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Abstract
Drawing on primary research conducted with Sahrawi children and youth in the Sahrawi refugee camps, Cuba, Spain and Syria between 2001 and 2009, this article explores the Sahrawi politics of ‘travelling memories’, assessing how, why and to what effect memories of both the Western Saharan home-land and of the Algerian-based home-camps ‘travel’ between older and younger generations and across geographies in contexts of ongoing mobility. I start by exploring the ways in which Sahrawi children and youth ‘inherit’ and negotiate memories of their home-land and home-camps when they are temporarily separated from their families for educational purposes. In particular, this raises the question of whether the transmission of memories in such contexts of separation takes place in spite of children's distance from their families and home-camps, or because of this. I then examine the ways in which youth's memories ‘travel’ with them to their refugee home-camps upon graduation, analysing how their memories relate to those memories prioritised both by the international community mandated to secure a political solution to the protracted conflict, and by the older Sahrawis who monopolise not only the political infrastructure in the refugee camps, but also the ‘official memory’ of home-land and home-camps alike. Overall, I argue that the transmission of memories of the home-land are complemented and at times superseded by the development of and longing for memories of youth's home-camps. As such, multiple processes of memory-making and memory-recuperating underpin diverse political commitments to a plurality of home-spaces, including both the home-land and the home-camp. Recognising the intersecting and at times conflicting nature of memories of home-land and home-camp leads us to question the implicit assumption that political mobilisation revolves around memories of the home-land alone, or that the home-land should itself be the focus of political action and change.
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments and thanks are due to the anonymous reviewers of this piece, and to Yousif Qasmiyeh for his support and critical feedback throughout the course of this research, part of which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK).
Notes
[1] In contrast, the inter-generational transmission and negotiation of collective memories has been explored in detail by scholars broadly associated with the interdisciplinary field of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, including with particular reference to the agency of Palestinian refugee children in developing and contesting their own “understanding[s] of and participation in reconstructing historical or collective memory” (Habashi Citation2012, p. 1; see Hart Citation2002, Farah Citation2005, Chatty Citation2010b).
[2] Also see Farah 2008 for a comparison of the role of camps in the protracted Palestinian and Sahrawi refugee contexts.
[3] As noted by Said, “collective memory is not an inert and passive thing, but a field of activity in which past events are selected, reconstructed, maintained, modified, and endowed with political meaning” (2000, p. 185); for an overview of the politics of collective memory in diasporic and refugee contexts see CitationLacroix and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (forthcoming).
[4] For a detailed history of the conflict over the Western Sahara, see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (Citation2009); Mundy and Zunes (Citation2010).
[5] A discussion of conditions within the Western Sahara is beyond the scope of this study – see Stephan and Mundy (Citation2006), Human Rights Watch (Citation2010) and Amnesty International (Citation2010).
[6] Of these tracking strategies, the first is increasingly significant in migration and diaspora studies, while the second has been well developed with reference to tracking the movement of money/remittances. The focus on plot/story/allegory, and in particular on myth-telling, is also regularly used by social memory studies and anthropologists interested in memory.
[7] Detailed methodological insights into diverse means of analysing the inter-generational transmission of memory and history in the Palestinian refugee context are offered by Sayigh (Citation1977) and Zureik (Citation2003).
[8] For instance, Hanson and Brembeck (1966), Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), Anderson (1983), Gellner (1983) and Smith (1983).
[9] The terminology of tribes is applied to the creation of hybrid groups of Sahrawi who have graduated from educational establishments around the world, including La Tribu de los Cubanos and La Tribu de Los Rusos. These student-tribes hold their own form of collective sub-memories, in part revolving around loss and separation from their families.
[10] An analysis of the role of non-Sahrawi ‘elders’ from outside of the refugee community is beyond the scope of this paper, but is worthy of further examination.
[11] A large proportion of these Cuban-educated Sahrawi returnees currently occupy positions of authority in the camps, with one member of the Polisario Front's National Secretariat estimating that around 2,000 Sahrawi trained in Cuba occupy the most important political, social, administrative and professional roles in the refugee camps (Sayed quoted in ACN Citation2006). Many high-ranking Polisario/SADR officials are Syrian graduates (i.e. the SADR Ambassador to South Africa 2008).
[12] As argued by Said, however, while “National identity always involves narratives of the nation's past, its founding fathers and documents, seminal events, and so on […] these narratives are [nonetheless] never undisputed or merely a matter of the neutral recital of facts” (2000, p. 177). Precisely how one can distinguish between youth's ‘recitation’ of key elements underpinning the official representation of Sahrawi history and national identity from their individual and personally held commitment and belief in, or rejection of these underlying facets and principles, is a tension which remains to be explored in future research.