Halted narratives: The combative futurity of Sahrawi female militant’s public memory

ABSTRACT

Since 1976, the Sahrawi national liberation movement known as the Polisario Front anticipates state sovereignty in Western Sahara by organizing into the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in Southern Algeria. Drawing on excerpts from the life-histories of six Sahrawi women who contributed to build the SADR’s early social and physical infrastructures, this paper presents practices of public remembrance as coextensive to a history-making labour of social regeneration that seeks international recognition for the Sahrawi nation, as well as to pass on nationalist moral values and political desire across time. The life-worlds of the Sahrawi generation these six women belong to have undergone considerable structural changes brought about by Spanish colonialism, the emergence of the Polisario Front in the 1970s, war, forced displacement, and a 1991 UN mediated ceasefire. Highlighting the on-going vitality of anticolonial nationalisms, this paper offers an account of how elderly Sahrawi female militants seek to socially regenerate the project of a Sahrawi revolutionary nationalism through their production of history.

KEYWORDS:

• Anticolonial nationalism
• memory
• history
• female militancy
• social reproduction
• Western Sahara

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the many Sahrawi munāḍilāt who have shared their time and life-histories with me, to the Sahrawi families who have generously hosted me over the course of my research in the SADR and to Fanna Saleh, Lehdia Hamadi, Bakina Saluh for their work with me carrying out these interviews. I am also very grateful to Seçil Daǧtaș and to the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on the piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation [grant number: 8355].