, several mentioned the center to me and when they did, most people described it as a benevolent government institution with the purpose of protecting single mothers and their newborn babies from the potential ill treatment of their kin.

I was also told the prison was almost empty. Single mothers were detained until fathers accepted to marry them, and allegedly, in most cases, faced with intense social pressure, they did. In any case, the very existence of this prison speaks to the way in which the POLISARIO

Front’s discourses and practices adhere to a reformulated hishma, performing nationalism and

189 sovereignty, in part, by intervening in women’s sexuality. Moreover, the mobilization of the pre-revolutionary ethical tradition associated to hishma folds into a “prioritization paradigm”

(Amireh, 2012) whereby women’s sexual oppression is deemed less urgent than fighting against the oppression of the nation as a whole. These valorizations legitimate the model of female empowerment associated to the figure of the munadila’s: one that does not promote an increased autonomy over women’s sexuality, yet strongly encourages women’s presence and

88 participation in the “public” and visible spaces.

For the most part, these two discourses - the more “global” discourse of liberal feminism described by Fiddian-Quasmiyeh and Sahrawi nationalism’s dominant model of female empowerment that I just described– speak past each other. Still, the two converge to situate women at the center of a “politics of visibility” in which actors as diverse as Sahrawi nationalists, humanitarian workers, development aid expatriates, members of an international

“left” and even representatives of those with more imperialist drives, all come together to turn women’s bodies into the terrain over and through which battles over sovereignty are being fought in the region. It is in this light how I understand the way in which my research topic failed to interest Salka (and others): It spoke to a fatigue, even a resistance, to being studied, to being observed.

The next section returns to the Women’s Union’s general meeting to reflect upon the way in which the bureaucratization of the Saharawi women’s movement into the Women’s

Union is implicated in the production of new public and private spheres in the lives of Sahrawi women. Moreover, I show how women’s encroaching private lives and new obstacles to

88 The POLISARIO Front’s prohibition of female circumscion and of the aesthetics practices of force-feeding young women can be considered as an exception to this observation. Draw on Janice Boddy (1982) work to suggest this ban might also be more motivated by the destruction of a pre-revolutionary order than by the promoting women’s sexual autonomy.

190 women’s participation in “public spheres” are often more evident for those who came of age under the structural conditions of a colonial meantime than to members of an older generation.

4.2 Organizing into the Women’s Union

At one point during the meeting I was officially introduced to the Executive Directors of the Union, each of them in charge of a different department, including: Administration,

International Cooperation, Human Rights Activism, Alphabetisation and Education, Women’s

Health, and Research for the Promotion of Women. Suelma, an unusually young member of the

Union’s Executive, had been elected to direct the later department. Most other women in the meeting assisted each of the Directors in one of these departments. A stream of tea cups was continuously being served to us by a young girl whose mother, the caretaker for the building, was preparing in a different room, whilst a heated discussion was going on between the

Union’s executives over a topic that engaged their interest much more than my trite research project: the schedule for the language classes I would teach during the course of my fieldwork in each of the women’s centers of the Republic.

The discussion finally gave way to a prolonged midday break known as al-ghayla, a session of lounging and tea drinking while we waited for lunch. Khadaya approached me, and like many young Sahrawi women with higher education, she spoke fluent English. Even though she was head of research, she wanted to apologise in advance: she would not be able to oversee my work very closely. She explained she was the only person taking care of her divorced mother’s khayma located in Ausserd, a province approximately 30 km away from where the

Union’s headquarters are located. The Women’s Union did not cover the cost of her transport so she barely used her office in the Union’s main headquarters. Given that the Union could barely provide her with a monetary incentive, she took any opportunity she found to earn a separate 191 income. At the time, she was busy working as a language teacher for a group of visiting

European students learning Arabic. “Are you married?” I asked her “You are already sounding like a Sahrawiya” she told me, making us laugh and then she answered: “No. I don’t think about that right now”. She was determined to look for an opportunity to read a master’s degree abroad and was postponing marriage.

After lunch, many lay down, some covering their faces with their milafhat, napping in a room now filled with the sound of chatter and the relaxing murmur of those practicing midday prayer. The mood bore little resemblance to the more formal atmosphere of our meeting a few hours back, when everyone had sat upright, looking towards the Secretary General attentively.

One of the Executive Directors had taken an iron and a pile of milafhat, spread them over one of the working tables, and made use of the operating electricity source in the Women’s Union’s headquarters (a rare luxury elsewhere in Republic) to iron her clothes as she chatted casually to those sitting around her. Milafhat had fallen off a few heads, hanging over shoulders informally. Some took the opportunity to redo their hair-buns, combing their hair with their hands as they chatted. I sat observing this scene, exhausted by the difficulty of following the fast conversations around me. Then Suelma, whom I had not seen in a while because, unlike the older members of the executive board, she had joined her younger colleagues to help clear up the plates and leftovers from lunch, returned from the kitchen and sat next to me, exclaiming with a sigh:

“I am not used to this way of working… I don’t like wasting time in this way, do you?

When I have work to do, I go to the Women’s Center’s offices in my province because

I can’t work in my khayma. The khayma is to relax the way they are relaxing here now!

And the Centers should be for working, not for wasting time like this…!”

192 I gave Suelma a sympathetic smile, thinking about how her comments reflected generational differences in the upbringings of women in the room. Suelma’s older colleagues had come of age during the years of armed struggle, at a time when they were required to leave their children in nurseries during the day, dedicate their collaborative labour to building a new

Republic, share food in public eating-halls and prepare dinner in the privacy of the khiyamyet following the menu established and using the food rations provided by the POLISARIO’s leadership on any given day. Those had been years when everything personal was folded into the collective cause and when women had focused much of their energy into the creation of a their nascent Republic’s new national domain. Moreover, the transition from the predominantly collectivised nomadic lifestyles of a pre-revolutionary period, cohered with the radical collective ethos of the early revolutionary period (one escalated by the conditions of dispossession and armed struggle), an ethos requiring all those who became exiled in Algeria to live as if they were part of a single, national, nomadic encampment instead of kin-affiliated ones.

Napping or ironing clothes during one a work breaks might have felt more appropriate to an older generation of women who had grown up in an environment where the boundaries between political activism, domestic labour and labour outside of their households were not as discernible as they were to Suelma, someone who has been educated in the institutional spaces of the Algerian state, where the activities one performs within the private space of the home are more clearly demarcated from the activities one performs in institutional, public spaces.

Moreover, Suelma has come of age in the radically different political and economic conditions of a colonial meantime. Since the 1991 ceasefire new spaces have emerged in the

Republic for the pursuit of private interests and, from 2003 onwards, the Sahrawi Republic’s

193 institutions started to offer monetary incentives to some of its citizens-refugees (Wilson,

2012:33). Organizations of the Masses receive one of the lowest budgets from the Republic’s administration because they are considered first and foremost spaces for citizen-refugees voluntary political mobilisation. Economic incentives for women who work for the Union are extremely low, helping explain why a young woman like Suelma uses the skills she obtained through her university degree to combine her Executive position in the Union with other income-generating opportunities such as teaching Arabic to European visitors in the Republic.

Overall, Suelma’s frustration with her older colleagues’ work style and work rhythm is telling of the way in which the ideo-spatial and temporal logics of the modern nation-state begin to apply to the Sahrawi Republic of this colonial meantime: “I don’t like wasting time… and if we don´t finish this meeting before nightfall, I won’t find a car to return to my khayma”, and with this, a second layer of difference between her and her older counterparts became apparent: young and unmarried, Suelma was expected in her khayma before nightfall, both to mitigate sexual risks and hearsay and to prepare dinner for her family, a task that is now unwaged, “private” and usually ascribed to the daughters of a family.

With the exception of the Union’s caretaker and her daughter, the Secretary General and I were the last to leave the headquarters of the Women’s Union. The sun was coming down and we saw children running back to their khiyam and men closing the doors of their shops for prayer: “I don’t know how we are going to make sure that girls come to your English classes” she commented. I was surprised to hear this, I had not expected there would be a low demand for language training: “Why do you say that?” I asked. “Because we have to pay for everything of late…” she said. “Even organizing a general meeting like today’s is difficult. The executive committee complains because they want the Union to pay for their transport here… they don’t

194 understand that there is no money for things like that, especially now with the crisis in Spain

(referring to the global financial crisis of 2010)… everyone expects to receive salaries, but we don’t always have the money for that... We will even have to pay for the announcement of your

English classes. We need to pay the person who goes around the neighbourhoods with a megaphone publicizing activities. Everyone expects to work for money now. There is no volunteerism left here.”

This was not the last time I would have this conversation with the Secretary General who frequently complained about the Union’s lack of human resources. She was voted into her position in 2002, at a time when most had already understood the “peace-process” was going nowhere. This was right before the POLISARIO started distributing monetary incentives amongst the Republic’s public servants in 2003, a time when the leadership was becoming concerned with the demoralisation of citizen-refugees, with their declined command of labour and with a perceived decline in citizen-refugees participation in the Republic’s activities.

Mirroring the concerns of those times, the Secretary General’s mandate in 2002 was, and continues to be, that increasing the women’s participation in the Women’s Union activities

(UNMS booklet, 75).

However, according to the Secretary General, this mission has only become harder and harder for her to accomplish over the years. Even though the Secretary General was acutely aware that generational renewal is of key strategic importance to the Sahrawi cause, she struggled to attract young women to the Union due to financial constraints. Whereas the beginning of her mandate coincided with a period of economic bonanza for Spain, a time when

Spanish regional governments and associations were provisioned with an amount of humanitarian and development aid unprecedented in Spanish history, the austerity measures

195 imposed over Spain in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis had, by 2011, significantly reduced flows of aid to the Women’s Union. Thus, even though the Republic was full of women, especially young women, who have studied abroad and returned with a variety of skills including proficiency in foreign languages, she often faced difficulties in finding translators willing to work with her voluntarily. Unlike her generation, who had dutifully devoted their voluntary labour to serving the collective cause, young women, she lamented:

“expect salaries and better conditions. There is no volunteerism anymore…” In this way, the bureaucratization of women’s organizing into the Women’s Union has coincided with a perceived “crisis” in women’s “political” participation.

I became acutely aware of this perceived crisis on occasion of a European

Commission’s delegation visit to the Republic. One this day, one of Union’s Executive’s stormed into one my English classes at the main headquarters of the Women’s Union with an important message for me. I stepped outside the classroom to talk to her. It was around midday and the class was coming to an end. She told me the Union had received an important message from the Republic’s Prime Minister: A delegation from the European Commission was due to visit the Republic that same day. The Women’s Union was asked to host and organise an event upon their arrival. She needed me to make sure my students stayed behind until the event was over, I needed to make sure they were around to participate and welcome the delegation when they arrived. I tried my best to do as she said, and whereas approximately half of the class left the building exactly when the class was due to be over, approximately another half stayed behind, agreeing to do extra exercises with me until the event started. However, hours went past, and the group started to slowly reduce in size until there was not a single student left.

They excused themselves one by one, explaining they had work to do in their khayma. When

196 reported this to the Union’s Executive she was very displeased. She was one of several making frenetic phone calls to the Ministry of Information, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of

Resources and Equipment, gathering chairs, musicians and journalists for the event, complaining to me between phone call and phone call that young women no longer volunterred their work like they did in the past.

The European Commission delegates did not arrive until after the sun was down. Even

Salka, who has a position at the Union and was a decade or so older than my students was annoyed to have to stay until so late. When I told her the story with my students she said: do you think the parents of those girls would allow them to return to their khyiam from the Union at this hour? Does the Union have cars to drive them home? What if something had happened to them? And what would people say seeing them walk around at night?”

In this way, Salka, a woman who has come of age in the structural conditions of a colonial meantime, identified a blind-spot in the vision of her older colleagues. Having grown up in a Republic where the boundaries between the “private” and the “public” were virtually inexistent, to her older colleagues— now burdened with having to attend to the politics of respectability of actors worldwide who fixate on the importance of women’s presence in

“public spheres”— the vulnerabilities and risks involved trying to live up to figure of munadila in the present —that exemplary woman who, like the Union Executives, would have stayed behind for the event, dedicating her labour to the Sahrawi cause night and day— were not as obvious as they were to Salka.

Stepping outside of the spaces of the Union to reflect upon how its work is imagined by those who do not have regular contact with the organization, the following vignette looks ay

197 how this process of bureaucratization is implicated in the creation of a conceptual separation between a society with “private” concerns and the “public” concerns of the state.

4.3 Outside the Women’s Union

In May of 2013, I organized a trip to visit my friend and research assistant Embarka.

When I arrived at her khayma, the first thing she did was to scold me for making my visit into a day trip only. The brevity of my stay was, indeed, unusual. I typically stayed a couple of nights with her, sometimes weeks. Yet, due to France’s invasion of Mali in January of 2013 and the violent activities across the Mali-Algerian border that this invasion precipitated, the

POLISARIO had increased security measures in ways that made it very difficult for me to negotiate staying overnight outside of Buyudur, the province where the administration had officially registered me with a host family. Embarka knew as well as I did that requesting a special permit to stay with her longer would have been cumbersome for both of us, yet we also knew her scolding was her welcoming, her attempt at living up to hospitality despite the difficulties of these colonial meantime (see chapter 2) 89.

After these greetings, Larosi, a male friend who had agreed to escort me on my visit, joined Embarka’s husband in the living room where they were assigned the task of making tea as I followed Embarka to the kitchen: “You can make the salad”, she instructed me. I sat on a

89 The French military intervention of Mali in January of 2013 propitiated two Al-Qaeda attacks in Algeria soil on the same month. Sahrawi refugee camps are the crossroads between Northern Mali and Algeria. Following these attacks, the Sahrawi Republic was closed to all foreginers for a period of 6 months. This included most of expatriated workers - under the explicit instructions of the POLISARIO and Algerian authorities. With these attacks on top of the kidnap of three Western development workers in the camps on November of 2011, allegedly by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the POLISARIO Front and Algeria could not afford the political and economic risk of a second kidnap. The tumultuous January of 2013 was unfortunately also the time when I had planned and organised a 6-month period of fieldwork in the camps, after a 6-month interlude from a year-long fieldwork period (September 2011 to August 2012), a plan which was aborted when, on the 10th of January I was called by the office of the POLISARIO in Madrid advising me not to board my flight as I would be deported back. By April of 2013 delegations were invited to participate in the 40th anniversary of the POLISARIO Front, and I was given a new 3-month visa.

198 plastic stool and in front of a plastic table dicing boiled carrots and beetroot, pouring water from the canister into a plastic bowl where I rinsed lettuce leaves, as I watched Embarka move between the stove and the oven where she was making a chicken stew. This was a special meal.

Most Sahrawi families do not consume meat, salad and vegetables on a regular basis. Moved by her efforts, I said something along the lines of “you should not have” and she replied, humbly: “this is nothing… just simple badaoui cuisine” I smiled, thinking about how different this meal was from “the simple cuisine of bedouins”, as I prepared myself for the anticipated comfort of listening to Embarka’s update on familiar stories.

Embarka proceeded to talk to me about her new job. She had been hired by a Spanish association to run the administration of a resource-center in her neighbourhood. She struggled with the critiques she received from her foreign bosses but insisted she loved it anyway. Most of all, she enjoyed the everyday contact it offered her with women who were neither her relatives nor her immediate neighbours. These social interactions, she said, were allowing her to apply the skills she had learned at university. Unable to understand how her degree was instrumental to this social life, I asked her to explain that.

It all started, she said, when a book arrived at the center. It was a book about love and about sex, written in Arabic. It had been sitting on a shelf, gathering dust for days, until one day, an older women broke the ice, took the book into her hands, held it up and said out loud:

“This is the most important/interesting (muhim) book in here!”. A conversation started after that. Young women started to talk about love and they all looked to Embarka because, being the only one with a university degree, she was assumed to be wiser. They asked Embarka

“what is the meaning of love?” “What did you say to them?” I asked:

199 Well, I explained that there is love towards mothers, towards friends… towards

men… that these were many different types of love…I told them it was normal to have

sexual desires towards men but that this was only one part of love. One of the girls

started to tell us about her boyfriend. He is a Cubaraui90, and she said that she didn’t

believe what I was saying; that in her experience, love between men and women was

only sexual desire. She didn’t understand that this man was taking advantage of her. I

tried to convince her that love between men and women can exist… but it was hard,

you see, because no one ever talks to young women about these things, so they can’t

distinguish between men’s intentions…

This conversation turned out to the springboard for many others. Word had spread and

Embarka started receiving unofficially visits (that is, these visits were not in her job description) at the center to solicit her advice on love affairs. An unmarried woman in her late twenties had come hoping to share with her a very big secret, a big secret that explained why she refused to get married. Embarka feared the secret could have something to do with a story of abuse from her father or one of her brothers. “Vivian, she seemed so ashamed, I tell you, I was scared of what she was going to tell me” but the story was not what Embarka had expected. It was the story of a love affair the woman had had growing up with a female friend of hers. Her ex-lover is now a married mother of two, and the two pretend nothing ever

90 Embarka’s specification that the person she was referring to was a Cubaraui was not superfluous. The term “Cubarauis” refers to Sahrawis who have grown up in Cuba, educated by the Cuban government as a form of aid since the beginning of the war. Since the end of the Cold War, the number of Sahrawis invited by Cuba has been reduced significantly. These youths spent an average of 10 years of their childhood in Cuba with little or no communication with their families (the latter is true mainly of the early generations; today internet offers a little more frequent contact). As a result they are a clearly distinguishable group when they return to the camps. They lack the complex knowledge of Sahrawi modesty codes and appropriate behaviour. They tend to be louder, and discriminated for being suspected of drinking alcohol and engaging in illicit sexual behaviour, mixed dancing, etc. They tend to befriend each other and they are also the most successful in emigrating to Spain, due to their command of Spanish and relative ease in their ability to form relationships with Westerners writ-large. She used it as a code to highlight that he was likely to be more liberal in his relationships and morally dubious in general.

200 happened between them. However, Embarka’s confidante could not put the story behind her.

Embarka encouraged her not to be so harsh on herself; she advised her to get married and “get on with her life” but this seemed easier said than done: “she doesn’t believe she deserves marriage and all those things”. Another woman had not slept for days worrying about her daughter because she had walked in on her “making love to herself”. She felt so worried about her daughter she did not allow her to leave the house. She was afraid she had become

“unmarriageable”. Embarka encouraged her to think otherwise: “I told her all it meant was that her daughter was ready for marriage and that she should marry her as fast as possible!”

We giggled after Embarka repeated to me her witty remark, until she said, with a more serious tone: “You see what I mean? I feel I can use my studies to be useful to women in this way. You know how it is here, no one tells young women about love. They can’t talk about these things with anyone”. I nodded, and reflecting upon how her stories revealed the limitations of the emphasis the Women’s Union's placed upon increasing women’s participation and leadership positions in the Republic’s institutions and decision-making bodies, I said: “The support you are offering women with these issues is the kind of work that the Women’s Union should do, right?”

“The Women’s Union?” Embarka exclaimed, almost shocked by my remark. “You

know the Women’s Union, Vivian? Don´t you? There is no place for those discussions

there! You see most people here think that the Union does… you know, political work.

They bring women together and they organize marches. Sometimes they give them

good advice. Advice about not getting too fat or not using the whitening creams that

give you cancer and all that… all of that is good work… but they always do it in front

of the camera… yes, people listen to them but they are not understanding any of their

201 ideas, they don’t take them in… No, Vivian, that type of work should be done in small

groups… If you want women to really understand you, you need to build trust with

them… It is slow work… You should know that, Vivian, you are an anthropologist!”

In hindsight, my question to Embarka had been naïve, almost absurd. As explained earlier, Sahrawi nationalism’s dominant model of female empowerment is premised upon a revolutionary self-sacrifice that does not frame women’s sexuality as an individual concern, a model of empowerment aligned with a global fixation with women’s presence in “public spheres”, tending to measure women’s empowerment in relation to her presence in public spaces. These alignments are far too powerful to expect the Women’s Union to officially take a position against them. Embarka’s reproach was correct: It should have been obvious to me that the deeply sensitive topic of women’s sexuality─which in the

Sahrawi Republic has the characteristics described above, even if women’s sexuality is, arguably, a sensitive matter, everywhere─needs be dealt with in small circles of trust, building relationships, learning to listen and to communicate adequately. Her comments serve as a potent reminder of the way in which the most supportive of networks are weaved in people to people interactions that exist outside and despite the stated official, respectable and recognizable agendas of institutions and its nodes of equivalence with global, sometimes imperialist projects. She was right; I should have known all of this, especially as an anthropologist.

