oa “We Cannot Forget It, It is Our Land”: Nostalgic Attachment of the Sahrawis to Their Homeland, an Equally Real and Imaginary Territory

The hope to return to their homeland is a constant and collective belief among the Sahrawi since they fled the Western Sahara almost fifty years ago. Traditionally nomadic, they lived alongside Spaniards for almost a century until early 1976, when Spain abandoned the territory and divided it between Morocco and Mauritania. Most of the population fled into the desert in which they suffered bombardment, hunger and disease. This exodus caused their group to decimate and exhausted the survivors that arrived in the Algerian ḥamāda, a safe place near the city of Tindūf. A vast area of desert characterized by heavy sandstorms and extreme temperatures. Since then, the majority of the Sahrawi community has been living in diaspora, between refugee camps in southwestern Algeria and in countries such as Spain and France, desperately awaiting to exercise their right to self- determination and return. In this article, I discuss diverse Sahrawi’s testimonies and interviews which show that while the elderly generations of Sahrawi people describe their homeland with a strong sense of longing and have an attachment to the territory and the life which they left behind, the younger population maintain a more symbolic idealization and belonging to the home they never knew. At the same time younger Sahrawi generations experience a need to adapt to the exilic environment and diasporic territories and spaces in which they live and their idea of homeland bifurcates into real and imaginary paths yet constantly tries to reach the same destination.