In Embarka’s portrayal of the Women’s Union “political” labour was aligned with labour done “in front of the camera”. Embarka argued the work of the Union targets surfaces, the outside of things. There is a way in which Embarka’s comments, positioned from outside the Union, mirror Suelma’s words from inside the Union. As I argued in the

202 introduction, it was not until most women’s work became unwaged, that speaking of a private/public divide in the Saharawi Republic makes sense. What I see in common in both of these young women’s comments is a generational perspective that suggests that the bureaucratization of women’s organizing has coincided with a time when the “political” began to feel displaced into the professionalized, institutional and “public” domain of the

Saharawi Republic.

The valorization Embarka’s comments make regarding what counts as political and what does not bespeaks the way in which the transition from a Sahrawi women’s movement into the Women’s Union has contributed to produce what Timothy Mitchell describes as “state effects” (2001), enabling the perception of an ontological difference between “the state” and “society”. Despite the fact that the Women’s Union is technically not part of the Republic’s administrative branch of government, despite the fact that it was conceived as an instrument for political mobilisation, the organization’s practices, the nodes of equivalence it must forge with international organisations and stakeholders sustaining it, make the Women’s Union appear disconnected with the concerns of

“society” and squared with the concerns of the “state”.

Moreover, Embarka’s unambiguous perception of the Women’s Union as a space where there was no room to discuss issues pertaining to women’s sexuality and sentimentality is also telling of the way in which the Women’s Union’s “state effects” are embedded and associated to the emergence of gendered private and public spheres. It is telling of the Union’s priorities: its fixation on female participation in public spheres at the expense of erasing its intervention

—or lack thereof— in more private domains of women’s experience. Her perception speaks to the contours of the dominant, national model of female empowerment that, in rendering women

203 hypervisible, becomes aligned with globalist forces operating in an around the region of North

Africa, falling short of addressing the way things look for women on the “inside”.

Nevertheless, although I take Embarka’s perception of the Women’s Union as a space estranged from women’s everyday agendas to be pointing at something very real and serious, my own day-to-day interactions with the Union between 2011 and 2013 suggested these contours were somewhat less rigid. The following ethnographic vignette illuminates how, whereas many women used the space of this institution’s to invest in and to reproduce the hypervisibility of the Sahrawi munadila, others use it to contest the models of female empowerment that a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism promotes, denouncing the alignments that partnering with an humanitarian-development-solidarity actors produce. Through a description of the labour of those who use the Union to disturb the politics of respectability that

Sahrawi women have been assigned to embody, the following vignette aims to to show how the

Women’s Union must also be understood as a key venue enabling the regeneration of the

Saharawi revolution.

4.4 Preparing for the POLISARIO’s 13th General Congress

The POLISARIO’s General Congress takes place every four years and it is the largest and most important political event in the Sahrawi Republic. Around 1800 Sahrawi delegates are voted to attend this event in representation of each of the following political constituencies: the four Organisations of the Masses (Women, Youth, Workers, Students), district councils

(dawair), the army, the Republic’s ministry, Sahrawi in diaspora and activists in the occupied territory (Wilson, 2016; Baschlin, 2004: 141). During these General Congress, delegates vote to adopt legal reforms and/or changes to the constitution as well as for the President of the

Republic, the same person who becomes the Army’s Commander in Chief, the POLISARIO

204 Front’s Secretary General and in charge of appointing most members of the National

Executive. A few months prior to the event, all those who send delegates to the General

Congress run preparatory sessions to raise awareness amongst their bases over the issues they propose to bring forward at the Congress. Roughly a month into my fieldwork, a large conference was organized at the Women’s Union in preparation for the POLISARIO Front’s

13th General Congress. The Union’s Secretary General asked me to participate in these sessions, assigning me the role of documenting. I was asked to take pictures, notes and recordings, summarize them, and then sending them off as a press release to Spanish activist networks of solidarity with the Sahrawi cause.

The largest room in the Women’s Union headquarters was packed with chairs facing a long table with four microphones for the speakers. The most popular musical band of the

Republic at the time, named after a region in the Western Sahara known for its reputed poets

“Tiris”, prepared their instruments on the stage, next to a sound technician. Journalists fluttered around the room, setting up their cameras. They worked for RASD TV (República Árabe

Saharaui Democrática TV) and RASD Radio, whilst a group of approximately one hundred women arrived from all the corners of the Republic: a combination of parliamentarians, journalists, ministers, heads of districts, school principals, teachers and nurses took to their chairs. I sat near the back of the room so that I could move around with my camera and next to

Fatimetu, an executive of the Women’s Union who was born in the early years of exile and armed struggle.

The event began when the Secretary General entered the room next to the Republic’s

Prime Minister, taking a seat each behind the presiding table to the sound of claps and ululations (zaqarit) from the audience. Khadaya too took a seat next to them and so did one of

205 the Republic’s young female judges. Tiris started playing and singing: “Independence, all we fight for is independence… the people and the government are one and we fight…”. The audience sang along, clapping, cheering and ululating. Once the music stopped, everyone stood up to sing the national anthem solemnly. The Prime Minister opened the event, thanking

Sahrawi women for their political commitment and participation in the cause, making a special mention to women in the occupied territory contributing to the Sahrawi uprising taking place there91. His speech was followed by the Secretary General who reminded her audience of women’s achievement throughout their long struggle against occupation; however, she alerted, much work was still to be done to guarantee the status Sahrawi women had acquired was guaranteed in the future. To that end, she explained, the Women Union’s priority was that of increasing women’s political participation in the Republic.

Suelma presented a paper next on the subject of women’s political participation. She explicitly defined political participation as the right to vote and to stand for elections, arguing women’s political participation is much higher in the Republic than in most independent states.

With three female ministers, one female governor, virtually all female heads of districts, 34% of the legislative authority, 30% of the parliament and women’s mass participation in all the institutions of the masses, Sahrawi women had good reason to feel proud of their political participation. Nonetheless, the highest political order of the POLISARIO Front remained mostly male-dominated, with only four women out of a total of twenty-four seats. Thus, she explained, despite their achievements, the path to reach full political equality with men was full

91 In fact this conference was held on the 9th of October, commemorating the first day of the protests a year prior in “Gdeim Izik”, a peaceful protest in the form of a mass encampment by Sahrawis living under Moroccan occupation that lasted two months in 2011. Although Gdeim Izik acquired very little media coverage, Noam Chomsky has claimed it was the “invisible precursor” to the Arab Spring (See Chomsky on “Democracy Now” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTjOt0Pz0BQ).

206 of difficulties. For Suelma, these obstacles included: economic precariousness, especially of female-led households, the “cultural idea that women’s natural place was in the realm of the khayma”, close to her children and enduring levels of female illiteracy. In this way, Suelma made use of a familiar modernist narrative that, assuming the gendered and ideo-spatial logics of the modern nation-state, conceives labour associated to the khayma to be outside of politics.

Moreover, some of the examples she used reflected the way in which the laws and the institutionalisation of the Republic in exile are contributing to sediment these assumptions especially amongst members of a younger generation. Suelma critiqued article 80 of the

Sahrawi constitution, which determines the conditions of eligibility for candidates to run for parliament. This article establishes that the criteria for parliamentary eligibility include: belonging to the army, having been elected to attend one of the national congresses, having held a position in the executive board of an institution or organization of masses or having served as an ambassador to the Sahrawi Republic or as a representative in a foreign delegation.

However, because women are a historical minority in these higher-level positions of political representation, in practice, these criteria discriminate against women’s political leadership.

Taking the perspective of a global political order, Suelma’s suggestions for improvement made sense. She insisted on the importance of extending women’s rights to the domain of the household. Bridging the private spaces of a woman’s life with public spaces of the Republic, she alerted her audience: “A woman can’t participate politically if she doesn’t feel she has rights within her own khayma”.

The second speaker, a young female judge of the Republic, similarly advocated change, premising arguments that assumed the logics of the modern nation-state. She praised the

Sahrawi constitution for granting women the right to vote and to run for elections, rights to

207 education, to health care and she praised it for protecting and giving special importance to women’s maternity (articles: 39, 42, 4). Men and women have equal employment rights and the same right to raise cases in civil courts. The penal code differentiates between men and women only in a few and, in her view, legitimate cases92. However, she explained, female jurists had come together to denounce the absence of a personal status law in the Republic legislating over laws concerning divorce and economic responsibilities at the level of the khayma. In fact, the speaker announced she was chairing a committee in charge of drafting a Sahrawi personal status code that would be presented in the upcoming national congress: “I would love to request from all women who are going to participate in the POLISARIO's 13th congress to demand that family law is included in the program of the congress. Please vote for it”93.

After their interventions, the floor was opened to comments from the audience. The first to stand up was a well-known and charismatic public speaker with a high position in government who assured the audience that Sahrawi women received a 200% in all their exams because they took charge of everything, from the domain of the household and all the way to the public administration of the State. Others followed her lead, yelling out impassioned patriotic

92 These include: charges of murder punish men with the death penalty whereas abortion punishes women alone with a sentence of imprisonment between 5 to 10 years. Rape is a law designed for men who are penalized with a minimum of 3 years of imprisonment.

93 Despite this committee of female jurists’ efforts, their demands to incorporate a personal status law in the Republic were not discussed during the program of the Congress after all. I was told the leadership had opposed it, considering it too risky a conversation. It is worth noting that whereas civil law and structures exist in the Republic these are not always respected and they are often overridden by customary law as practiced by qbail elders. Legislating family law would surely raise a lot of resistance from proponents of customary law. Pushing for family law was a blow to the very reproduction of a customary justice system and was thus considered an unrealistic aim of risky implications to matters of national consent. It is also worth noting that some women feel a personal status law is not in their best interest. Sonia Rossetti (2012: 341) notes Moroccan anthropologist Naima Chikhaoui claimed Sahrawi women living under Moroccan occupation did not celebrate Morocco’s 2004 “family law” (mudawana) arguing their customary law was more respectful towards women’s rights than the regime’s new family law. Similarly, Enrique Bengochea (2016) claims Sahrawi women who were part of the Spanish Sahara’s “Seccion Femenina” complained about the colonial administration djema’s intervention in their customary law.

208 sentences such as “I don’t want anything else but the nation” until someone grabbed the microphone with a slightly different message concerned with the stagnation of the peace- process: “Where are the ideas? When are we going to come up with new ideas to come out of this situation? and what are the younger women doing except for trying to look pretty and watching soap operas?”. There was a murmur from the audience after these comments. Then another woman, also an older woman, took the stage and said: “always the same… you say you haven’t done this, you haven’t done that… well you know what? Most women here continue to be the most nationalist and revolutionary, even more than our men! Whenever the POLISARIO organizes a political rally it is us who fill their cars, us who fill their rooms! All we need to do is make sure is to elect well-educated, nationalist women, true munadilat!”.

Her comments received a loud cheer from the audience, but were largely ignored by the speaker after her, a young woman who chose to address the issues raised by the official speakers of the conference: “I want to talk about divorce”. Stepping outside of the dominant, secular, rhetoric of Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism she made use of Islamic precepts to defend her point: “Our prophet was very clear about our right to solicit a divorce. Yes, there are differences with regards to men and women between laws concerning divorce in the hadith.

The hadith says that if a man asks for divorce he has three months to change his mind, whereas for a woman, once she asks for a divorce, her decision must be final, but we never practice this right here! We always wait for men to divorce us!

At this point Fatimetu turned enthusiastically to me as if looking for my approval “you understand what she is talking about?” but I only got the gist of it [All the citations provided here were recorded, transcribed and translated into Spanish with help from an assistant at a later stage. This vignette is based on my selections from a three hour-long tape that I translated

209 from Spanish to English to include here]. I said: “she is talking about divorce, right?” Fatimetu nodded: “Yes, this is something very important. You see the woman who is talking now? She has three children. She married very young, she is still young, she could marry again! But her husband left them years ago without divorcing her… now he lives abroad with another woman… He is caaaalm, he has a good life, while she is here, feeding their children on her own! Just like me!” (see next chapter for Fatimetu’s story). The young speaker continued: “We also need to make Sahrawi women aware of their right to denounce rape. Many are victims of rape and of physical violence but they do not dare denounce it. We need to make women who will participate in the National Congress aware of this problem, as it is them who will represent us there…”

An uncomfortable silence took over the room after these comments. Violence against women, especially sexual violence is a largely taboo subject. I looked towards Fatimetu but her expression had turned serious, un-engaging, and I felt intimidated to ask her for confirmation of what I had heard. The speaker’s words bore a heavy presence in the room, they lay low in the air, until an older woman took the microphone and gave a fierce response:

I want to remind you all that we have founded this revolution; we worked clandestinely

to spread awareness against Spanish colonialism. We built everything, all of this, we built

it from nothing, and now that we have something all that you can do is talk about the

small things? All we should be thinking about is how to fight Morocco. We need to be on

the side of women who do not question this reality, and stop talking about the small

things and as for the saibat (loose women), we need to ask families to stop defending

them when they become pregnant out of wedlock. The women our nation defends should

be clean. The women we defend are not the women who we see talking on the phone with

210 their boyfriends as they take walks outside of their khiyam. We have stopped caring about

those women and we have also stopped caring about our secrets. We are becoming the

voice of our enemies, speaking and sharing our internal matters.

If the younger speaker had framed the issue of sexual violence within a longstanding religious understanding of women’s rights, the older speaker rhetorically displaced this move, interrupting it with a familiar, nationalist discourse in which women’s sexual respectability is made to stand for the respectability of the nation itself (Allan, 2014). In so doing, the speaker was making use of the prioritization paradigm in which women’s sexual/gender oppression is deemed less urgent than fighting against the oppression of the nation as a whole. The younger speaker’s demands to make sexual inequality visible, her attempt at bringing the experience of spheres of life rendered private into public conversation, was trivialized by her older counterpart, who deemed such issues “small” in the face of enduring colonialism. Likewise, she described these “small things” as “secrets”, internal affairs, which should best remain in the dark. Bringing them to light, the older woman feared, not only distracted the nation from other imperatives, it brought disgrace upon them, weakening their larger nationalist cause.

Reproducing a nostalgic account of the early revolutionary period, she implies the younger speaker’s focus on “the small things” dishonoured the memory of the elder munadilat’s sacrifice to the nation.

A murmur infested the room again, until another young woman grabbed the microphone to perform a new rhetorical displacement: “I just want to say one thing: we only have two options, we either win or we let them win. And as for political participation and what is being said about young women I want to say that our leadership is also responsible for this situation: Why is it only their children who have visas, cars and who build keikotas (the most desired type of

211 household in the Republic)? Meanwhile the sons of martyrs have been abandoned to their luck since 1991. Obviously the sons of martyrs are leaving, they are going anywhere. They go anywhere they can to find a life for themselves, and who stays behind feeding their children?

Us…! Her and her and her….” she said. Pointing her fingers towards random women in the crowd, and then turning to the presiding conference table where the Secretary General and the

Republic’s Prime Minister’s were seated. At that moment, mobilising another longstanding ethical tradition amongst the Sahrawi, one associating the political authority of leader’s with their capacity for economic redistribution: “and that goes straight for you. You don’t give our children enough for them to stay put”

At this point the audience had become extremely loud, some cheering for the speaker, some yelling at her. It was so loud that the Secretary General interrupted her: “please calm down, there are other spaces and other conferences designed to talk about these things… here we have come to talk about women’s political participation… please! Everyone, calm down” and the conference resumed shortly after.

The Women’s Union is fraught with the challenge of uniting women of differential kinship and generational status and, as the last speaker’s comments help reveal, it is also necessarily implicated in the creation of new divisions between them, ones related to a process of bureaucratization that allows, some Sahrawi women more than others, to establish powerful connections with humanitarian-development-solidarity aid actors. The very creation of the

Women’s Union is concomitant with the beginning of the humanitarian and internationally administered bureaucracy of the Sahrawi Republic in exile that is implicated in the production of a governing class, enabling privileges for some Saharawis instead of rights ─most notably, the right to self-determination─ to all. Highlighting the production of these new forms of

212 inequalities, the last speaker’s comments shifted accusations delivered to young women during the conference – their disaffection from politics, their habits of consuming soap operas instead of working for the cause, their sexual looseness, etc. – on to the state administration, pointing to the ways in which the flows of humanitarian and international aid may also be contributing to distancing the leadership from the everyday struggles and concerns of Sahrawi women.

Importantly, she did so mobilising a moral economy that predates a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism. However, opening her comments with an unequivocally patriotic call “to win or let them win” she reminded the audience of the way in which a longstanding moral economy of distribution and redistribution amongst the Sahrawi people cohered with the practices upon which a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism was founded. This speaker, like others, used the space of the Union to refuse allowing a “prioritization paradigm” (Amireh, 2012) silence her objective to defy the moral economy of the present, as well as her goal to bring the everyday gendered inequalities women face into political questions of national deliberation and concern.

4.5 Conclusion

I met Salka regularly to walk home together from the Union after my English classes.

On one such occasion, I noticed she came out of one of the big meeting rooms: “You were at a meeting?” I asked: “Yes” and she told me about a Swedish delegation visiting the Republic for a week to carry out workshops and conferences with the Sahrawi Youth Union about “models of participatory democracy”. The delegation was now carrying out an institutional visit to the

Women’s Union, a must-see stop in the itineraries of most foreign delegations visiting the

Republic.

Hearing this I wondered if Salka would have preferred staying in the meeting longer. I assured her I would wait for her until it was over but her reaction convinced me that she had no

213 interest in doing so: “No no… I was waiting for you…! I will not fill their rooms in front of foreigners…” I nodded, by then used to the spontaneous and courageous frankness that had warmed me to Salka from the very beginning, as I thought about how the “them” in her sentence and how it collapsed any romantic notion of a unified category of women, intersected here ─like everywhere─ through lines of kinship, race and class. In this case, her “them” also described those who enjoyed proximity to an internationally funded state administration and its burgeoning elite class. The expectation that she had to fill the room in front of foreigners speaks of a global fixation with women’s presence in “public spheres”.

“Well, what were they talking about in the meeting?” I asked. Salka looked at me with a bored expression: “You know that they are fighting to get more women into government, that they are working to convince women to vote for more women, that they are educating them in their rights; they say they don’t want the POLISARIO to ignore Sahrawi women’s rights once the fight is over and we return to our land… blah, blah… They always sing the same song”

Salka’s exhaustion from “hearing the same song” indexes a larger fatigue with a discourse based on a model of female empowerment that from her generational perspective, begins to feel obsolete. Her critique is situated in an engagement with the world of objects and artefacts, state “effects”, the Sahrawi constitution, the Republic’s institutions, the Republic’s infrastructures that were created for her by members of an earlier generation. She grew up in a social world where her participation in public spaces was not only allowed, it was expected from her, in a social community that had invested in her education, projecting their dreams for the future on to her own life’s trajectory. What this all means is that Salka is already convinced of the values the executives of the Women’s Unions emphasize time and time again, she is

214 convinced of the importance of being educated in her rights, and she would love to see as many women as possible in positions of leadership.

The repetitive lyrics of the song Salka refers to is that of a dominant nationalist discourse and its discursive alignment with global (sometimes imperialist) feminisms that converge to render women’s bodies hypervisible at the service of diverse political agendas.

Salka’s resistance to “fill the rooms of the Union in front of foreigners” expresses her refusal to perpetuate these alignments, not unlike the way in which she attempted to dissuade me from my research project on the very first day I met her. She continued:

Why do you ask me what they said? You know what they said, Vivian, it is

always the same! But it hurts me to think we might be losing an opportunity…. Now

people come to see us from all over the world saying they want to help us but you

will see, when we return to our land, all that support will disappear and then

everyone will take what they have, build their own home and forget about everything

we built here together… Over there, a man will be able to slam the doors of his

house, beat his wife and no one will even hear it happen, just like men do in Algeria

and in Spain! If we don’t do anything to change things now, God help us then.

Salka, like others in this chapter, myself included, refuses the “prioritization paradigm”

(Amireh, 2012) of Sahrawi nationalism in which women’s agendas are externalized from and deemed less urgent than national liberation. However, like others in this chapter, I too do not stand innocent of reproducing Sahrawi women’s hypervisibility and I am writing from the uncomfortable position that Salka alerted me to from the very first day of my doctoral fieldwork. The very fact that this hypervisibility was part of what enabled my support for the

215 Sahrawi women’s movement even before I started my long-term fieldwork with them, speaks to the global mobilizing allure of the model of empowerment it conjures. A model that has tended to propel women into new public spheres worldwide whilst not sufficiently addressing the struggles confronting them in new kinds of private spheres —the underbellies of modern nation-states— that have emerged concomitantly. Such underpublicized spaces are not specific to the Republic, just like Salka pointed out to me, nation-states like Spain and Algeria have their own and, of course, beyond. Indeed, Salka’s prediction: the idea that these dangerously private spheres of women’s lives will only continue to grow in an independent Western Sahara, is empirically supported by the outcome of women’s struggles in movements of national liberation elsewhere (Lazreg, 2001; Moghdam, 1994).

Salka’s critique points to the generational disjuncture between those involved in

“cultural innovation and those involved in cultural accretion” (Scott, 2014 (b): 165). To her

Women Union’s colleagues of an older generation, there is affective investment in securing the model of female empowerment they forged for the sake of a future that has not yet come into fruition. Salka, however “inhabits the present as a ruin of what an earlier generation looked forward to as the horizon of its hope” (ibid: 172). She is ready to let go of this hubris in the interest of securing a future that looks different to the present of her contemporaries in Spain and in Algeria whose presents have been temporally ordered upon relatable futures-pasts.

Whereas the Union plays a fundamental role in “sustaining” the hypervisibility of women, something that I have argued is of serious strategic importance in the context of the dominant political cultures of humanitarian-development-solidarity complex aid sustaining the space, I want to suggest that the everyday critiques, contestations and interactions with the

Women’s Union I have described here are doing a type of work that is different yet comparable

216 to the “slow” labour that Embarka carries out in her much more spontaneous conversations with women. Outside the walls of the Union Embarka found a quiet and an intimacy unlike what she could have ever found inside them. However the women described in this chapter speak to emergent structures of feeling within the Women’s Union that contravene representations that would paint institutions as static spaces devoid of movement. The intergenerational tensions described speak to the interior processes through which the movement is regenerated, rather than to its fissures.

Instead of thinking of Salka’s warning as a mere symptom of the way in which the institutionalization of the women’s movement has alienated and fragmented women nostalgically remembered as having been otherwise united in the past, I think of Salka’s critique as an expression of the movement’s reckoning with present contradictions but also of its enduring vitality. I see her observations as symptoms of her generations’ enduring attachment to a Saharawi revolutionary process that, in her case, also emerges out of her shared activities in the everyday life of the Union. Her critical observations speak to the way in which

Salka’s experience of an “attritional temporality of political action” (Lazar, 2014) positions her differently to the “historical time” of a Saharawi revolutionary nationalism. The space of the

Union reproduces women’s hypervisibility, but it also allows women to hold the Union accountable for it. Even when micro- political expressions such as Salka’s and others describes in this chapter are typically lost to official “history”, offering a space where women remind other women of the overlaps but also of the asymmetries in their struggles, reminds us of the temporalities that co-exists with the “historical time” of political struggles. It shows us the way in which Sahrawi women are bringing their experience of an “attritional time” to bear on the

217 “historical time” of their revolutionary process and, in so doing, they are defying the political paralysis of a colonial meantime.

218 5 Navigating Marriage-Scapes

I met Fatimetu at one of the Women’s Union’s meetings. She was born during the early years of exile and was in her forties when I met her. I sat next to her during lunch that day. We had a full plate of rice with a large bone of goat meat at the center that four of us sat around, digging our right hands into the plate, picking food from the triangle directly in front of us, holding rice with our fingertips and pushing it towards our palm as I had been taught to do during my previous visits. Once on my palm, I tried amassing the rice into a ball before introducing it into my mouth, yet, my companions inevitably teased me about my less than adequate skills at eating with my hands. “Do you want us to find a spoon for you?” they offered. “No, no, please,

I am learning” I insisted, even as I dropped a trail of rice on the carpet. Then, Fatimetu asked me a second, equally predicatable question: “So, tell us, are you married?” “No” I replied:

“Well, who is your boyfriend then?” she insisted. “I don’t have a boyfriend”, I replied.

“Nooo?” Fatimetu remarked in a dramatized display of playful disbelief:

Come on, tell us…who it is, don’t be shy. You know how many boyfriends I have? Not

one, not two… maaany boyfriends, maaany… come on, tell us the truth…you cannot be

here for work only! You must have come because of a boyfriend…

The other two women eating with us laughed at Fatimetu’s comments. One of them put an index finger to her forehead, indicating to me, amicably, that Fatimetu was “crazy” and I, eager to put into practice an expression I had learnt in Mauritania over the summer, replied:

Fatimetu, you are “khatiiiira” (dangerous [f] but which I had learnt to intone by

extending the “i” to denote sexy/seductive/temptress)… the last person I would name

my boyfriend to is you! How many boyfriends did you say you have?

219 To my delight, the joke was well received, if causing a minor furor in the room as women sitting around different plates of rice began inquiring about the source of our laughter. The story travelled across the room and when the Secretary General heard it she broke into the noise with an earnest tone and said in Spanish: “Don’t listen to them, Vivian. None of them has several boyfriends. Believe me, they would all be married and sitting in their khiyam if they could.”

The comment dampened the humorous atmosphere of the room. It made me fear I had been too outspoken and prompted what felt like a recriminatory comment from the Secretary

General. Weddings, the affairs of romantic partners and marriage, make for popular topics of conversation as long as interlocutors pay attention to the gender and generational make up of their interlocutors. Perhaps the fact that this spicy conversation had circulated in a room with women of different ages had required the Secretary General to put an end to it, sealing the matter with a serious tone. Yet what had she meant by “they would all be married and sitting in their khiyam if they could”?

Rhetorically juxtaposing the space of the khayma with the spaces of the Women’s Union, her comment reiterates the growing sense of separation between households and the

POLISARIO’s institutions/organizations described in the previous chapter, yet it was most likely intended to communicate something else. I interpret the Secretary General’s comment as a way of reminding Sahrawi women in the room of their onus to their nation, underlining their duty to participate in the activities of the Republic’s institutions. I think of her comment as a form of interpellation that animates the political figure of the munadila (militant f.): a woman who has no time for romantic affairs and is expected to fold her personal desires and everyday labour into the collective struggle for national independence. Sahrawi women sitting in the

220 room heard her disciplining message but it was pronounced in Spanish and directed specifically at me and thus it was also part of a representation of a Sahrawi political culture of resistance geared at external audiences. I make sense of the Secretary General’s comment alongside another from a different conversation I had with her where she explained that nursing a newborn baby was the only acceptable reason for a Sahrawi woman to stay indoors and take a break from working for the collective cause. Otherwise, for as long as their struggle for decolonization is ongoing, their duty is to be in public spaces such as that of the Women’s

Union where we were all gathered. Her stating: “they would all be married and sitting in their khiyam if they could” sought to convey the personal sacrifice required of Sahrawi women to keep their political struggle alive; a proud assertion of the courage that living up to the revolutionary figure of the munadila entails.

Still, her comment confused me. Many of these women were in fact married. Exactly in what way could pursuing the project of marriage be understood as coming up against the political subjectivity of the Sahrawi munadila? What competing meanings did the project of marriage hold for Sahrawi women today and how do they navigate and negotiate between these in their everyday life?

In approaching these questions, this chapter reflects upon transforming marriage-scapes in

Sahrawi recent history by tracing their implications for gender relations in the present. I borrow

Arjun Appadurai’s notion of the “scape” (1990), not to engage his discussion on the production of difference in globalization but to mobilize the spatial image he uses, allowing us to think of marriage practices as embedded into a larger field of actions in which ideas, values, resources, objects, as well as governing and labour practices are exchanged. To talk of marriage-scapes suggests marriage may be thought of as a scape in its own right: a field of social, political and

221 economic relations and practices in which ideas and objects flow and through which certain rights may be either secured or lost. This chapter focuses on the way in which Sahrawi women navigate present marriage-scapes in the Republic, securing rights to forms of autonomy that marriage relations may both generate and destroy.

One of the POLISARIO Front’s earliest revolutionary measures was a socialist-inspired and secularist campaign against the practice of Sadaq. Sadaq is the word in Hassaniya used to describe the groom’s gifts to a bride made mandatory by Islam in order to legalize a marriage

(mahr in Modern Standard Arabic). In the POLISARIO’s leadership own words, the movement was against sadaq because they were against the practice of “buying” women (cf.

POLISARIO, 1988: 55 in Wilson, 2016: 156). Wilson notes that such a formulation was likely intended to gather support with an “imagined or actual liberal Euro-American audience in mind” (ibid). However, this ideology was equally commensurate with socialist ideologies that were popular at the time and imagined as oppositional to a liberal and Western political culture, emplacing a Sahrawi nationalist model of female empowerment in the transdiscursive political field with other secularist Arab nationalisms contemporaneous to it (see Dahlgren, 2005 &

Molyneux, 1991 on similar ideologies and policies in the People’s Democratic Republic of

Yemen or Jean-Klein, 2006 for Palestine).

In practice, however, the religious requirement of sadaq was never fully banned. Article 3 of the Sahrawi Republic’s first constitution in 1976 declared Islam the official religion of the

State and shariʿa (Islamic law) the judicial code of justice applied by the nation. Rather, because war and exile dispossessed men from either their jobs in Spanish industries or from their means of production (camels, goats, pastures, etc.), or from a combination of both, the

POLISARIO’s government in exile took on this religious duty on

222 behalf of grooms, procuring brides with symbolic cash amounts that rose to a maximum of 10

Algerian dinars during the years of armed struggle (Wilson, 2016: 157).

The POLISARIO’s intervention in marriage practices pursued several interrelated aims.

First, reducing men’s economic obligations upon marriage encouraged the rate and the number

of weddings. Morocco’s invasion took a heavy toll over what was an already relatively sparsely

populated Western Saharan territory. Thus, demographic growth was, and remains, a

nationalist imperative94. Second, the measure sought to encourage inter-tribal and inter-status

marriages, eroding pre-revolutionary systems of political authority and weaving new social

relations that could substantiate the sovereignty of a nascent Sahrawi nation-state (Wilson,

2016). All in all, the campaign against sadaq formed part of a larger goal to transform a

system of arranged marriage towards a model more amenable to modern forms of governance

based on companionate marriage. In this way, it was framed alongside other measures taken by

the POLISARIO at the time to enhance women’s autonomy over their bodies, including

making bridal consent mandatory upon marriage, prohibiting female circumcision and

prohibiting the aesthetic practice of force-feeding women prior to marriage (Caratini, 2006:

7)95.

Today, the idea that women should be involved in the choice of their first husband —

recall women were involved in the choice of consecutive husbands prior to the revolution—has

become extensively normalized. Nonetheless, the revolutionary goal of making marriage less

94 In this sense, Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism is comparable to other national liberation movements it is contemporaneous with, especially to the Palestinian, given they both are against forms of settler colonialism in which population numbers matter a lot (see Kanaahneh, 2002).

95 An aesthetic practice aimed at fattening women’s bodies past puberty making them more desirable marriage candidates as per customary standards of female beauty among Hassaophones (see Popenoe, 2004). Large and rounded female bodies remain the standard of beauty among the Sahrawi, and young women sometimes go to great lengths to obtain these, including ingesting damaging “fattening pills”. However, the practice of women force-feeding other women has virtually disappeared and is collectively shunned upon.

223 expensive and more flexible has not. Similarly to other places in today’s Middle East and

North Africa (Bayat, 2010; Singerman, 2007), organizing an average marriage in the Sahrawi

Republic today is prohibitive to most grooms and their families96. The practice of the bridewealth has re-emerged with force following the 1991 ceasefire. However, even if the practice is rooted in longstanding customary practices and Islamic principles, the way in which the bridewealth has re-emerged is significantly different to the sadaq of pre-revolutionary times. Even the word sadaq —made dirty by the revolutionary campaign against it— no longer circulates in the present. Instead, as will be described further along this chapter, gifts from the groom to the bride upon marriage are described today as what I think of as a kind of euphemism “al-mjiba”, a word that literally translates into “the things brought in”.

Local and international observers alike often read the renewed demand for men to invest significant economic sums upon marriage as a symptom of an eroded revolutionary conviction among Sahrawi citizens-refugees. It becomes associated with the rise of

“materialist” values in the Sahrawi Republic, conjuring imaginaries of covetous young women who increasingly aspire to the comfortable lifestyles ans aesthetics they consume through television and other media, more involved in enhancing their physical beauty through consumerist practices and other individualistic pursuits than living up to their elders’ legacy of making the collective cause of national independence their primary concern. In this way, the marriage prestatation’s (re)-emergence is often pitched against the figure of the Sahrawi munadila and the dominant model of female empowerment she represents, producing anxieties among local and non-local observers about the reproduction of the revolution in time.

96 See (Posel, D., Rudwick, S. and D. Casale, 2011 and Hunter, 2011) for a reduction of legal marriages due to the difficulties youth face to amass bride-wealth in the context of South Africa. This situation also resonates with youth in the context of Southern Europe where present political and economic conditions do not allow them to gather the income and security necessary to marry, leave the protection of their natal home and form new families.

224 My goal in this chapter is to invite a different reading of women’s demand of a dower within present marriage-scapes. Situating the dower’s (re)-emergence within a moral economy that pre-dates Saharawi nationalism and within the dominant gendered geography and distribution of labour in the Sahrawi Republic today, I locate it within structures of feeling that are both emergent and residual, both generated by and resurfacing under the conditions of the present. Rather than retreating into individualist pursuits, unconcerned with the future of the

Sahrawi nation, I think of the (re)-emergence of the dower as a quiet endorsement of the idea that women should be acknowledged for their newly unwaged regenerative labour and provided with insurance within relations of marriage and divorce. The chapter describes and discusses the way in which Sahrawi women are bringing the subject of marriage to public deliberation, challenging existing configurations of the private and the public and pursuing collective measures to protect women from insecurities they face in the present. In this way, I present the (re)-emergence of the dower as one of the terrains through which women are regenerating the munadila’s expression.

The chapter begins by presenting schematic descriptions of the most significant changes in the marriage practices of Sahrawi citizen-refugees within the last fifty years. Drawing from my extensive conversations with elderly Sahrawi women (see chapter one) and the ethnographic work of Julio Caro Baroja (1955), Sophie Caratini (2000) and Alice Wilson (2016), the first diagram below is a broad representation of the marriage-scapes before the revolution, during the period of Spanish colonization leading up to Morocco’s invasion and the war of liberation that started in 1975. The second maps the marriage-scape of the early revolutionary period in the Republic leading up to the UN-mediated ceasefire of 1991. The third marriage-scape draws

225 upon my first hand observations of wedding practices in 2009-2015 and from Wilson’s

observations in 2004-2006.

The three diagrams flatten out a dynamic field of social relations that may mislead one

into presuming a neater periodization and greater homogeneity of practices between all

Sahrawi kinship groups than is actually the case. The diagrams do not aim to produce an

exhaustive historical account of marriage practices among the Sahrawi citizen-refugees; they

are meant as simplifications, creating a tool to visualize broad transformations across time,

comparing and contrasting the involvement of different key actors as well as the types of

resources that have flowed within these marriage-scapes throughout the past fifty years of

struggle.

226 5.1 Marriage-“scape” One: Before the Revolution

Sadaq

Household items Bride’s nomadic encampment Groom’s nomadic encampment

Faskha

1. Marriage contract signed in bride’s natal khayma in the presence of male agnates

2. Celebrations: Seven-day long celebrations (for women’s first weddings), three-day long for consecutive weddings hosted by bride’s nomadic encampment. Musical and poetry recitals by hired iggawen, a professional caste of artists.

Extended Glossary sadaq: Hassaniya for Islamic bridewealth, known as mahr in Modern Standard Arabic. Usually consisted of camels, goats, jewellery, artisanship, sometimes slaves. Cash did not circulate in the Western Sahara very broadly until the late 1960s and it was rarely exchanged in weddings. The value of these gifts usually depended on the social proximity of the spouses to be, the quantity tending to increase as the distance between the families of the bride and groom or their divergence in status did. Paternal cousins are generally the preferred spousal choice (Caratini, 1989, 2000 Wilson, 2016: 151- 152; see also Abu-Lughod, 1986). fashka: (reciprocal to sadaq). Derives from the Arabic root f-s-k, which means “to break”. Months or years after a marriage, the bride’s family would travel to her new encampment with these gifts (faskha) further endorsing the couple’s union, constituting a practice of reciprocity on the part of the bride’s family. The practice is unheard of in other Arab contexts (Wilson, 2016 b.).

227 5.2 Marriage-“scape” Two: Early Years of Revolution (1975-1991)

Symbolic sadaq (up to 10 Algerian

dinars) The POLISARIO Front Emergency relief tent (gueton) and household equipment Bride

Symbolic sadaq: political speeches, stones or branches from WS Groom

Marriage contracts: In the government’s district office, no presence of the bride’s male guardian (wali) is required. Lippert (1985: 19-20) and Perregaux (1990: 73) report women in 1980s could attend an office of the district (daira) on their own, perhaps with a sister or friend, needing no one’s consent. One of Lippert’s interlocutors told her “a young girl does not need her family’s permission to get married” (1985: 19). However, my own ethnographic findings are more in line with Caratini (2000) and Wilson (forthcoming) who have suggested marriages in the absence of kin rarely took place in practice during this period.

Wedding celebrations: One day and one meal. Sometimes the POLISARIO provided a goat for slaughter to make inhira (meat-based meal). Hosted and organized by revolutionary women’s committees of “justice and social affairs”. Hosts and guests were composed of mixed kinship and status groups from the bride’s district. Sometimes the musical group of the district was invited to sing revolutionary songs known as al-nidal (see Ruano & Solana, 2015). Sometimes guests read political speeches or national poetry. Oftentimes, grooms supplemented these with other gifts of symbolic, rather than economic, value: copies of the POLISARIO’s magazine “10th of May”, one of Martyr El Ouali’s political speeches, or with sticks or stones from the land left behind in the Western Sahara that they brought back from the battlefield for their brides. As if mirroring the way in which poets stopped dedicating romantic verses to individual women, devoting all of their words exclusively to the production of nationalist and revolutionary poetry (see Gimeno, Robles, Awah & Solana, forthcoming), during the years of war, grooms poetically converted nationalist and revolutionary emblems into romantic gifts for their brides.

228 5.3 Marriage-“scape” Three: “No War no Peace” 1991-present (2005)

al-mjiba

Groom and, often, his family Bride and fam ily

Some household equipment and food rations

The POLISARIO Front

New material standards of a consumer-based economy have rendered the POLISARIO’s, symbolic sadaq irrelevant to the point of their disappearance from circulation

Marriage Contracts: negotiated near the bride’s family’s khayma, in the presence of a male agnate acting as guardian as per the Maliki Islamic tradition for both the bride and groom in front of a qadi, judge. Like in pre-revolutionary times.

Wedding Celebrations: Two-three day long for women’s first weddings, one day long for consecutive weddings. The bride’s family typically rents a large tent known as quaa in the market that hosts hundreds of guests and is in charge of preparing a midday meal for t´he bride’s relatives. The défile, meaning procession in French, describes the moment when the groom and his extended family make a loud entry into the bride’s neighbourhood with a row of honking cars escorting a big truck that carries al-mjiba. The second meal of the day, the one shared by the family of the bride and the family of the groom, is usually provided by the groom, often with help from his extended family, yet served in the premises of the bride’s family compound. The former is an entirely new practice that some criticize on the grounds that it constitutes a breach to customary rules of hospitality. Typically both sides of the family will continue to host their relatives for another day or two each in their respective neighbourhoods. Poetry recitals, musical concerts and dance parties (nishat) are sometimes organized, hiring local artists.

229 Extended Glossary

Al-mjiba: literally translates into the “The brought-in things”, term used in pre-revolutionary times to describe the things men brought into their nomadic encampments upon return from battles/raids (ghazi) or markets. In the context of present weddings, the word describes the resources that the groom is expected to provide upon marriage. An average al-mjiba can easily add up to somewhere between 4000- 5000 euros. It is typically composed of cushions, carpets, glass tables, TV- sets, solar panels, refrigerators, tiled floors, gas ovens, latrines and washing machines from markets in Algeria, Mali, Mauritania and beyond. As will be discussed in further detail in the next section, today’s al-mjiba sometimes includes gifts, cash, clothing and/or jewellery in the way that the gifts of sadaq were, but not necessarily.

Faskha: It is not a standard practice across families (and whether it ever was is a question I have no answer for). The practice is unheard of in other Arab contexts (see Wilson, 2016.b) One of my host mothers put faskha together, with help from her brothers, sisters and married daughters, for the family of one of her recently married daughter’s husband while I was doing fieldwork. Nevertheless, I have asked many other Sahrawi citizen-refugees about this practice and whereas some of my younger friends assured me they had never heard of it, others insisted it was no longer practiced and others described it as something “new” and rare.

Comparing these diagrams overall one sees how grooms, if often supported by their extended family, are today expected to take on a larger proportion of the costs involved in marriage than ever before in the last fifty years or so —notice the shifting sizes of the circles, rectangles and squares— something which helps explain the collective sentiment I described earlier, indicating that women are becoming excessively demanding of men.

Caratini has argued that following the ceasefire Sahrawi women increased their demands upon men so as to see the high incidence of divorce they experienced during the years of war decrease (2000: 450). She observes the number of weddings and babies was very high during the years of war but so too were divorces (2006: 116). Thus in her view, women began demanding men to increase their investment in marriage in order to reduce the likelihood of men’s abandonment. In the next section, I build on Caratini’s insight, by situating the

230 sadaq/mahr’s re-emergence within a moral economy that values women’s security within marriage relations, as well as within a politics of distribution that affirms women’s regenerative labour and contributions to the collective struggle. The final two sections of this chapter build on these insights, exploring how young women’s demands upon marriage are embedded within a longstanding ethical tradition that seeks to protect Sahrawi women’s longstanding Islamic rights, not just within marriage relations but also outside of them, within relations between divorcees.

5.4 Asserting Women’s Contributions: “We are not Expensive, we are Valuable”

During the summer of 2013, I spent many mornings in the premises of the Sahrawi

Youth Union (UJSARIO) accompanying a group of young men and women who had come up with an interesting initiative. Using an oven delivered to the Youth Union by the Sahrawi

Ministry of Equipment (wizarat attajiz), the young women baked sweets two or three mornings a week. In the afternoons, their male counterparts sold these sweets to the various shops found in the market of their province. Whereas the profits were distributed equally among all the women involved in this cooperative, the young men offered their collaboration voluntarily.

Underlying this distribution of the gains was a collective recognition that young men had greater opportunity to generate income elsewhere as women’s time was much more solicited in the everyday labour of household reproduction. Indeed, without aspiring to make these unmarried women financially independent from their natal families, the youth union described this initiative as one that sought to provide women with some financial autonomy, allowing them to buy goods for personal purposes, including: mobile phone credit, hygiene and beauty products, and/or contribute to their household economies.

231 On one of those mornings, I joined the group for a tea-drinking session, while we waited for the sweets to bake. During the conversation, one of the women started to tease one of the men because it was rumoured he had a Spanish girlfriend. She playfully incriminated him for investing his affections on foreigners: Was it not wrong for Sahrawi men to marry

Spanish women? Was it not true that Sahrawi women were in need of special support given the difficult circumstances the Sahrawi people were going through? This started a fiery discussion that polarized the young men and women. Some men made tongue and cheek arguments: it was not them who chased foreign women; foreign women chased them due to Sahrawi men’s good reputation as lovers. Others came up with even more ingenious arguments: there was political incentive in marrying foreign women in order to multiply their number of international allies.

Unsurprisingly, these comments provoked a playful scandal among the young women who laughed off their occurrences and insinuated they could make their choices sound as politically grandiose as they wanted to but their motivations had more to do with individualist aspirations than with furthering the collective cause of the Sahrawi people. At one point one of the young men interrupted to exclaim: “Look, young women! The problem is that it is diffiiiiiicult to marry you…” Significantly, he used the Hassaniya word w‘ar, which has the double meaning of “difficult” and “expensive”. To this, one of the young girls who I refer to as Bakita, replied:

“Look, young men! We are not expensive (w´arat: f.pl. w‘ar) we are valuable (ghaliat)!!!”

The proud declaration of dignity in Bakita’s reply ´w´as also an astute wordplay, given that ghaliat, feminine and plural for ghali, also has a double meaning, in this case “expensive” and “valuable”, in Modern Standard Arabic. Her remark received cheers of appreciation from the group and, seemingly, was the first to gather support from both genders; it settled the matter and the group moved on to new topics of conversation.

232 Even though this conversation took place in a friendly and humorous environment, it reflects palpable gendered and generational structures of feeling that I heard frequently expressed during my fieldwork. The concern the young man voiced in relation to the difficulty of gathering the resources required to marry a Sahrawi woman is seconded by many like him. I was told marrying a Sahrawi woman from the occupied Western Sahara tends to be even more costly so it is not unheard of for men to travel elsewhere in Algeria or beyond with the purpose of finding a wife. Sometimes men return with wives to live in the Republic, others build a household abroad. For young women, this is sometimes interpreted as disloyalty to them. The overarching patrilineal system makes marrying-out much more socially acceptable for men than it is for women. Even if suggested somewhat jokingly, the argument advanced by the young man who insisted there was nationalist incentive in marrying foreign women is supported by the fact that the offspring of such unions are considered Sahrawi. This is not true when a Sahrawi woman marries and forms a family with a foreign man. Whereas some

Sahrawi women do marry-out, it is much more controversial for them to do so than it is for men. The controversy is not only derived from nationalist imperatives sensu stricto, it is sometimes justified by interpretations of Islamic precepts, and usually made sense of in relation to an overarching gendered distribution of labour that emplaces women at a closer proximity than men to the extended family they are expected to care for throughout their lifetime. Based on her observations amongst the Rgaybat qabila— the tribe with the largest demographic in the

Western Sahara— during the pre-revolutionary period, Caratini writes: “it was impossible for a woman to marry outside of the Sahara. It would be very hard on the qabila to lose a woman entirely” (2006:8) and I do no think a statement like that can be understood outside

233 consideration of the strong, collective valorization placed upon women’s labour as a tangible contribution to the larger society.

If during the exceptional circumstances of war and exile the POLISARIO’s government took on men’s Islamic responsibility to be the providers of their families, after the 1991 ceasefire returning combatants (and their sons thereafter) have taken up this role again albeit under significantly new economic and political circumstances. The borders between

Mauritania, the occupied Western Sahara and Algeria were relaxed in the aftermath of the ceasefire, gradually inserting the Sahrawi Republic into a commodity-based economy. In 1996, the Spanish government started delivering pensions to POLISARIAN ex-combatants of the

Spanish Sahara who had served in the colonial “indigenous” army, known by the name of the

Tropas Nómadas. Such pensions constituted one of the first significant cash flows to enter individual households of the Sahrawi Republic. Reliant as the Republic’s institutions are on international and humanitarian aid, the monetary incentives they have offered since 2003 are low, unstable, and can hardly compete with the income that can be generated participating in economies that exist outside of the Sahrawi Republic. Following the cease-fire, new spaces have been created for the pursuit of private interests (Wilson, 2012: 29-33). Today each province has at least one market, taxi services and other small businesses such as restaurants and public baths. During my most recent visit in April of 2015 I saw a newly erected dentist’s clinic in the province of Buyudur that is run privately.

For the most part, the capital and, sometimes, the skills required to open these businesses are generated from participating in economies found outside of the Sahrawi

234 Republic97. Whereas an increasing number of young women (married and unmarried) live abroad, often studying but also working and sending remittances to their kin in the Republic, the responsibility to provide rests primarily on men. This means that a significant proportion of young men spend their lives in permanent movement in and out of the Republic either taking part in trans-Saharan trade routes, searching for jobs, income and citizenships in other nation- states, or even “returning” 98 to the occupied Western Sahara without necessarily loosing their affective ties and relationships in the exiled Republic nor their nationalist convictions (Boulay,

2014).

The remittances these men send to their families are key to sustain not just the households but also the communities, the neighbourhoods and the districts of the Republic as a whole. Female-led households are often in charge of sustaining children from several marriages

(Caratini, 2006: 118). The fact that the khiyam of divorcees and widows without older sons who can sustain them are amongst the most impoverished households is well known.

Moreover, it is the women, who tend to live in the Republic much more permanently, who carry out all of the unwaged labour required to sustain and to nurture the Republic’s spaces and communities. Positions in the lower levels of administration, like those of the “Organizations of the masses” discussed in the previous chapter are the most underpaid and, often, entirely unwaged. Not only are these near-voluntary positions taken up mostly by women, it is also mostly women who organize and vote in the Republic’s political elections, fill in its amphitheatres, host visitors and international delegates, look after the young, the elderly and

97 Exceptions to this rule include income-generating activities such as those of henna artists, who rely on means of production and skills that are local to the Republic, as well as female cooperatives found in every province that are run through microcredits loaned by international NGOs and managed by the Women’s Union.

98 The quotations around the word “returning” is in recognition of those relocating to the Western Sahara, who were born as citizen-refugees in the exiled Republic. When it comes to youth, their relocation is only a “return” of sorts.

235 other dependants, participate in parliament and in conferences, organize marches of solidarity with international causes, administer food rations, sing, dance and perform in public, clap, ululate and profess revolutionary and nationalist slogans in the numerous events the

POLISARIO leadership organizes throughout the year.

Bakita, the young woman in the opening vignette of this section who reminded her male counterparts: “We are not expensive, we are valuable” is one of the thousands of young women to have spent more than a decade separated from her family, earning secondary education abroad with the expectation of finding remunerated employment, ideally, in the independent

Western Sahara her elders have spent their lives fighting for. It is in the context of these shattered expectations, faced with the reality of having to return where they are needed and expected to look after kin, to an exiled Republic that offers limited opportunity for remunerated employment (especially to women) and all in the context of a politically stagnant peace process that offers no signs of respite, that the (re)-emergence of sadaq/mahr and “marriage-scape number three” needs to be understood.

In situating present marriage-scapes within the current gendered geography and distribution of political and economic labour of today’s Sahrawi Republic, I hope to show that women’s increased demands are symptoms, not of an eroding revolutionary conviction but of their demand’s embeddedness in a longstanding moral economy and a politics of distribution amongst the Sahrawi people that protects and affirms the value of women’s regenerative labour to the political struggle. The (re)-emergence of the bridewealth helps affirm the immense value of remaining present in the Republic, carrying out the everyday tasks of looking after households, neighbourhoods and institutions in exile in this prolonged colonial meantime devoid of war and peace. Bakita’s proud and dignified comment works as a reminder that,

236 despite dire circumstances, the very fact that the Republic continues to stand firmly in place forty years after its proclamation is, in large part, thanks to the steadfastness of women’s regenerative and unwaged labour.

5.5 The Moving Substance of the Past

Even though the political and economic circumstances in which contemporary is being configured are specific to the conditions of the present, the structures of feeling, moral, economic practices and demands I have traced above are resurfacing out of the “always moving substance of the past” (Williams, 1967: 128). They congeal as structures of feeling and world-views that are “residual”—“that which has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process,"—not only as "an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present" (Williams, 1977: 122). They form part of the Sahrawi women’s

“conscious history” (ibid: 130) and represent a collective memory of pre-revolutionary pasts that proudly insists: “we were always so free” (Juliano, 1999).

Indeed, Bakita’s assertion: “we are not expensive, we are valuable” reminded me of a conversation Embarka and I had with a much older women, Khuya, while we were collecting her life-history in one of the interviews we carried out with her during the winter of 2012. On one occasion we asked Khuya, born around the year 1941 near the town of Bucraa, if rhil, the journey undertaken by newlyweds to the natal encampment of the groom after a marriage, always took place in that direction: from the women’s natal encampment to that of the man’s natal encampment. She answered:

“Always, yes, almost: there were a few cases when the couple stayed with the woman’s family, when her mother was alone or very sick or something like that. In Islam a woman must

237 go where her husband is and do as he says, but even more important is the man’s duty to protect his wife. You see, women were given to men as an amana”.

Amana is an Islamic concept that describes something one is morally entrusted to protect.

It may refer to an object, a person or animal entrusted to the protection of someone else for an indefinite period of time. When the amana is an object, the receiver has the right of usufruct over it. When the amana is a person, the receiver may relate to him or her through exchanges of labour, protection, affection and care. Similarly, when the amana is an animal the receiver is allowed to use it for transport, consume its milk or hair but never to kill it. Even intangible values or purposes such as the political cause of independence of the Sahrawi people, is sometimes described as an amana, a cause confided to the Sahrawi people by the Sahrawi people. In short, an amana entrusts the receiver with the duty to look after the amana in question but never to own it. For instance, if a woman gives one of her babies to another woman as amana, the child might never return to the biological mother but would always retain the legal identity of his or her natal home. It would be considered illegitimate for a person endowed with an amana to try to possess it. An amana could never be bought or sold because it never fully belongs to the person endowed with it.

It is thus significant that Khuya chose to describe “the traffic of women through marriage”

(Levi-Strauss, 1969; Rubin, 2006) using the word amana. She continued:

“A husband had a duty to provide his wife with everything she needed and to treat her

well, with respect. If he could not fulfill these duties, if his wife was not happy with

him or if he was not happy with her, he was obliged to divorce her, sometimes to return

238 her to her natal family, and always to give her the freedom to marry someone else. You

understand?”

Contrary to the POLISARIO Front’s discourse when it legitimized its campaign against sadaq on the grounds that it was a way of “buying women” (cf. 1988 Sáhara libre, in Wilson, forthcoming: 55), thinking of brides as amanat (pl. amana) refuses to frame women’s circulation through marriage exchanges as merchandise. Instead, applying the perspective

Marilyn Strathern applies (1988) to her analysis of Melanesian marriage exchange practices, situated within the larger social order of Saharan nomadic pastoralists, brides are best thought of as circulating subjects that may actively make or break social and political relations.

Declaring “women were given to men upon marriage as an amana” denies a narrative that would confuse women with objects that can be bought, sold or possessed, affirming them as subjects of rights and responsibilities within contractual relationships of marriage instead.

Khuya’s use of the Islamic concept of amana situates marriage exchanges within a pre- revolutionary moral economy that values women’s everyday regenerative labour, placing it at a par with the labour of representation that the women’s kin-men carried out for them in spaces such as the intra and inter-tribal councils of al jamaʿt and the ait arbaiʿn. A labour of political representation that Sahrawi men continue to carry out on behalf of Sahrawi women in the public spaces of the Sahrawi Republic and international forums, even if a significant proportion of the kind of political labour, as discussed in more detail in the previous chapter, is also carried out by Sahrawi women in the present.

The collective recognition of the inherent political value to women’s labour of regeneration is part of what leads to collective efforts not only to establish, but also to enforce women’s

239 rights within relationships of marriage and divorce that we saw in the previous chapter. The longstanding rights and responsibilities that Sahrawi women have enjoyed within the social contract of marriage were laid out to me in great detail by other elderly women, such as Suadu, born in 1950, near the city of Tan Tán in the region of Tarfaya. During our interviews with her, Suadu described the legal precepts and practices followed by her qabila (tribe) in pre- revolutionary times to ensure women’s wellbeing and autonomy upon marriage. Should a woman with children become divorced, the ex-husband was obliged to give her a certain amount of his camels, goats and perhaps part of their milk. The amount would depend on the man’s wealth and on whether or not the divorcee chose to return to her natal encampment or to stay to live on in the encampment of her ex-husband upon divorce. Children, daughters especially, would typically stay to look after their mother. Women always kept the khayma, which had been provided to her by her own natal family upon marriage.

A divorced father would retain rights over decisions throughout his children’s life —such as who they would marry—in return for his enduring support (Juliano, 1998: 62), and, given a generalized lack of stigma over divorce, divorced women could easily remarry. Although polygamy was, and remains, an extremely uncommon practice among the Sahrawis (Juliano,

1998: 68-70; see introduction of this dissertation for possible explanations), Suadu explained that if a man decided to marry a second wife without divorcing his first, it was common for first wives to pack up their khayma and return to their natal encampment in defiance. They asked their husbands to choose between them and their new wife; few, she assured me, allowed men to have both.

Social gatherings organized in the honour of divorcees were known as “mrugh alcada”. mrugh means “getting out of”. In his context specifically, it means “finishing or accomplishing”

240 alcada, a period of four months that Muslim women must respect between marriages. lcada, provides a prudential time frame to reveal whether or not a woman is pregnant from her previous husband, allowing the newborn’s father to be correctly identified. During the gatherings of mrugh alcada, divorcees were dressed up and decorated with henna by their female relatives. They sat over a carpet on a distinguished spot of a khayma from where everyone could observe her and waited for potential suitors to read them poetry, flirting and competing over her hand in public. Women, who enjoyed considerably more autonomy after their first marriage, would be expected to choose the suitor they found most charming and desirable after the party99.

Even though only men have the right to carry out a divorce as per Islamic law, Suadu described to us the mechanisms that were available for women in pre-revolutionary times to repudiate their husbands, soliciting and achieving divorces. Women’s right to request a divorce becomes effective once she returns her sadaq/mahr, especially if the divorce is solicited early on the marriage. Such women were described as karah. Suadu shared with me the story of a karah, a young woman who returned to her natal encampment on her own volition after repudiating her husband. One day, a group of her husband’s male relatives visited the karah in an effort to convince her to return to her husband. They say she listened to everything they had to say patiently and when they were done she turned to them and said:

The old man is prohibited for me

Even if I like him or he likes me

99 Although these celebrations do not commonly take place in the Sahrawi Republic, the practice has been described by Juliano as an example of a “Sahrawi indigenous feminism” (1998: 80) and has been showcased by the Sahrawi Women’s Union Association based in Spain and its network of supporters as an exemplary Sahrawi custom (Also see: http://amse.mujeresaharauis.es/la-fiesta-del-divorcio/).

241

It is prohibited that I be with the old man Even if I love him and he loves me And it is prohibited for others to touch me Just because of back needs2 He made me lose my head and blind in one eye and damn the group in front of me damn the one nearest to me and one furthest and that is what my tongue says It is prohibited for anyone to touch me

aḥaram a cliye al-shaibani wakha nbqih au yebqini wa aharam at-lauu amsuni bi lahuaj al-uarani aktal rasi wa a cuar caini wa atfu bilycamc al-ghadami wa atfu bil-aka’ wa adduni hadha ghailtu bilsani wa ahram atlau ymsuni

“That is what she said!” Suadu exclaimed in a thrilled expression: “She said those

words in front of all those men who were much older than her! Imagine! She humiliated

her husband so much for what he had done that he could never speak another word about

her, out of shame. They say the man gave her a divorce immediately after that. The qadi

(judge) did not even require her to return her sadaq”.

As argued in chapter one, the mobilization of these narratives about the past need be

understood in relation to the priorities of the present. Khuya and Suadu’s account are nostalgic

accounts of dignified, powerful and autonomous women emphasising a social world

2 Allusion to sexual needs. 242 governed by collective values and contractual regulations that might point to a sense of what

“lacks” in the present. In other words, their exercise of remembrance does not serve the stagnant purpose of commemoration alone. Rather, it embodies a political and ethical act of collective memorialization, through me (and others), that “revives” such pasts, propelling them towards desired futures, perhaps protecting them from the present.

The fact that a significant number of young men today live in perpetuum movement between borders, seeking livelihoods and citizenships, inside and outside of the Republic, produces anxieties over infringements to these longstanding marriage contracts and relations.

Their often risky, physically and emotionally draining endeavours impose long periods of separation between husbands and wives, often leaving women in very vulnerable situations, sometimes having to look after children without any income for extended periods of time. It is not uncommon for men to abandon their families altogether while they are abroad. In some cases, men remarry, sometimes granting their wives in the Republic a divorce, others neglecting to do so. If the separation between the spouses extends over a long period of time, marriage contracts may be revoked, but it can take many years before there is a certainty that a man does not mean to return to his marriage. Legally unable to re-marry, women in this latter circumstance are left without the option of seeking a new spouse during this period. Such women are described as al-muʿalgat (muʿalga sing.) a term that literally and evocatively translates into “the left hanging”. The legal limbo of al-muʿ algat is not only clearly related to the long distances and movements current economic and labour conditions impose on men, it also constitutes a legal limbo in the personal lives of women that compounds on to the legal limbo an “international community” is imposing over the Republic during this colonial meantime.

243 Al-muʿ algat were never mentioned in my conversations with elderly women, yet their predicament loomed heavy in the imagination of my younger interlocutors. It was a frequent subject of conversation among young Sahrawi women who shared stories with me about women in this situation, both inside and outside the Women’s Union’s corridors. To offer one of several examples, I was told of a young woman married to a man who had immigrated to

Spain two weeks after their wedding. Four years had passed since, and he had not sent his wife any remittances, nor given her any news of his whereabouts. No one, not even members of his natal household claimed to have heard from him since the day he left. Some expressed concern for the man’s safety but, given this is not an isolated occurrence; most interpreted his behaviour to be disgraceful on the grounds that he was sequestering his wife’s life prospects:

The woman is a muʿ alga you should see her… she is so young and so beautiful, yet

she cannot dress up or go to many parties because she is married and everyone knows

that: people could talk bad things about her, criticize her for going out like that in her

husband’s absence. But she does not even know where he is, imagine!

The moral outrage cases such as those of al-muʿalgat provoke among Sahrawi women is part of what lies behind their motivations to renegotiate the priorities attached to the female revolutionary munadila, subtly questioning a modernist model of female empowerment that propels women to occupy hypervisible public spaces, and prioritizes “large things”: the struggle for independence over “small things”— issues externalized from the larger struggle and made secondary to it and often silenced— pertaining to women’s personal lives.

As the next section will show, young Sahrawi women are taking concrete steps to revisit this dominant narrative, regenerating modesty codes (hishma), specifically by taking these increasingly privatized matters to public deliberation and, in so doing, invigorating a

244 longstanding ethos and sensibility that I have represented so far through Bakita, Khuya and

Suadu’s accounts: one geared towards finding collective measures capable of confronting insecurities faced by women within present marriage-scapes.

5.6 Putting Marriage Practices to Public Scrutiny

On the 8th of May of 2012, the Center Martyr Naaja Ali Brahim, a training and research center located in the province Buyudur, organized a conference entitled: “Non-material cultural heritage: social rituals and marriage rituals”. The event was co-organized by the Sahrawi

Ministry of Culture and the Women’s Union, yet run by a group of young women, who had carried out a three-month long research project prior, using the Women’s Union’s regional centers found in each of the Republic’s provinces as the locales to carry out their work. They had organized the conference as a venue to present the results of their research to the wider public.

I first heard about the project from Fatimetu earlier that year. After attending one of my

English classes in one of the regional Women’s Center, she called me into an office and asked me to take a seat next to her. She wanted me to look over the questionnaire for the research project. Even though she was not behind the initiative, younger women—in their twenties,

Fatimetu was in her forties—at the center had asked Fatimetu for her feedback. The following is a copy of the questionnaire. I translated the questions from Arabic to English with one of my research assistants a year later.

245 Personal details

بيانات شخصية انثئ

أن ث ى-/ذكر- Male/Female

الفئة العمرية(Age (choice between youth/adult/elderly

المستوى الدراسي Educational level

الحالة االجتماعية (Marriage status (single/married/divorced

الوظيفة Occupation

مكان السكن Place of residence

نوع العائلة(Size of family (choice between big/small

Research Questions

اسئلة البحث

1. In your point of view, what is the definition of cultural heritage?

ما هو مفهوم المورث الثقافي بنظرك

2. Amongst the expressions of our cultural heritage: the male dress (zaraʿa), female dress (milhafah), the turban (ezam) and the dialect of Hassaniya: Do you find them necessary to maintain? Justify من الموروث الثقافي الشعبي 'الدراعة الملحفة و اللثام االسود و اللهجة الحسانية' هل ترى ضرورة في التمسك الحفاظ عليها علل 3. Among the social practices of our cultural heritage: rituals and practices concerning marriage and birth. Have you seen them change? If your answer is yes, do you think this has had an effect on society at large? اذا كانت قد شهدت من الموروث الثقافي الشعبي طقوس و ممارسات خاصة بالزواج و الوالدة هل شهدت هذه االخيرة تغيرا تغيرا – هل يؤث ر هذا التغير على المجتمع

4. One of the customs and behaviours that we follow in relationships between husbands and wives is the lack of contact between them in front of others, especially when they are newly married (before the birth of the first child). What is your opinion about this? من بين العادات و التقاليد المتبعة في العالقة بين الزوجين عدم االحتكاك بينهما بشكل مباشر امام الناس خاصة في فترة الزواج االولى (قبل المولود االول( ما رايك فيها

246 5. Are you in favour of the idea of marriage at an early age? Justify! هل انت مع فكرة الزواج المبكر علل 6. Do you think that the mahr is the same as lmjiba? If your answer is “No”, what is the difference? هل باعتقادك ان المهر هو لمجيبة اذا كان الجواب "ال" ما الفرق بينهما 7. Wedding festivities and ceremonies for newborn babies have become very expensive. Do you wish to maintain this or to change this? Do you think this phenomenon is an obstacle for marriage? Who is the responsible according to your point of view?

الزفاف و العقيقة وتبعاتهما (تارزيفت( اصبحت اليوم جد مكلفة و فيها بذخ كبير من حيث طريقة االعداد و التنظيم هل ترغب في االبقاء عليها طقوس هل تعد هذه المظاهرعئقا في الزواج من المسؤل في نظرك عن تللك المظاهر 8. What is the relationship between this phenomenon and the decreasing numbers of family members? Explain! ما عالقة هذه المظاهربضالة الحجم االسري علل

9. Are the rituals followed during the time of the pregnancy and birth compatible with the current requirements? Justify! هل الطقوس المتبعة خالل مرحلة الطفولة )الحمل الوالدة(تتماشى و متطلبات العصر علل

10. Do our current rituals redress the female difficulties? Justify! هل الطقوس و الممارسات المتبعة خالل هذه المرحلة انصفت االنثى )البنت( علل

11. Some people see pregnancy as a sickness (a woman who is not well). Do you? Explain هناك من ينظر الى الحمل و كانه حالة مرضية (امراة ماهي اصحيحة ( علل

12. Do you like your child to wear traditional clothes on religious occasions? هل تحب ان يرتدي ابنك مالبس تقليدية في المناسبات الدينية

247 13. Regarding the customs that we follow to solve conflicts between couples and our collective methods of reconciliation: Are you in favor or against reconciliation? Is there any effort made by the Sahrawi authorities to maintain this cultural heritage? If your answer is YES, are their efforts sufficient? من بين الطقوس المتبعة في حل الخالفات العائلية )بين االزواج( "الصلح" هل انت مع او ضد الصلح

14. Taking into account our current situation (divided population, the exile, occupied territory and the diaspora): what means do we have to maintain our cultural heritage? في ظل الواقع الذي نعيشه شعب مجزا الى اجزاء (جزء المناطق المحتلة و الجزء االخر بالمنفى و اخر في الهجرة ( ما هي االساليب التي يمكن ان نحافظ من خالللها على مورثنا الثقافي الشعبي

Fatimetu patiently waited for me to read out the sentences in Arabic, helping me make

sense of their meaning, even calling other women into the office to help us with translations

with no shortage of miming, misunderstandings and laughs. When we finally finished going

through the document, she asked me: “Well, what do you think? Are we missing something?”

For the most part, my opinion over the workings, operations and activities of the Union

were not usually sought after, yet, having learnt to interpret these occasions as one of many

practices of sociality, I welcomed interpellations of my researcher “expertise”, even in

situations such as these when it was very clear that my inputs were hardly warranted. I said it

looked great, taking the opportunity to enquire into the aims of the project with Fatimetu.

I was slightly puzzled: “You say it is a research project on marriage but this

questionnaire asks about so many other things!” To me the questionnaire read as an enquiry

regarding cultural heritage, customs, appropriate dress, modesty and the appropriate ways of

pursuing female empowerment. Only some of the questions, at least according to my reading of

them at the time, were explicitly concerned with marriage practices (Qs 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 13). I

must not have made myself clear because Fatimetu’s answer did not directly address my

248 confusion, yet she presented me with a familiar rhetoric regarding the government’s concerns over delayed marriage and demographic growth: “Yes”, answered Fatimetu: “It is a research project about marriage because there are not as many marriages as before; it is a big problem”100.

A few months later, when an articulate and outspoken woman in her early twenties stood up in front of a large audience to present the results of the research, a gentle rumble erupted among a group of elderly women sitting nearby me. I asked a friend I was sitting next to if she knew what the agitation was about. She explained they were criticizing the speaker for discussing such matters in front of her father, a man with a leadership position in the

POLISARIO’s government who was sat in one of the front seats of the conference hall.

Although this was a governmentally sanctioned and institutionally organized conference, they considered discussing marriage matters in front of one’s male elders, in a mixed generational and gendered audience, to be a breach of hishma (modesty codes) due to its implicit allusion to sex. Recall the reformulation of hishma was very important to the emergence of the figure of the Sahrawi munadila, praised for dancing, singing and delivering loud political speeches in public. However, the dominant project of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism did not condone this transgression when it came to the expression of more “private” or sexual subject matters.

The audacity of the young speaker to talk publically about marriage rituals made these older women feel ill at ease.

Although in my everyday interactions with women involved in the project, the research was always described as an inquiry into the prickly subject of marriage, the young speaker introduced her presentation saying their aim was to generate information and discussion over

100 See Wilson (2016: 171) for an excerpt of President Abdelaziz’s speech during the 12th Congress of the POLISARIO Front in which he expressed this same concern as well as the short-lived governmental attempts made by the POLISARIO to make wedding celebrations less costly during that period.

249 Sahrawi customs and rituals as part of a larger effort to protect Sahrawi culture against the threat of its diffusion in exile/diaspora and of Moroccan appropriation101. She framed their research under the rubric of “intangible cultural heritage” ─a concept they had borrowed from

UNESCO─akin to other efforts carried out by the Ministry of Culture, such as the documentation of oral tales, historical narratives, poetry and fables from Sahrawi elders102.

Listening to the speaker’s introduction I felt as if she was addressing the question I had initially posed at Fatimetu. To them, this research formed part of a broader effort to raise awareness about the way in which marriage practices were tied into larger questions regarding their struggle. The speakers tied marriage practices to other questions of traditional concern to the POLISARIO’s national movement of liberation, namely: a discussion over suitable national symbols (Qs. 1, 2, 3, 12 and 14), women’s empowerment (Qs. 10), modesty codes (Qs. 4, 11) and questions in relation to appropriate governmental intervention in marriage practices (Qs.

13). Relating the subject of marriage to questions regarding the make-up of Sahrawi society at large, the design of this research project explicitly scaled marriage into its larger “scapes”. At stake in turning marriage practices into a matter of public deliberation was scrutinizing who the

101 As discussed in the introduction, the Spanish Sahara already practiced cultural appropriation of Sahrawi “culture” through folkloric exhbitions organised by La Seccion Femenina (Bengochea, 2016). For more information on attempts on the part of the Moroccan regime to appropriate Sahrawi culture as part of its own, see http://violetaruanomusic.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/a-cultural-caravan-for-peace-tainted.html and Article 15 of a collaborative report by a number of international human rights organizations denouncing Morocco’s human rights violations of Sahrawi people, including the right to cultural expression https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzlReABymFt5ZmV4aGIybVBBSEk/view?pref=2&pli=1.

102 As a member of the association Antropología en Acción (see http://www.antropologiaenaccion.org/, I have collaborated in several of these projects with the Sahrawi Ministry of Culture, including by participating in the ethnographic film documentary “Legna: Sahrawi Poetry Speaks” directed by Bahia Awah, Juan Ignacio Robles and Juan Carlos Gimeno, and by means of my co-authorship of a forthcoming anthopology of Sahrawi national poets.

250 Sahrawi people were as a whole. It was part of a discussion about who they were fighting to become103.

Results to questions one, two and four revealed the majority of those consulted were convinced of the national imperative to preserve Sahrawi cultural heritage. When asked whether social customs persisted among the Sahrawi that discriminated against women, the results were less unanimous, with just over 50% of women thinking discrimination persisted and just fewer than 50% of men declaring it did. Many (both men and women) included in their comments their belief that the Sahrawi Republic offered women a special status compared to women in other societies and that gender discrimination was far less pronounced than it had been in the past. Others pointed out that practices that discriminated against women endured such as the custom of celebrating male-born babies more enthusiastically than female babies.

Not only was these young women’s public discussion of marriage considered a transgression of hishma, but the research project itself aimed at provoking debate regarding appropriate modesty codes. Question eleven asked Sahrawi-refugees if they believed pregnancy should be understood as a sickness. The adjective “marida”, which means “sick” in

Arabic, is used as a euphemism in Hassaniya to describe a woman who is pregnant. Similarly, when a woman gives birth she is said to be healed “brat”. Bringing up the subject of

103The total number of questionaries distributed was 500. However, the results are based on 312 questionaries given that the researchers discarded those some on the ground that they were incomprehensible or had illegible answers. No one consulted for the questionnaire was below 18 years old, and the majority were between 18 and 39 years old (male 71,42% and female 76,54%). Hassaniya is a spoken dialect, which explains why the questionnaire is written in Modern Standard Arabic (except a few words that do not derive from Arabic.The break down of the rest of the personal details for those who answered the questionnaire is: Gender [42% Male, 58% Female] Age group [(18-28 yrs. Male 35.23%/ Female 49.65%, 29-39 yrs. Male 36.19%, 40-49 Male 25.66%, Female, 13,79%, 50yrs and up, Male 1,90% and Female 6.20%)] Educational level [Primary male 0.95% , Female 7.58) (Secondary Male 2.85%, Female 19.04%), (High School male, 32.8% and female 25.52%), (University and/or higher studies Male, 28.56%, Female 22.31%]Marriage status ]Single, Male 55.23%, Female 52.41%), (Married, Male 55.23%, Female, 38.62%), (Divorced Male 1.90%, Women, 2.65%)]. Employment [Males 70.47%, Female 55.86%] Type of family (this referred to the nuclear family=[Small 77.14%, Female 68.27%, Big male 15.23%, Female, 26.89].

251 pregnancy, in its explicit association with sex, is considered impolite, almost vulgar, and there are women who go to great lengths to hide their pregnancy in a gesture of modesty— explaining a woman is marida excuses her from physical labour in the household and beyond, allowing her a break from her duties towards the final stages of her pregnancy that is revealing of the value Saharan nomads placed upon women’s reproductive labour. The vast majority of both men and women however answered that they did not see pregnancy as a sickness. During the time of my fieldwork, international health NGOs such as the Spanish Médicos del Mundo, ran women’s health projects with the Sahrawi Women’s Union that sought to combat this

“mentality” in the believe that hiding pregnancy was keeping women at a distance from seeking clinical monitoring during their pregnancy. Moreover, question two gathers citizen- refugees opinions regarding public displays of affection between spouses, something that was strictly frowned upon in a pre-revolutionary social order where affections towards the larger kinship group (one’s patriliny) were expected to override romantic affections for one’s partners or nuclear families (also in other Bedouin societies, see also Abu-Lughod, 1998). Although more contested, most (especially women) preferred to conserve modesty over public display of affection between spouses, agreeing to preserve the tradition of maintaining no contact between wife and husband in public.

The young speaker explained the research team was initially surprised by the result to the question regarding citizen-refugees’ opinions over very early marriage. Although the question had not made this explicit, the researchers had designed the question in reference to marrying shortly after puberty. Whereas 44.76% of men and 60% of women had responded they were against this practice, this fell short of their estimates. Marrying shortly after puberty had been a fairly standard practice in pre-revolutionary times yet, at present, the average age

252 for a woman’s first marriage was in her mid-twenties (late twenties for men). Moreover, the researchers thought the result was in contradiction to an otherwise wide consensus regarding the value society placed on educating women extensively before becoming belaboured with the responsibilities of marriage and child rearing. Given that the Sahrawi Republic has few secondary schools and no university of its own, the research team had presumed a far greater rejection of early marriage. In fact, the team offered a critical interpretation of the result, concluding many had probably misinterpreted the question and used it to express their discontent at having to marry at a later age than they would choose to. Similarly, results to questions seven and eight showed an overwhelming agreement in associating the rising costs of marriage and standards of living to its decreased rate. Whereas some men blamed women for these rising costs, women usually attributed responsibility to “the family” or “to society” as a whole.

However, the gender divide in the results was most pronounced in relation to question six, asking respondents if they considered al-mjiba (“the things brought in” -see marriage-

“scape” two-) to be the same thing as al-mahr (Islamic bridewealth). Prior to the conference, I had gone over the questionnaire with my host-sisters (who were not involved in the research) and they told me question six was al-muhim, which means the most important and the most interesting. Whereas 64% of men answered they thought elmyiba counted as al-mahr, only

43% of women did.

The result for question six was predictable to the researchers. The high costs of putting together al-mjiba justified men’s general impression that it should be enough to fulfill their religious duty (see marriage-“scape” number three). Nevertheless, many of my young female friends, including those involved in the research project, insisted al-mjiba should be

253 conceptually separated from al-mahr. Recall al-mjiba is mainly comprised of all the equipment required to run an average household in the Sahrawi Republic today (cushions, blankets, latrines, fridges, solar panels, pots, pans, etc.). According to these women, whereas lmahr was intended as gifts for the bride, al-mjiba was composed of items that were shared between the bride, the groom and their children. As one of my interlocutors put it: “al-mjiba covers the basics”. Crucially, because they are “basic” items of a household, they cannot be returned upon divorce. To them, making al-mjiba pass for lmahr violated one the religious principles behind the practice of al-mahr, which was meant as gifts that the bride could potentially return should she solicit a divorce (recall Suadu’s story of al-karah, the woman who repudiated her husband). Today’s al-mjiba sometimes includes cash or jewelry that is indeed returnable, but not always; the ambiguity of the term al-mjiba (“the brought-in-things”) renders Sahrawi women’s Islamic right to solicit a divorce ambiguous.

The very fact that these young researchers included a question regarding the meaning of the word al-mjiba is both an implicit acknowledgment—perhaps even a quiet endorsement of the (re)-emergence of bridewealth—and a demand of a legal sort to establish a clear difference between the practice of al-mahr and al-mjiba. In this sense, it breaks the taboo that the

POLISARIO’s revolutionary ban over sadaq/mahr had partly produced among citizens- refugees regarding the subject of the dower and the economic exchanges of marriage. I see it as a quiet endorsement of the idea that women should be acknowledged for their unwaged regenerative labour, providing them with a clear form of insurance upon the potential abandonment of their husband, but not only. The demand to separate al-mjiba from al-mahr is also a way of making sure that this mandatory prestation includes returnable items, resources

254 that may potentially mediate between a woman’s desire to leave an unwanted marriage and her legal and economic capacity to do so.

In closing, I return to Fatimetu, a woman who regularly participates in the collective activities of the Women’s Union in her province, illustrating through her example, the multiple interpellations women respond to, as well as the types of considerations and negotiations they make as they navigate contemporary marriage-scapes.

Fatimetu is a divorcee. She married at the age of sixteen when the war was just coming to an end. Unusually for the times, she and her husband built their khayma near her husband’s family compound because, while she had many sisters that could help in looking after her own mother, her husband didn’t have any sisters to look after his. Fatimetu became a mother to five children. When the war ended, her ex-husband returned from the battlefield and, like so many other families, they started making plans for their return to the Western Sahara. However, once the paralysis of the peace process became apparent, her husband started travelling regularly, trading goods between Mauritania and the Sahrawi Republic to support his family. Once her children became less dependent on her, Fatimetu decided to run for elections and she was chosen as the leader of the district council (daira) where she and her mother-in-law lived.

One day, her husband called her from Mauritania to tell her he had found a new wife and he was going to divorce her. For a year following her divorce she and her children stayed in her mother in-law’s district where they had always lived but as time passed, she noticed, her ex-husband stopped sending them money: “Now they (her ex-husband and his new wife) live in an air-conditioned house (abroad) and she has everything. Meanwhile I have nothing”.

Under these circumstances, although she resented having to lose her house and the job she had been elected into at her district, she could not stomach continuing to care for her mother-in-law

255 so she took an empty room near her mother’s compound which one of her sisters had left behind after she had immigrated to Spain with her husband.

Fatimetu was extremely proud of her oldest daughter who had obtained a UNHCR scholarship to study a year abroad in Europe. Not only had her daughter received excellent grades throughout her life, she also kept herself busy giving regular talks regarding the plight of the Sahrawi people abroad: “She is a true munadila”, people would say about Fatimetu’s daughter. Her other daughter was also studying in Algeria. However Fatimetu struggled with her sons. The youngest still lives with her and the other joined the army. Her eldest kept asking

Fatimetu for money to buy his own car and start doing business but, for Fatimetu, generating that kind of money seemed like an impossible feat. She complained: “meanwhile his father sends us nothing, he does not even call his children”.

Although the divorce celebrations of pre-revolutionary times (mrugh al‘ada) are not commonly practiced in the Sahrawi Republic today, I always thought of the social life in

Fatimetu’s khayma as the contemporary expression of such gatherings. Her home in the mid- evening was often full of guests. She received frequent visits from men, drawn in by her contagious laughter and her warm, friendly and inviting character. They would drop by, take a seat, and she would be expected to bring out a tea set and to entertain them. Her phone was constantly receiving text messages that she sometimes showed me (and sometimes not), laughing at the various compliments she received from her suitors. She shared many funny stories about these men with me, yet always insisted she never slept with them, given that sex outside of marriage was against her religion. She used to say she was only “passing time” and she was always vague when I asked her if she liked any of them for marriage.

256 An interval of eight months passed before I saw Fatimetu again. “Come to see me soon”, she said when I called her to say I had arrived back in the Republic: “I have some news for you”. “What news?” I asked. “I am getting married. Come to see me and I will tell you all the details!” When I finally visited Fatimetu I was keen to find time alone with her to ask her:

“So… are you going to tell me about this marriage of yours, already”? “I am not marrying anyone!” she said “I just wanted to make sure you came to visit me”.

We laughed off her friendly trick although, later on, Fatimetu explained there had in fact been a man, a good man, she insisted, who had proposed to marry her in earnest. Fatimetu had thought about it a lot but she decided against it. She told me she was scared: What if he does not contribute to her family? The Women’s Union was encouraging her to run for elections for a higher leadership position. Knowing how popular she was, I too encouraged her to run, but she was reticent. The Union offered very little monetary incentive. She worried that a leadership position would take up even more of her time for little reward. Meanwhile her children would continue needing cars and laptops for their future. She was contemplating starting a small shop with another female friend, maybe asking the Women’s Union for one of their microcredits, but what if she married and her new husband did not like her to work in the market? She liked this man, he was “a good man”, but marrying him offered her no guarantees, and “I already have my children, I have to think about their future”.

Fatimetu’s decision not to marry contradicts what the Secretary General of the

Women’s Union said on the day that I met her: “They would all be married and sitting at home if they could”. Fatimetu did not, in fact, want to marry at all costs. To her, marriage did not necessarily represent the allure of a comfortable life. Instead, marriage formed part of a matrix of livelihood options that she had to navigate, taking into account complex and transforming

257 political, economic, labour, legal and aspirational “scapes” that entailed serious risks for her and her family as well as potential comforts.

5.7 Conclusion

The sentiments, practices and demands I have discussed in this chapter invite us to think of marriage-scapes as shifting fields within which rights may be both generated and destroyed. They invite us to re-orient our lens toward seeing the high cost of Sahrawi weddings today, as a practice that congeals out of residual structures of feeling that are emerging

(Williams, 1997: 121-135) to protect the dignity of Sahrawi women and affirm the value of their contributions to the struggle under highly indeterminate and insecure economic and legal circumstances. They respond to longstanding moral economy amongst the Sahrawi people that values providing women with insurances upon relations of marriage and divorce.

The (re)-emergence of residual practices and structures of feeling traced in this chapter speak neither to young women’s lack of attachment to the Sahrawi cause nor to their rejection of its revolutionary values. On the contrary, they reveal efforts at transforming a dominant model of female empowerment that renders women’s agendas secondary to national liberation, demanding increased insurances upon entering marriage as well as measures that allow them to exercise their long-established right to a fair divorce, in ways that are regenerating the project of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism.

That is, even if these women’s demands and standards upon marriage are not articulated as an overt challenge to the dominant model of female empowerment espoused by the

POLISARIO Front, I see them as expressions of what Bayat has described as practices of

“everyday feminism” (2013), regenerating the figure of munadila in ways that respond to the priorities of their present. Instead of overtly opposing the Sahrawi munadila’s hypervisibility in

258 public spaces, young Sahrawi women are working with it, bringing aspects of women’s lives, easily eclipsed out of a camera lenses, into public view. Bringing marriage practices into public contestation their demands are, almost inadvertently, challenging the ideo-spatial private-public configurations and logics of the modern nation-state that are rendering marriage relations

“private” and external to their collective struggle for national liberation.

259 6 On Love and False Promises

Strong Eastern winds known as sharguiya had come out on the morning that my friend

Nura took me to a social gathering at her maternal aunt’s khayma. On days with sharguiya, hot and dusty air enters your eyes, your nose, your ears, and your thigh muscles ache as they fight against the air’s resistance in an effort to move you across the sand. Women often complain that flies infest their kitchens when there is sharguiya and the elderly say it makes their bones hurt. Even the thought of leaving the protection of a khayma on a day with sharguiya makes one feel tired, defeated by the wind in advance, so I felt relieved when we arrived to our destination.

We entered a room weighed down by a thin cloud of incense and I imagined the women of the khayma spending that morning energetically brushing up the room in their daily struggle against the sand. This room looked spotless. There were low, circular tables covered by colourful plastic cloths for special occasions, as well as plastic plates with biscuits, dates, and popcorn. Small glass jars with plastic flowers had been placed on each of the low tables. Large rectangular cushions lined with colourful materials of the same bright colours as the numerous other cushions spread over them, lay against each wall of the room, welcomingly.

This was the beginning of a gathering to receive a group of Nura’s extended family that had arrived from the occupied Western Sahara with an exchange program run conjointly by the

UNHCR and the peacekeeping agency MINURSO. Since 2004, these two UN agencies have flown a total of 12.625 Sahrawis across the earthen military berm and over a large still area that remains heavily contaminated with landmines, dividing the Western Sahara into two (UNHCR,

2015). The visits are five days long. In 2015, there were 31,058 Sahrawis remaining on the

UNHCR/MINURSO’s list (ibid), waiting to be called in for the opportunity to visit family

260 members on either side of the berm that they have not seen since their mass displacement in

1975. In the case of younger citizen-refugees, these visits are also often the first opportunity they have to see the land of the Western Sahara, its cities, its coasts and its sea.

There were two elderly women already inside the room when we arrived. They sat around a younger host preparing tea for them. Nura and I approached and bent towards them to greet them at length; a right-hand shake followed by a respectful embrace in the form of a tap over their right shoulders and numerous sentences of greeting uttered back and forth, almost mechanically.

I took a seat next to Nura on one of the corners of the room as she continued to talk to me about the man she was seeing. He was married. He promised Nura he would break up his marriage up for her, but time was passing and he did not seem to be taking any steps in that direction. This was a situation of risk and vulnerability for Nura whose reputation extending her youth into early bachelor adulthood was at stake. It was not a matter of little significance to her livelihood: the probabilities of obtaining a successful marriage to a spouse with some income and who came from an “acceptable”104 family, depended, not insignificantly, upon her reputation; upon how she was imagined by eligible men and their families. Nura was worried: if she waited too long before she got married for the first time, rumours would likely begin to spread as to her sexual maturity and suitors may begin to lose interest in her, in part, due to questions surrounding her virginity. Nura was sharing one story after another with me

104 What constitutes an “acceptable” spouse varies from person to person and from family to family, of course. The most generalizable trend is that of “hypogamy”, the rule that brides should always marry grooms belonging to a family of greater wealth of status. Arguably, “marrying up” is a preferred practiced everywhere, yet the late Pierre Bonte said it was a prohibition for female hassophones to marry a man from a social group of a lower status than them (Bonte 2008: 89). When exceptions to this rule have been noted, children born out of marriages where the bride had greater status than the groom would be, unusually, identified as belonging to the patrilineage of their mother (Caro Baroja, 1955: 20) thus adhering to the rule that women should not reproduce children of a socially inferior status than her own (Bonte, 2008:161 also see Wilson, 2016: 151).

261 regarding the different ways in which her boyfriend had disappointed her, holding her mobile phone in her hand as she spoke, checking regularly to see if she had received a text message from him.

Numerous women had begun to enter the room, greeting and approaching every one of us before taking a comfortable seat next to a free cushion. Because Nura’s stories were capturing all of my attention, I was fairly distracted from this routine gathering of women until

Nura pointed out the guests and family members from the occupied territories had arrived. A woman walked in with what appeared to be her two daughters, Nura wasn’t sure, one could have been a niece or a daughter in law. They had flown in from the occupied city of Smara, located in the Western side of the berm. When we noticed the youngest of them was wearing a bracelet decorated with the Sahrawi Republic’s flag, Nura exclaimed: “Maskina”, meaning

“poor her”, and used in this context as an adjective of positive recognition to describe someone affectionately. “Why maskina?” I asked. “Because she is a true munadila, look at the flag on her wrist. We have stopped wearing flags here, but you know, in the occupied territories they have it easier”. “What is easier for them?” I asked, and Nura explained:

It is easier for them because at least they live on their land, they breathe their

own air. That gives them more hope; it gives them more strength to fight. Living

here there are days when you say to yourself that your only purpose in life is to live

for your cause: You want to study, you want to work, so you can fight for your

people, but other days… well... other days you think it is useless, and you spend

your time worrying about getting married, having your children and living for

yourself.

262 Look at that woman (she pointed towards a woman sitting on the other side of

the room in front of us). She has not seen her own son for the past ten years. He left

to find work and no one knows where he is now. He does not call his own mother.

Imagine. In the end, we all suffer here but if we return to el mantiqa (meaning “the

region”, used in the Republic to index the occupied land of Western Sahara) there is

great shame over us, but until when, Vivian? Why are we not fighting a war? Why

are we waiting for human rights organizations to give us our rights? And what can

we do here meanwhile? In the occupied Western Sahara youth receive cameras to

make videos that are showing the world the harm the Moroccan government is

doing to them, but here? Who is paying attention to us here? Here we have nothing,

how can we fight? Here only the children of the government can afford to work for

the cause. If you are not one of them, you have nothing. There is nothing here, what

can we do here? There is no life here”.

Nura’s words made my heart sink. The sound of the vicious sharguiya coming from outside compounded with the desperation of her words into a logic that painfully echoed

Agamben’s elaboration of “bare life” (1998). That “bare life” and “calamity of rightlessness of stateless people, deprived of a place in the world, which makes opinions significant and actions effective” (Arendt: 1973: 296) that Nura’s elders had so resolutely resisted and circumvented, by building, maintaining and organising their Republic in a refugee camp. Forty years after, the same institutions, infrastructures and social relations premised upon a prognosis of a future exercising sovereignty over the Western Sahara, now orientate Nura’s present towards a future that is stuck in the temporal impasse of a colonial meantime.

263 Nura’s lament—that, like anyone’s lament at any given time, does not necessarily reflect how she feels at all times—evocatively speaks to prevalent “structures of feeling”

(Williams, 1977: 128-135) of her generation. Feelings related to being “stuck” in the contradictory time-zone of a space that is at once a settled Republic and a temporary movement for national liberation, a state that sometimes feels like it is merely posturing, a state that does not feel quite real. Such feelings reflect out of a temporal axis of struggle, a form of historical narrative that has been interrupted (chapter one), a modern temporality (Koselleck, 2004) that the Sahrawi movement for national liberation took on in an effort to translate and make desired futures recognizable to international law and its rhetorical model of justice. Dreams that citizen-refugees attach to with “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2010), holding on to them skeptically, not unlike the way in which Nura holds on to her phone, waiting for news.

Additionally, Nura’s lament speaks poignantly to how this colonial meantime pervades women’s lives, specifically in their attempt to live up to the revolutionary figure of the munadila (militant, f). As has been described in the previous chapters of this dissertation, the figure of the munadila was forged during an early revolutionary period when the private-public dichotomy that informs Nura’s calculations of her life choices—marrying/forming a family and living for oneself versus studying/working and devoting oneself to the collective struggle for liberation— was not as delimited as it is today. The public/private dichotomy encroaching during this colonial meantime is affecting the very definition of what counts as political action.

For instance, Nura’s sense of political paralysis derives out of her perception that that which counts as political labour must be accessible to the camera. Speaking to a global fixation associating political labour to activities performed in visible “public” spaces, this conception of

“the political” overshadows a longstanding valorisation amongst the Sahrawi of women’s

264 labour in the domain of the khayma as a form of political labour. Ironically, Nura feels impotent to labour for her cause because, unlike her co-generationals living under military occupation in the Western Sahara, her life is devoid of visible forms of violence and of spectacular forms of political action that capture the attention of international media.

In this chapter, I examine how the division between public and private labour that is encroaching in a colonial meantime influences the “emotional, caring labour” (Hoschild,

[1979] 2003) of love. During an earlier revolutionary period, a period when one could not differentiate citizen-refugee’s labour into forms such as waged/unwaged, public/private, productive/reproductive, citizen-refugee’s labour of love could more easily be regimented towards the nation, signaling loyalty towards the movement of liberation. This argument is not one regarding the interiority of feelings; rather it is an interrogation into “close involvements of emotion talk with issues of sociability and power” (Abu-Lughod & Lutz, 1990: 2). The argument does not imply that, during an earlier revolutionary period, citizen-refugees loved an abstract concept ─that of a “nation”─ more, or the same, than they loved actual people or concrete places and objects around them. My argument is that the absence of a private/public dichotomy made it easier for citizen-refugees to perform the emotional labour of love towards the nation than it is for them today.

Naisargi Dave (2016) argues love is a politics of distinction that requires us to differentiate between who and what we invest (our labour) in. During the years of armed conflict (1975-1991) differentiating between one’s objects/subjects of love was challenged by the fact that, for instance, the labour of love towards one’s own children folded into the labour of love towards the national struggle. Dispossessed from their cattle, their land and their status, most citizen-refugees did not have the conditions of possibility to separate the objects and

265 subjects in which they invested their labour: they were obliged to leave their children in common nurseries in the morning, work throughout the day for the collective cause, and prepare meals for their children in the evening following the instructions, and using the rations provided by their movement of national liberation. All mothers had to be prepared to sacrifice their children to the struggle, be it sending them abroad as far away as Cuba for a decade, or sending them to the battlefield in the Western Sahara. Recall Suadu’s words in chapter one when she implied that the loss of her son was as important to her as the loss of any other

Sahrawi martyr. Her statement (a performance) coheres with its constitutive meanings; it is coherent with the way in which she practiced her labour while her son was still alive, making no rhetorical distinctions between the care she invested in her son and her care for her struggling compatriots and the projects they were building in common.

By contrast, in the Sahrawi Republic of a colonial meantime, one in which a separation between the private and the public is “quietly encroaching” (Bayat, 2013), the kinds of personal sacrifices that living up to the figure of the revolutionary munadila entail now pose serious risks to individual security. Under the conditions of the present, as Nura’s comments suggest, dedicating one’s labour to the cause is perceived as requiring working and studying in public spaces, that comes at the expense of laboring in the private spaces where one invests time in the project of marriage and child-rearing. There is the need to differentiate and choosing not to do so, choosing to dedicate all of one’s labour, including one’s labour of love, to the collective cause comes with huge risks: the risk of sacrificing one’s life’s prospects in the name of a collective future that begins to feel like a mirage rather than a promise. Indeed,

Nura’s commentary suggests that, either way, this choice is unbearable; choosing between

266 one’s personal future and one’s collective future is a feat so daunting that Nura’s vent could only end tragically, reflecting upon the absence of life itself.

In previous chapters we have seen women using their organisations and institutions to regenerate—rather than contest—the figure of the munadila. Attending to women’s agendas in the present, their efforts represent attempts to make the embodiment of the munadila livable under the conditions of this colonial meantime. Bringing privatised concerns of women’s lives into public deliberation, we have seen them trying to transform the private/public configurations underlying the tragic choice of Nura’s lament. This chapter dwells further into how the temporal and legal limbo imposed over the Sahrawi struggle pervades the personal lives of Sahrawi youth in ways that can be read out of their expressions about love or lack thereof. It shows that love talk serves as a conduit through which inter-generational tensions are played out.

I take two of the suggestions made by Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas: “love talk lends itself to discussions over gender relations”, and another: “love is an idiom through which people debate generational distinctions” (2009: 13). I elaborate on these suggestions showing how love talk can be thought of as a site from where ambivalence towards the dominant project of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism and its entanglements and engagments in a politics of recognition vis-a-vis with global regimes of power is being expressed. I show how the hopelessness expressed in Nura’s lament is one that many of her generation are contesting by tapping into the “attritional time” (Lazar, 2014) of their struggle, a temporality that more silently, yet constantly, protests and negotiates the futures prescribed by the “historical time”

(Koselleck, 2004) in which their revolution has acquired dominant representation.

267 The last section of this chapter, entitled “On Love as Destiny” attends to how the talk of love and its absence may also come embedded in a religious temporality that speaks past the historical time of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism almost entirely. It consists of a temporality that is “residual” (Williams, 1977: 122) and key to understand the way in which

Sahrawi citizen- refugee’s hope for the future often derives out of an experience of time that entirely circumvents humans attempts to forecast and influence the future. Thinking of love as co- constitutive of justice and truth (Hooks, 2000: 15-51), this chapter discusses the different ways in which love talk evokes transforming affective and aesthetic regimes in the Sahrawi

Republic, as well as residual and emergent structures of feelings that speak to the quiet renegotiation and regeneration of a Saharawi revolutionary process.

6.1 Love and Gender Relations

At one point during my fieldwork, Salka agreed to visit and interview Aichanana ─ one of the Women Union’s executive directors─with me. We took a seat in the corridor of

Aichanana’s keikota, following her hospitable insistence that this was the coolest spot of the house because it had breeze coming in from both ends of the room. Aichanana sat behind her tea utensils, asking her daughter to bring water and extra tea leaves from the kitchen, as she checked if she had all her pots and other necessary ingredients with her, wiping off the remains of a previous tea session on her tea table with a cloth. We small talked until, with Salka’s help,

I prepared Aichanana for the interview, asking her if it was OK to record her voice, letting her know what we wanted to ask her about, but Aichanana started talking as soon as I pressed play on my recorder:

268 My name is x daughter of xxx, I lived through the revolution. I was born into

the Sahrawi revolution. I grew up in the Sahrawi revolution. My life in general has

been devoted to the revolution. You can say I am a revolutionary, a munadila. I live

for everything that the Sahrawi Republic represents. My work has been devoted to the

Republic. I have offered my life to it.

During the course of the interview, Aichanana told me she was born in errih ahmar (the red winds)105, an area near Bir Lehlu, found in the desert pasturelands of today’s occupied Western

Sahara. Most of her family was displaced to Algeria early on in the war starting 1975. She was born approximately in 1973, so she does not remember this experience firsthand. Like the

Secretary General of the Women’s Union and some of its other directors, the POLISARIO’s leadership sent Aichanana to Libya as a child where she went to school for eight years. Once she obtained her baccalaureate, the leadership sent her to the Women’s School of the 27th of

February, where she trained to become a teacher. Few women were trained as teachers at the time, she explained, and they were very necessary. Aichanana has lived and worked as a teacher in the 27th of February, today’s province of Buyudur, ever since.

At the time of our interview, she has been elected head of the literacy department at the

Women’s Union. Aichanana told us that in the 1970s and 1980s there was a lot of “ignorance”.

At least 80% of Sahrawis, she claimed, did not know how to read or write. During those times, the POLISARIO’s government ran intensive summer programs where those studying abroad and returning to their parents in the Republic during the summer were recruited to teach adult and elderly citizen-refugees how to read and write, as well as other skills they had learned

105 The fact that the area is named after its winds probably implies it was a flat area of few mountains/large rocks. I thank one of my anonymous research assistants for this insight.

269 abroad. This applied mostly to those studying in Algeria and Libya, given that those who had been sent as far away as Cuba, the ex-Soviet Union or Spain typically did not return to the

Republic for at least a decade. According to Aichanana, it was thanks to these summer programs that many older women, unable to receive education abroad because of their household responsibilities, became trained and able to access positions of responsibility within the Republic. She estimated illiteracy has been reduced to 50% at present. Whereas today education is free and universal, high schools in the Republic are scarce, and there are no universities. Those who wish to obtain higher education need to leave the Republic, but

Aichanana lamented that in practice fewer numbers than what the leadership would want choose to do so. In her opinion, a lot of Sahrawi youth does not find motivation in pursuing education, choosing to engage in economic activity (especially male youth) from an early age and/or focusing on achieving to get married (both male and female).

When I asked Aichanana how she understood her work to be related to the struggle of

Sahrawi women in particular, she assured me Sahrawi women have always enjoyed full freedom to manage and run their khiyam. I asked: “what then has the revolution meant for the status of Sahrawi women?” and she answered with a familiar narrative echoed in anthropological writing (Juliano, 1999), insisting nothing had changed for women because

Sahrawi women have always been free to hold positions of responsibility within their society.

According to her explanation, the only differences were in the instruments women used at present. Young Sahrawi women speak foreign languages. They know how to use new technologies. They know how to use the language of human rights and how to move in international spaces. In this way, she emphasised the importance that the “form” that the

270 political had acquired through their revolutionary process, a form that is translatable and

recognizable to global audiences:

Aichanana: Youth has a new language to describe their struggle. They speak different

languages and they know how to use new media, so they can spread the word

of their struggle more…but we are aware that our society has always granted us

our rights as women. Women have always lived free from rape and physical

violence in our society.

Vivian: What is the Women’s Union doing to keep the principles of the revolution alive

in this period of no war and no peace?

Aichanana: There is nothing that women do not do.

[At this point, Salka, visibly frustrated, intervened in the conversation]

Salka: But… leave the conflict and the national cause aside for a moment. She [Vivian]

is asking you, what are the things that we must work on as Sahrawi women? For

women’s sake only, not for the sake of the cause.

Aichanana: Our main objective is to achieve independence and that includes financial

independence from men. We must continue to fight illiteracy. We should

increase our numbers in the government, but we also acknowledge our situation

is not like that of women in other societies. We are extremely active politically.

All the leaders of our districts are female. 33 % of the parliament is female. We

are not like other women.

Vivian: What do you think explains Sahrawi women being different to other women?

271 [At that moment, Aichanana’s telephone rang]

Salka: She says we are different because she says we are free, that we have our rights

guaranteed by our constitution, and that we are equal to men…. But I don’t think

so…

[Salka lets out a skeptical laugh. Aichanana hung up and continued]

Aichanana: We make up to 33% of the parliament and we are fighting to establish a gender

quota in the next General Congress…

[Salka interrupted]

Salka: Oohh [visibly unimpressed]. They are trying to get a quota…

[A discussion began between Salka and Aichanana concerning the exact number of

women in government at the time, how the quota would work, and whether or not it

was a meaningful measure. Salka argued the quota would not meaningfully

empower women. Aichanana agreed that it was not enough but thought it was an

important step]

Vivian: What about family law? What do you think about the changes to the constitution

that the Women’s Union will be presenting at the National Congress in relation

to family law?

Aichanana: Family law exists here. Our religion grants us family law, but the problem is that

women don’t claim it. For example, our religion tells us men should pay for the

education and for children’s upbringing, even upon divorce, but here women

never ask for anything when men leave them because they know their mothers,

272 their family and their neighbours will always look after them and their children,

no matter what. When a father leaves, everyone does everything they can to

support divorced mothers. Islam gives divorced women the right to ask for

support from their ex-husbands, but we are not used to demanding this right here;

it is as if women feel shy/proud (hashmanat) to do so. The Union always tries to

persuade women to request support from their ex-husbands but they refuse, so

we prefer to fix the problem differently: we help women become financially

independent from men, through our microcredit programs, for example.

I asked Aichanana about weddings, specifically about the POLISARIO’s revolutionary ban over sadq/mahr and its apparent return to social life. Aichanana answered that, whereas prior to the revolution, mahr was provided by grooms in the form of camels, goats, jewels and, sometimes─if rarely─money, now, she said, women don’t ask for anything upon marriage.

Today, the groom was expected to provide brides with a khayma and with its furniture, but money or goods were never transacted. In this way, Aichanana mobilized the semantic and legal ambiguity of the term al-mjiba (the brought-in-things) to describe present marriage- scapes in a way that did not contradict the POLISARIO’s revolutionary campaign against sadq.

At this point, Salka intervened in the conversation again with what I interpret to be a veiled criticism of the POLISARIO’s campaign against sadaq/mahr. Reminding Aichanana and me that al-mahr is a religious obligation, she said:

Salka: Islamic law says women may choose whether they want to marry with a metal

ring, with a glass of water or with millions. The law of Islam left this door open

for women

273 Aichanana: But wait… our society does not oblige men to bring anything to a wedding. If

there is money and he can give money to the bride, great, if there isn’t any

money, women don’t ask for anything

Salka: Well, if so, that is only because of this situation we are in. Wait until we leave this

place. We will ask men to bring a cow and their daughter106.

Aichanana: But why should a man contribute with money if he builds a house for his wife

and his new family? Is that not enough?

Salka: Yes… [with a sarcastic tone] I don’t know any family here who asks for money

as part of al-myiba (“the brought-in-things”) only for furniture and for the

khayma and all that. We must be the only women in the world who only ask for a

roof to live under.

Aichanana: Exactly, asking for money upon marriage is something that doesn’t exist here.

Vivian [to Salka]: Do you think Sahrawi women should ask for money upon marriage?

Salka: Yes!

Vivian: Why?

Salka: Because men don’t stay, I know that. Husbands end up leaving their wives.

Wives should receive money and save it for when they do! Women need to

rely on something when men are no longer around to support their children.

106 This was meant figuratively. I asked Salka what she had meant by this expression when she helped me transcribe it. She said it meant “men would be asked for their most valuable possession upon, even for their daughters.

274 Aichanana: Well, for me, that is not necessary. When there is nothing, there is nothing.

Besides, good company is the most important thing.

Salka: [Passionately] What company? Men are always leaving! There is no company

here.

Vivian: [Jokingly] Aichanana is a romantic!

Salka: Ha!! A romantic in the Sahara! Not a good idea! There is no romance in the

desert [We all laugh at her comment].

Aichanana: This is not about romance. Commitment is the most important thing.

Salka: What commitment is there here?

Aichanana: Sahrawi women demand commitment from their couples. In a fair marriage the

woman has her rights and the man has his rights, neither should override each

other.

Salka: Well, see? They [a reference through me for “foreigners” or “Westerners”] call

what you are saying romantic…”

Aichanana: Of course! We have our emotions too!

Salka: No, no, for them everything is not about emotions either! They also think about

the “I give you, you give me”!

Aichanana: Well, there is no “I give you, you give me” mentality here.

275 Salka: Of course there is! You can be taken to a shaykh (a tribal elder in charge of,

amongst other duties, administering justice) here if you do not give someone

what you owe them! Just like in Europe. When a Sahrawi man marries a

European woman, he has to pay a lot of money to divorce her!

Aichanana’s daughter: [incredulous] Men have to pay money over there to get a divorce?

Vivian: In Spain, ex-husbands are usually meant to continue providing for their families by

law, but this does not mean they always do so.

Salka: Yesss!!! That shows you that everything is not romantic over there either! It is very

far from being romantic. With us, we are now very social, our families are very

united and they help women when they get divorced and all that, but in the future

we will become like them!

Aichanana: Please, Salka… stop saying those things! She [me] is recording! When men get

divorced here, they leave their ex-wives with everything they brought into the

house! They don’t even pack away their own clothes!

[Aware of Aichanana’s discomfort, I turned off the recorder, ending the official interview]

The tensions between Salka and Aichanana vividly illustrate differences in the political habitus of their generations. If the two interlocutors were contemporaries in the sense that they were co-present in time, they did not share the same experience of it and, in that sense, their contemporariness was not coeval: “They did not come to that co-presence from the same past or from the same relation to pasts… they were not haunted by the same displacements of

‘futures past’” (Scott, 2014: 160).

276 During the interview, Aichanana presented me with Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism’s dominant model of female empowerment: one that insists on the importance of educating and disciplining women into subjects that may lead to occupying positions of leadership within the public spaces of an independent nation-state, becoming financially and politically independent from men. Relying on a collective and nostalgic memory that insists Sahrawi women “have always been free” (Juliano, 1999) and have always enjoyed a high status in the domain of their khiyām, she is less concerned with women’s position within their family relations and households; one might presume that she takes them for granted. From Salka’s perspective, this logic is almost exactly inversed: Salka has grown up in a Republic that offered and indeed expected her to participate actively in its “public spheres”. However, she also grew up in a period where she could see how the security and autonomy that Sahrawi women have traditionally enjoyed in the domain of the khayma, the one that Aichanana took for granted, was becoming eroded by the emergence of the Republic’s new “private spheres”.

Moreover, in line with the revolutionary commitment of transforming a model of arranged marriage into a model of companionate marriage more commensurate with the global model of the nation-state, Aichanana supports the leadership’s policy to make marriage less costly for grooms. She would rather speak of companionship than of romance, presenting marriage as a contract sublimated to the fraternity expected from Sahrawi society as a whole: prioritizing the unity of the Sahrawi people over any potentially fracturing interests, such as the differing interests of women and men.

Her defensive reaction to Salkas’s “there is no romance in the desert” seems to indicate she had associated Salka’s comment with a familiar narrative in which romantic love is understood as a marker of modernity, a “travelling theory” (Said: 1983) that does not contemplate the

277 possibility of love within political models beyond those of the nation-state in which companionate marriages are considered the norm (De Munck, 1998 in Hirsch & Wardlow,

2006: 5-14). In this light, Aichanana’s “but we have our emotions too”, speaks against the possibility of a colonial and orientalist interpretation that associates love with a modern

“fiction” (Lowie 1948:8 in Lindholm 2006: 6), or as an escape and an adaptation to the pressures of life under state societies (Cohen 1969: 666 in Linholm: 11), altogether absent from marriage in patrilineal societies─such as the Sahrawi─or relegated to spheres outside matrimony, confined to secret, idealised and platonic extra-matrimonial affairs, given that

“love” is not calculated into arranged marriages (Lindholm, 2006: 11). Aichanana’s defensive reaction: “but we have our emotions too!” might have been her way of speaking out against any of these interpretations that dangerously dehumanize Sahrawi marriage relations by subtracting the possibility of romance from them.

In my interpretation, however, Salka’s “there is no romance in the desert” was not mobilizing any of these kinds of colonialist discourses. On the contrary, she was trying to persuade Aichanana that marriage everywhere─even in nation-states where a companionate model of marriage is the norm─entailed contractual economic obligations. To Salka, the futures of “progress” that perhaps Aichanana associated with the model of companionate marriage, were naive, a mirage produced out of futures-past. For Salka, a woman who has come of age at a time when the new private spheres of the Republic are becoming increasingly acute, the contract of marriage is fraught with the underlying inequalities between men and women. In her view, such inequality turns “romance” into “a bad idea”. The conditions of the present, requiring men to leave the Republic─taking more individual risks and traversing longer distances than men did in pre-revolutionary times when they travelled, in groups, to

278 exchange products in markets or to engage in battle and/or raids─in search for income, propitiate the incidence of men’s abandonment of marriage in a way that makes Salka cynical of the companionate model of marriage Aichahana defends. Under the conditions of the present, Salka appears to argue, women can barely afford the risks that romantic love entails.

To Salka, the historical time of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism conjures less promising futures than those imagined by her older contemporary. What Salka envisions are futures not unlike those of other nation-states, where it is hardly the norm for women and their children to rely upon the protection of their extended families, neighbours and communities upon divorce, making it necessary to establish clear economic insurances for women upon marriage.

The contradiction between the values of unity Aichanana’s political performance defends and the actual outcomes of Sahrawi nationalism’s dominant model of female empowerment irritate Salka. She is irritated by Aichanana’s apparent disregard of the quiet encroachment of these dangerous private spheres in the lives of Sahrawi women. More so, it alarms her. It calls upon her to reveal these contradictions to Aichanana and to me. Indeed, the conversation between Salka and Aichanana evokes something of Salka’s exhaustion with the exercise of a politics of recognition that underlines Aichanana’s performance. “They”—standing here for the

“international community” that “I” came to stand for during the discussion—, Salka tried to persuade Aichanana: “they call that romantic”. Salka, who has come of age during a period where the promises of an international community have revealed themselves to be patently false, rejects Aichanana’s defense of a model companionate marriage that is implicated in a politics of recognition that she knows to be futile.

I want to suggest that there is a connection between Salka’s: “there is no romance in the desert” and Nura’s: “there is no life here”. It is Salka’s understanding of marriage as fragile,

279 weakened by the ephemerality of human promises, what makes her weary of the risks involved in love, and the idea of marrying “for love” without ensuring material security. For Nura, the ideo-spatial logics that organise the Republic during this colonial meantime appear to make her life-course choices impossible. Parting from Bell Hook’s (2000) understanding of love as co- constitutive of justice and truth, both Salka’s and Nura’s comments form part of a structure of feeling amongst women in which the experience of an international community’s abandonment of its promises compounds with men’s abandonment of their love in marriage commitments.

They compound, not only because the structural political economic limitations of a colonial meantime are part of what lead to men’s abandonment (now obliged to transverse longer and more solitary distances for the purposes of securing livelihoods than ever before), but because there is also a connection at the level of the experience of truth being shattered.

The next ethnographic vignette moves to another situation in which the subject of love (or lack thereof) appeared unexpectedly in an encounter between representatives of an

“international community” and Sahrawi youth, male youth this time.

6.2 Love as Generational Idiom

On a May Sunday morning I received a succinct text message from Salama saying: “Do you want to visit the Hospital of War Victims?” It came as a surprise but I said yes in a heartbeat despite the relative lack of information. When I arrived at the meeting point Salama had given me, the situation was exactly what I had imagined it to be. My friends Salama and

Larosi, two young male leaders of their local Youth Union in their early twenties, had been assigned to show a group of three Spanish journalists around the Republic for the day. The visitors stayed in the expatriate compound located in Rabuni and they had been provided with a government car and a driver during their stay. Salama and Larosi had decided to take them

280 to the Hospital of War Victims; one of the must-see stops for foreign visitors to the Republic.

Despite this being month eleven into my doctoral fieldwork and my third visit to the Republic,

I had not had the chance to visit the hospital yet. The site is removed from the residential provinces I lived in, and unlike the majority of foreigners who go to the Republic on short visits I didn’t have access to regular transport107. For this reason, I was always enthusiastic about invites to tag along on other foreigner’s visits. That was always the easiest way for me to access the Republic’s “solidarity tourist” spots108: the National War Museum, the Hospital of

War Victims, the Centre for Neglected Youth, etc. It is important to note that, unless they work in one of the institutions, most of them found in Rabuni, most refugees have never been to these sites themselves.

The hospital of war victims is run by a doctor trained in Cuba who sat us in the receiving room and gave us a long welcome, which included a presentation of the human rights violations endured by the Sahrawi people in the occupied territories, the aberration of Spain’s and France’s role in the conflict, the affirmation of the Sahrawi people’s unalienable right to self-determination; a political recitation that one of the journalists became visibly frustrated by, rudely interrupting the Director of the hospital at several points, asking for more concrete information about the conditions of the hospital, the exact number of patients, the history of the place, and concrete information of that kind. After this, somewhat tense, welcoming we were toured around the hospital rooms, greeting patients who graciously allowed journalists to interview them and take pictures of their missing limbs. A room in the hospital was reserved

107 I had to ask for special government permits each time I moved in private cars and, often times, depending on the security alarm at the time, I was only allowed to move in government cars. All of this took time, requiring me to mobilize contacts in the government for such permits. So I reserved organizing car-trips to when these were strictly necessary.

108Note the Republic is sometimes portrayed as a sites to engage in “solidarity tourism” http://www.tourism- watch.de/en/content/tourism-western-saharan-refugee-camps»

281 for the daughters of patients. Conversing with one of them I found out that, because transport to and from her khayma was hard to come by, she stayed at the hospital for weeks, sometimes for month long intervals, providing her disabled father with company, because “it would not be nice to leave him alone”: a potent reminder of the kinds of emotional labour sustaining households, institutions, and all of the spaces in the Sahrawi Republic that are “in-between” these.

The sun was strong when we made it back to the residential province of Buyudur, where Salama, Larosi and I lived. We were all tired and tense from the visit and the group of us

(the three Spanish journalists, Salama, Larosi, the assigned POLISARIO driver and I) decided to sit on the shade of the only restaurant on the main street until the sun started to come down.

Larosi and Salama persuaded the owners, who were already getting ready to nap, to prepare something for us to eat. I walked with one of the journalists to a nearby shop to find cold drinks for everyone.

As we sat sipping our drinks, waiting for the food to arrive, Salama asked the group what our impressions of the hospital had been, leading to an array of expected comments: how upsetting the mutilations were, how admirable it was of the POLISARIO to provide assistance for them, how it was clear that more humanitarian support was necessary to improve the conditions of the hospital, etc. This evolved into a conversation about the roots of the conflict, asking Larosi, Salama and the driver how they thought it could all be solved, who was responsible, etc. I sat listening and feeling a quiet distaste for this conversation. The sense of proximity I felt with my compatriots’ concern for the plight of the Sahrawi people produced a certain embarrassment in me. The conversation was so predictable and repetitive: How many times, I wondered, had Larosi, Salama and the government driver

282 had this exact conversaton with well-meaning visitors? How many times had they engaged in this sort of exchange, only to repeat it one year after the next, without ever seeing any outcome

(other than sporadic success stories of receiving new sources of aid) in relation to their political struggle?

My discomfort was further exacerbated by my observations of Larosi who, if usually

very sociable and lively, had remained a little disconnected from this conversation, making me

wonder if he was finding it as pointless as me, until he interrupted the conversation’s flow with

an unusual question: “Let me ask you all about something. What is love?” We all stared at him

a little dazzled. Except for Salama who quickly caught on to Larosi’s queue, making me

suspect this was not the first time they had thrown this question on to people like this: “Yes,

please, tell us. What is love?” And Salama added: “We are trying to learn about those things

here”.

I was thrilled by this unexpected assault on the conversation. When the group slowly

caught on to the fact that Larosi and Salama were “playing innocent” a few of us decided to

play along, sharing overly-dramatic clichéd definitions of love as an arrest of the heart, or a

state of intoxication which gave meaning to everything in life. “Aha, aha” Salama and Larosi

nodded, clearly enjoying this too, and proceeded to ask us to provide a definition one by one,

but a “real definition of love”, clarified Salama, something that bewildered me: Was this

conversation for “real”? The discussion went on, gradually becoming a more serious

conversation regarding the difference between passion, romance, companionate love, love

towards siblings, love towards parents, etc. When we finished lunch, everyone was driven to

our respective households to nap.

283 I didn’t know Salama and Larosi well enough at the time to be entirely sure how to

interpret their choice of conversation. It had clearly started as a joke or as a pass time, but it

had also developed into something else. My initial impression was that others had mistakenly

taken the playful tone of the question to be earnest. However, Larosi and Salama appeared to

have engaged with the serious turn of tone to the conversation just as naturally, so I became

unsure if it was a topic of real interest for them. Thus, when I visited Larosi and Salama at the

Youth Union the next day, I asked them, over a session of tea:

Vivian: Guys, yesterday, when you asked the group what love is, were you being serious?

Salama: Yes, please tell us more about love, how does it feel? [With an overly stern face that

could not be trusted].

Vivian: Ah come on! Ok, I see you were not serious.

Salama: We are serious! [This time really confusing me because he suddenly appeared

genuinely earnest again] You know very well we have much more pressing matters

to think about here than about women and all that.

Larosi: Chsst. There is love here all right. The problem with this one is that a woman has

never loved him, look at him! [We laughed and changed topics].

This exchange finished convincing me that Larosi’s question, “What is love?”, had

indeed been a provocation: a way of transgressing the boredom of a near-rehearsed

conversation between Sahrawi refugees and foreign visitors, a refusal to participate in vacuous

performances of political resistance. Larosi and Salama commented on it through parody. It

was hard to tell if the conversation was serious or not; it was in a sense, neither.

284 Larosi’s question produced a new script. A different set of lyrics for the—recall Salka’s comment in chapter three: “they always sing the same song”— that both his elders and foreigners expected from him: a dominant script whereby personal matters such as romance are suspended until the national priority of liberation is achieved, a script that trivializes the affairs of the heart, denying a sense of normalcy, indefinitely.

6.3 Transforming Affective and Aesthetic Regimes

In the dominant pre-revolutionary moral order of Saharan nomads the expression of romantic sentiments was a delicate matter that required paying close attention to the gender and generational composition of one’s audience. Similarly to Abu-Lughod’s (1986; 1990 b.) observations regarding the role of poetry in the personal and sentimental life of the Egyptian

Arab Bedouin Awlad Ali, amongst Saharan nomads, the practice of singing romantic poetry was regulated through codes of modesty and honour that were implicated in the maintenance of established social hierarchies and modes of political authority. Women had (and continue to have, even if it seems like it has become less popular amongst youth) their own poetic structure and style of verses known as tebrʿa. In one of my interviews with Sahrawi female musicians of the early revolutionary period, she explained tebraʿ was almost exclusively reserved for the subject of love. Singing tebrʿa in front of non-related and elders is considered a breach of hishma, and tebrʿa is sung almost exclusively in all-female gatherings. Tebrʿa is thus a poetic practice enjoyed by women in intimate spaces and its verses are usually authorless. Although men were expected to court women, and not the other way around, women used the anonymity of tebrʿa to compose and send hidden messages to the men they desired, messages that sometimes invited them to court them. Male poets could pay less attention to guarding the anonymity of their romantic poems, and they could sing them in mix-gendered contexts

285 without necessarily (depending on the age and status of their audience) infringing on modesty codes. However, virtuous men also had to abide by modesty in their flirtations with women. In an interview with an author of a significant amount of the revolution’s poetry, he described to me with some nostalgia the discreet tricks that men would employ prior to the revolution to court the women they wished to marry. Before officially asking for a woman’s hand, a woman’s contender would pay numerous visits to her family, seeking contact with her secretly.

When he finally found himself near her, he might have offered her a messuak, a small branch from a locust tree, soft on the inside and used as a toothbrush. Alternatively, he might have told the desired woman a story. Upon the man’s second visit to her friq (nomadic encampment), he would seek contact with the woman again, asking if she still kept his messuak or whether she was able to recall the story he had shared with her. If the woman had kept his messuak and/or remembered his story, he would interpret them as positive statements, reading them as evidence that the woman in question was interested in him too. Upon the contrary, men would interpret this as a lack of interest on her part, and they would seek another candidate for marriage.

When war, exile and revolution broke out, those who look back to the period between

1975 and 1991, remember a time when all affairs of the heart, every sentiment that was personal, had to subsumed and channelled into collective passions and imperatives. Poets who joined the POLISARIO Front stopped dedicating verses to romantic love, replacing the individuals that had been the subjects of their songs with rivers, valleys and hills found in the deserts pasturelands of the Western Sahara, the army of liberation, the revolution, or to the nation itself (Gimeno, et al, forthcoming). Whereas the metric system and female style of tebrʿaa sometimes appears in the musical genre of Saharawi revolutionary nationalism known as

286 alnidal (Ruano Posada & Solana Moreno, 2015), when it does, its lyrics are changed, and where there had been references to male subjects, the nation, the army, or the Republic replaces these too. Crucially, there was coherence between this aesthetic performance of devotion to the revolution and to the nation and the aesthetic and affective regimes of a pre-revolutionary moral order whereby performing loyalty to one’s patriliny took pre-eminence over one’s loyalty towards a romantic partner and/or spouse. In both a revolutionary and pre-revolutionary moral order personal passions were considered of a lesser moral order than collective ones and is this respectable script that Salama repeated to me in earnest above: “You know very well we have much more pressing matters to think about here than about women and all that”. Salama’s observation spells the paradigm of priorities of the POLISARIO Front’s affective regime and it is this dominant affective and aesthetic order that Larosi interrupted making room for the subject of love in a conversation ragarding the Saharawi cause’s predicament.

While I was doing my fieldwork, an aura of secrecy continued to envelop talk of love amongst youth. When young men and women shared their love stories with me, rarely, if ever, were these love stories happy. These were usually frustrated love stories, stories of deception, or of anxiety for an on-going love story with all the insecurity and risks that love entails. On one occasion, a young woman recounted me a deceptive love story in the third person; it was a story about “her friend”. Weeks after, as we were walking through the neighbourhood, she pointed a car to me, a white Mercedes Benz, a very popular car amongst young Sahrawi men that is often used as a part-time taxi: “Remember the story I told you? That is him”, she said, as we walked past the car steadily, her face covered by her scarf, her eyes looking to the horizon hiding her acknowledgement of the car. The nervousness I sensed in her made me suspect the story had been about her all along. When I asked her she said nothing. She would not be the

287 last to share with me a deceptive love story in the third person. I came to recognise this as a precautionary device used to share their stories, mitigating the risk of their circulation. A device reminiscent of the discreet ways of tebra’, a medium used to express thoughts and send occult messages, precisely because the authorship was ambiguous.

However, during the time of my fieldwork, as it is also the case in many other contexts, the subject of youth and romantic love appeared to be the cause for alarm among older generations. If during the years of war the POLISARIO Front produced most of the mass media that citizen-refugees had access to─ radio, poetry, music─ in the post-cease fire

Republic, most citizen-refugees had at least some access to the internet (even if through material downloaded on mobile phones) and regular access to television sets that routinely play

Mexican, Egyptian and Turkish soap operas as well as poetry recitals from Northern

Mauritania that have turn enjoying and discussing the subject of romantic love openly normal again—if still depending on the gender and the age of one’s interlocutors. Poetry recitals are sometimes organised for wedding celebrations. These usually include men’s singing of love

(and other) poems. Female poets also sing publically but only when it comes to political poetry and, usually in government conferences and rallies (not in settings such as weddings), but all- female gatherings can easily turn into poetic/musical exchanges of spicy and romantic songs, verses and stories109.

Compared to the freedom of movement that women remember enjoying in their nomadic lifestyels, the sedentarisation and increasing sense of urbanity of the Saharawi

Republic (see chapter two and Abu-Lughod for similar observations 1990 a. b. in a relatable

109 Some male youth (I have never come across dissident female poetry) use poetry to express overt political disagreement either in government venues and events and/or through mp3 recordings that circulate from mobile phone to mobile phone.

288 context) allows for a greater surveillance of unmarried women’s movements outside of their khiyam. Unmarried women who spend too much time outside of their khiyam are frowned open and named “saibat”. Moreover, a widespread use of the mobile phone is transforming love’s visibility. Mobile phones are rarely individual property, especially amongst women. Sisters typically shared mobile phones, sometimes with mothers too, and young women often borrow them from their brothers. Because my phone very frequently had credit, it circulated widely, meaning I had to become used to erasing text messages I did not find comfortable for a wide audience to read. If the relative discretion that mobile phone provides is one of the factors involved in rendering the courtship tactics I described earlier obsolete amongst Sahrawi youth, they are also contributing to produce anxieties especially amongst female elders who sometimes find unwanted text messages on their phones from their daughters’ boyfriends.

Women talking on the phone, writing or replying to numerous text messages renders them suspect of flirtations with men outside of an older generation’s control.

I suggest that these collective anxieties are not disconnected from anxieties regarding the way in which a Saharawi revolutionary nationalism is reproducing itself, or failing to reproduce itself─regenerating itself instead─under the conditions of a colonial meantime.

Rather, they formed part of what Stuart Hall, John Clarke and Brian Roberts (1976: 56-57) describe as a “moral panic ” that responds to the way in which the shifting boundaries of society, and of the emergence of a private/public dichotomy in particular is necessarily transforming affective regimes and citizen-refugee’s labour of love. Such a context made those─usually members of an older generation─perceive their social world (and the futures affectively attached to it) as threatened, often scapegoating youth─female youth in

289 particular─identifying a younger generation as the source of the inmoralities they see in the present.

During the conference on marriage practices and rituals discussed in the previous chapter, a famous female singer who is around fifty years old stood up from the audience and commented:

We are in an open war with Morocco. We may have left our rifles to one side, but

we still carry the rifles of our culture. We are a small people, aspiring to become a

great people and that is what we should be praying for every day. Before, if you had

a love story, it was kept very secret. The larger community would never find out.

110 There was one once who told his girlfriend: (she started singing)

Down, down, with insinuation

And you, the one who makes me forget everything, love me

And on top, over people’s eyesight no one should know we are doing something wrong

And on top over people’s eyesight you don’t talk to me and I don’t talk to you.

Taht taht ʿla Tahsas

Wa enti teljini tebgrini

U el faug ‘la ‘in nayass

U el faug ‘la ‘in nayass ma nesmik u la tesmini

Following the cheers from the audience and defending a proud and modest presentation of an autonomous “self” considered attractive and desirable in a woman in pre-revolutionary and early revolutionary moral order, she added: “The young women we see today following

110 The translation into Spanish is by Sahrawi poet Bahia Awah. The translation from Spanish to English is mine.

290 men around will never find love. Only those who focus on their own lives and responsibilities, indifferent to male attention, those are the ones men want. We have experience with that. And that is what I had to say.” Then the singer sat down again to the cheers and ululations from the crowd, asking her to go back up and sing some more.

The singer’s intervention is perhaps best understood in this context as a veiled message of disapproval from an older generation of women to a younger one, expressed through a concern over the sexual mores and concerns over young women’s new investments in their personal lives (also visible in new investments in personal beauty in the consumption of industrial make-up and jewerly for example). Significantly, she framed her message to youth as one of relevance to the political movement and how best to “carry the rifles of culture”. In this way, her comments reveal how collective anxieties regarding the struggle, namely of having lost the capacity to resist through violent means, are transposed over to youth, and female youth in particular, producing a “moral panic” (Clarke, Hall, Jefferson, Roberts, 1975) that makes their sexual and sentimental behaviour culpable for the collective frustrations of a colonial meantime.

Recall from the previous chapter, the gentle rumble that erupted among a group of elderly women sitting nearby me when the young female researcher started presenting the results of a study regarding marriage practices and related issues in front of her father. The singer’s intervention spoke to a shared sense of discomfort to see their understanding of modesty transgressed in these new ways. The singer’s advice is thus inserted in a pre- revolutionary and early revolutionary moral order that associates female-pride and worth to discretion over sexuality and romantic desires. In this way, her intervention supports Sahrawi nationalism’s dominant model of female empowerment, whereby women are expected to

291 reformulate modesty codes, condoning women who address large audiences on topics of collective concern, but never over more personal subjects. Like others sitting in the audience, discomforted by the way in which these young women were bringing the subject of marriage

(in its implicit allusion to sex) to public deliberation, in the singer’s advice there was a sub-text that mobilised the “prioritization paradigm” (Amireh, 2012) we saw in chapter three, defending

“large issues” ─“We are in an open war with Morocco”─ over the “small issues” pertaining to women’s personal lives. Issues that, uncovered, have the potential of disturbing the respectability Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism has ascribed women to embody. The famous singer was not imploring young women to renounce romantic love, she was imploring them to keep such affairs secret, protecting their reputation, their desirability, and by extension the reputation of Sahrawi society as whole, especially under the conditions of a colonial meantime where the “nation’s reputation”─engaged in a politics of recognition─ appears to be the only instrument left for Sahrawi citizen-refugees to fight with.

By contrast, when Lala, Salka and Larosi talk about love, they are, in a sense questioning the effectivity of their elders’ politics of recognition. In talking about romance openly, they are transgressing dominant modesty codesty, tapping into the subversive quality of love talk (Abu-

Lughod, 1990: 35) and piercing into the “historical time” of their struggle with ordinary (or

“small”) issues that nonetheless tend to feel so singular especially to those experiencing them for the first time: the romantic and sexual pulsations of everyday life. In this way, love provides youth with an idiom with which to disturb the moral orders attached to Sahrawi nationalism’s historical temporality, confronting it with their experience of the “attritional temporality” of their struggle (Lazar, 2014) and, by extension, confronting the political paralysis imposed by a colonial meantime.

292 6.4 On Love as Destiny

Two days before my departure from the Republic in August of 2013, I brought presents for a group of six young women with whom I had spent regular time with at the Youth Union.

They insisted to return my gifts by spending elgayyle, midday, with them over a session of henna, beautifying me prior to my return to Spain. A group of four of us gathered in Hanafa’s home. The only other person present in the house was Hanafa’s elder sister, so the rest of us were invited to make ourselves comfortable, wash, change clothes, taking off our long sleeve dresses to wear lighter cotton ones that Hanafa lent us in anticipation of the midday heat. This was an occasion to discuss each other’s bodies: teasing one and other for being either too thin or too fat, offering to comb each other’s hair and sharing tips on how to make it softer. We eventually sat in the corridor between the two rooms of the house, on the spot with the most

“breeze” whilst Suadu, Lala, and Mariam got the henna ready. They chatted as I lay with my four limbs extended on the floor, each of them holding one of my feet or hands, delicately drawing figures on my skin as they squeezed plastic bags with a little hole in them that let out the henna. Exhausted by the heat and from not being able to move my limbs, Mariam started to complain about me dozing off and to wake me up she asked [later that evening I wrote down the conversation in my field diary, reconstructing it from memory]:

Mariam: Vivian…! How do you like your men?

Vivian: Oh… I don’t have a “type” [and, fearing my non-answer would disappoint my

interlocutors I tried explaining myself] I have liked many different types.

The silence that followed confirmed my suspicion: I had bored them.

Suadu: No but… Do you like them rough or smooth?

293 Vivian: Hmmm what do you mean? [Giggling].

Suadu: Well you know our men here, right? They build houses, they drive out into the desert

for days, their skin is tough… but men over there, in Spain, they are like our men in

Rabuni─the administrative region of the Republic where the Ministries, the UNHCR

headquarters as well as the expatriate compound are found─ their skin is soft, they

are like women!

Before I could reply:

Mariam: [cheekily] But I know what Vivian is saying. She is saying she likes ALL men!!!

Vivian: Exactly! [Delighted that Mariam had managed to redeem my non-answer with her

good humor]

Mariam: But her [pointing at Suadu] You know. She is difficult. She has never had a

boyfriend.

I looked at Suadu

Suadu: That is right [with an earnest, matter-of-fact expression] I will go straight into

marriage, to whoever is destined for me.

Mariam: Right, right. You see, that is exactly what I think. If one is destined to marry, one is

destined to marry, so why worry so much about what people think of you? Why not

have a little fun flirting with other men in the meantime? And this one [pointing at

Hanafa who was making tea] you know what this one does? She does not let her

fiancé anywhere near her! He is only allowed to call her on the phone! And only at 1

a.m. every day!

294 Vivian: He calls you at 1 a.m. every day?”

Hanafa: Every day [proudly].

At this point Nana intervened, looking at Hanafa with a mysterious tone:

Nana: Yes but her problem is that she never forgot her true love.

Vivian: Your true love? [shyly, quietly acknowledging Hanafa’s expression had turned

slightly sombre]

She did not look back at me, concentrating on making foam to decorate her teacups.

Mariam: Hanafa had a boyfriend for many years before she got engaged to a new one.

Hanafa: Six years…[heavily, still looking down towards the tea table]

Vivian: Six years? And what happened? Why did you break it up?

Mariam, Suadu and Nana, seemingly having lost interest in this conversation,

started chatting about something else.

Hanafa: Some men you just were not meant to marry. It doesn’t matter how much you love

them. Such is life.

Vivian: You mean because your families did not agree to marry you?

Hanfa: No,just because that is the way it was meant. It is just destiny (elmaktoub). Such is

life.

295 Hanafa’s story of a frustrated love story with someone she was not destined to marry is illustrative of a romantic trope of love’s absence and deceptive love stories that I heard repeatedly in the Republic, particularly amongst female youth, but not exclusively. However,

Hanafa’s “such is life” expresses almost the exact opposite to Nura’s “there is no life here”.

Hanafa’s lament is infused with a sense of patience, faith, acceptance and resilience. Pointing to a religious notion of time, a sacred temporality that often co-exists with modern temporalities (Bear, 2014 : 5), it is a lament situated in an experience of time that co-exists yet almost entirely elides the historical temporality of a Saharawi revolutionary nationalism.

Indeed her reference to destiny (al-maktub, literally “the written”) reminded me of a different story. Visiting the khayma of a friend I had met through the Women’s Union, I met one of her female cousins for the first time. Conversing over tea she asked me if I enjoyed my time in the Republic. When I answered that I had always felt extremely welcomed and comfortable, she insisted: “No but, I mean: you speak our language. You know how to make tea. You wear the milfha like us. Would you like to live here?”. I gave her the following answer: “No, my family and many loved ones live elsewhere and they would never move here”, but she insisted: “OK, but if you found a husband here, you became Muslim and you had your children here, you would have a family here. Would you like that?” To which I said I would find it hard to adapt. “Adapt to what?” She insisted. I answered: “Adapt to this situation where you can’t plan or choose to do things for your future”. Hearing this, she replied: “Yes... I know. You see, here we are used to that. We believe in al-maktub (destiny). We don’t think we can change the future”.

Her powerful explanation speaks to a religious temporarily that operates in the present yet remains largely outside the fields of a politics of recognition in which the historical time of

296 the Saharawi revolution usually acquires representation. Similarly, Hanafa’s lament over her love for a man that was not meant for her expresses an acceptance of the present and of the futures that it holds that escaped her control. Her destiny is not in the hands of any human for that matter, and in that way, it speaks to an experience of time that, as if disobeying the interpellations of a colonial meantime, performs patience, faith and hope instead of frustration or disappointment.

6.5 Conclusion

This chapter has shown that the transforming affective regime of the Sahrawi Republic cannot be understood without attending to how the emergence of a private/public dichotomy is transforming the emotional labour of citizen-refugees. In a context where citizen-refugees need to prioritise, choosing how to balance the investments that their labour of love makes, love talk is a site where gendered and inter-generational tensions regarding the regeneration of the revolution are being expressed. An older generation sometimes displaces anxieties derived out of the stasis of a colonial meantime onto the sexual and sentimental behaviour of youth, of female youth in particular, and a younger generation sometimes uses love talk as an idiom through which to disturb the politics of respectability of a Saharawi revolutionary nationalism in which their struggle has acquired dominant representation.

For Salka, Nura, Larosi and Salama love talk provides them with an idiom with which to disturb the “historical time” of their struggle through their experience of an “attritional time”

(Lazar, 2014) that has made them skeptical of the trust that their elder’s placed in a politics of recognition vis-à-vis the global regimes of truth. Regimes that Sahrawi youth have only known to be largely indifferent to their cause. That is, behind these inter-generational tensions are fundamental differences in the degree of trust that each generation places in the rhetorical

297 promises of an international community and its international law. In this context, love talk, an idiom that, embedded in a moral economy of long duree amongst the Sahrawi, is infused with subversive potential (Abu-Lughod 1986; 1990) and emerges as one of the registers in which a younger generation’s exhaustion with a stagnant peace process is being expressed. Indeed, I contend that the way in which youth uses love talk to trouble their elders’ politics of respectability is indicative of the inchoate ways in which the Saharawi movement for national liberation is regenerating itself through time.

Finally, Hanafa’s experience of time departs from a position that altogether speaks past the historical time of Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism. She does not imagine justice to be in the control of human agents and, in that sense; it guarantees the possibility of love’s existence in a world fraught by the frailty of human promises. Her acceptance of her frustrated love story is informed by a religious temporality that co-exists with the “the historical time” of a Sahrawi revolutionary struggle. It is revealing of residual logics that youth continues to draw upon to regenerate their political struggle, even if these have hardly acquired publicity in the dominant discourses of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism so far.

298 7 Conclusion

I met Khira Bulahi in 2009. At the time, she was the Director of the Republic’s

Secretariat of Training and Employment, based in Rabuni. In 2011, following the POLISARIO

Front’s 13th General Congress, her office became the Ministry of Professional Training and

Public Function. In 2015, after the POLISARIO Front’s 14th Congress, Khira was promoted from her position as Minister and appointed as the Official Representative to one of the

POLISARIO Front’s most important diplomatic offices, its representation in Madrid, Spain.

Back in 2009 she told me:

Each generation lives through what is reserved to them. Our generation

has not changed its discourse much since 1975; there is coherence between what

we say we do and what we do. However, our youth has grown up under the

shadow of a disappointment. They have been witness to the inconsistency

between what the international community says they do and what they do.

This dissertation has expanded on what it means for a generation to come of age under the shadow of a disappointment of such historical magnitude. The POLISARIO Front’s revolutionary poeisis inserted the Sahrawi struggle for decolonisation into the dialectic of a global politics of recognition that, since 1975, significantly began to transform the social relations, forms of authority and the socio political organisation of Sahrawi citizen-refugees.

Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism’s most dominant representations perform a break from the past that overlooks the way in which the movement’s early organisation largely cohered with the moral economy of a Sahrawi pre-revolutionary life-world; an economy that values generosity, hospitality, religious faith, distribution, redistribution, the freedom to defend and to

299 attack other political groups, and systems of rights and responsibilities within contractual relationships. Nevertheless, surviving the conditions of a colonial meantime has produced a gap between the values the movement officially stands for (its performances) and its ability to practice these (its constitutive meanings) in the present. As such, the political coherence between the words and the actions that Khira’s generation can proudly affirm forms part of a global moral contract that has been broken. I have shown how, to those coming of age under the conditions of a colonial meantime, living up to the their elders’ performances entails risks that appear futile. Haunted by the futures-pasts of an international community’s false promises, a younger generation of Sahrawi citizen-refugees are challenged to reproduce the political habitus of their elders and they question the efficacy of the POLISARIO’s politics of recognition.

Focusing on women’s everyday practices and the transforming conditions of women’s labour over time has provided me with a window into the moral economies, ethical traditions and notions of the political that have endured, co-existing with the dominant representations of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism. I have shown how some of the status and the rights that

Saharan women enjoyed in their pre-revolutionary social and political systems are threatened by their political movement’s incorporation of modern nation-states ideo-spatial logics, especially from the period commencing in 1991 onwards, once the bulk of women’s labour became unwaged and a private versus public distinction of labour began to apply to the organisation of the Sahrawi Republic. Whereas female youth’s responses to the contradictions imposed by a colonial meantime over their struggle are neither informed by melancholic attachments “to a past order of things”, nor wedded to the futures-past of a progress that many of their elder’s forecast, in reckoning with the challenge of sustaining and regenerating their

300 collective struggle over time, I have shown how female youth continue to draw upon valorisations of women’s labour that are associated with a longstanding moral economy amongst the Saharawis, in ways that are regenerating, rather than reproducing, staling or rupturing, their struggle for decolonisation.

The inchoate regeneration of the Sahrawi revolution I have depicted in this dissertation may or may not acquire representation in the historical time of the Sahrawi struggle in the future. So much depends on global relations of power that are unpredictable, but I suggest the expressions of the political I have described will most likely endure, perhaps continuing to speak past the historical narration of the Sahrawi struggle, if co-existing with it all the same.

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