INTERVIEW
Sandblasting indifference
21.12.2007
x (0)
Gaia Pianigiani
Photo by Colin Stobbart
U
nder the vivid colours of a nomadic tent woven in patchwork, a chorus of three women waving the edges of their typical costumes accompanied the alluring rhythms written in the sand of the African desert par excellence. The haunting beauty of the Saharawi music charmed the Londoner ears and consciously forced the Western public to follow the wiggling of the singers’ hips. Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to the Sandblast Festival and its conclusion, the jam session carried out by Tiris, the Saharawi band that has been touring the UK this autumn for the first time.
On the 3rd and 4th of November Richmix cultural space in Bethnal Green hosted a festival that let the Saharawi cultural heritage stride onto the stage, on which various works of art produced by the Saharawis were showed to an overwhelmed public. The risk that this deeply rooted artistic tradition, spread by women and men highly aware of their culture and past, would sink into oblivion has been warded off so far. For how long if the political situation of the region remains so uncertain?
Western Sahara is a non-self governing territory. The former Spanish colony was the setting of a harsh war between the troops of Morocco, that together with Mauritania occupied the territory in the 70s, and the Polisario Front, a nationalist movement claiming independence. After the cease-fire agreement in 1991, the United Nations proposed a referendum and a peace plan as possible solutions to the controversy, but an agreement still needs to be found. Nowadays, roughly 350,000 Saharawis are divided between the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara and the Polisario refugee camps in Algeria, living between war and peace. In fact, the presence of mines scattered by the Moroccan army jeopardises the lives of many Saharawis.
Richmix opened its doors to some of them, hosting a genuine melting point of races and cultures. The Saharawi performers, wearing long Bedouin tunics over their Texan boots and baseball hats as accessories, danced together with the public, who on their part were taking pictures with mobile phones. As a “Western woman” standing in a crowd of people from all over the world dancing and indulging in the atmosphere created by Tiris, one felt as Bedouin as the Saharawis. These people are willing to share, have an innate sense of the collective. It doesn’t matter if it is a long existing community or a fledgling one, constituted not even an hour before: they can transform a crowd into communal dancing corps.
In their community everybody participates in both the social and the cultural life and roles are shared interchangeably. Saharawi women don’t dance and sing to perform or show off their bodies. Dramatically different from the dancers whom the modern times accustomed us to, “Our women are symbolic dancers“- says Malainin Lakhal, Saharawi poet and Secretary General of the Saharawi Journalists’ and Writers’ Union -“Their aim is to explain the lyrics through movements and gestures.” Malainin is an authentic voice of his people’s experience and active refusal of the Moroccan sovereignty, as his personal involvement in many acts of open (and lately necessarily undercover) protest against the occupation forced him to leave his home country through a four-day long, daring escape along the wall guarded by Moroccan soldiers that divides Western Sahara from north to south, and finally reach Mauritania.
Malainin is the first one to mention the Saharawi women’s power when he plays around with words and says “Soon we will need an organization for the Saharawi men!”. Women have been the fixed foot of the compass represented by the often endangered Saharawi society. They were already involved in the Bedouin life, which was hard and needed many hands. Successively, Saharawi women became the forerunners of their people’s struggle for independence from the Moroccan occupation, which has been affecting the stripe of land bordered by the Atlantic Ocean for 32 years. During the revolution Saharawi men were in exile abroad or held in prisons and the women had to balance their absence by completing several tasks at once: They did the housekeeping, worked and constituted the municipalities, starting to play a prominent political role. They also campaigned for literacy as they understood its importance in the fight against the political oppression exerted by Morocco.
“Our women understood that it is all about culture and identity. The attachment to your own culture is what makes impossible for the others to dominate you”, carries on Malainin. This is the most likely reason why Moroccans hindered the constitution of Saharawi independent cultural organizations and did not build any high schools or universities in the territory. Nonetheless, in the 90s the manifestations of the Saharawis’ awareness of their situation, their strong commitment to the cause and will of independence increased in number, strength and impact on the development of an active and peaceful popular uprising in the zone of Western Sahara under Moroccan occupation.
Arts have been part of the Saharawis’ life since the human memory recollects. “All Saharawis are poets, or do ‘taste’ and like poetry”, says Malainin. On one side, as part of the desert culture, children would perform at families’ gatherings and learn poetry by heart in schools. On the other side, the Bedouins have a “blank, uncontaminated memory”, as they don’t get distracted from the metropolis, and are completely open to the inputs from the surrounding world. Among the dunes life goes at a very slow pace and there is time dedicated just to meditation. Is this one of the reasons why so many Saharawis are poets?
Malainin confirms that it is impossible to estimate the exact percentage of Saharawi poets, both for the lack of statistics in the occupied zones and for the problems they encounter in publishing their works. Nonetheless, the Sandblast Festival made perceptively clear that arts have traditionally been held in high esteem by the Saharawis. Without postulating a mysterious, innate poetic ability, it is clear that the Western Sahara conditions have always favoured artistic penchants. “There are still nomads especially in the liberated zones of Western Sahara, but many Saharawis still go to the desert from time to time, especially when the landscape is green after rain, to connect with their roots”. Malainin himself writes poetry in Arabic and reads it in French, English and Arabic. “Poetry and language are our primary sources of communication. They are the tools helping us to detect reality and share it”, he clarifies.
Poetry and arts in general also became the Saharawis’ persisting “weapon of mass distraction” in their striving for independence long ago. Notwithstanding, their artistic production isn’t limited to a political “J’accuse”. And showing to the Londoner public the multicoloured homage of both “not yet national” and international artists to the Sandblast Festival remarkably underlined it: The kermes dealt with culture and people, rather than with politics, reminding us that behind the international controversy there are individuals’ faces. Attracting the attention on the Western Sahara’s cause means, nowadays as before, not letting the Saharawi culture get sandblasted by common indifference.
On the 3rd and 4th of November Richmix cultural space in Bethnal Green hosted a festival that let the Saharawi cultural heritage stride onto the stage, on which various works of art produced by the Saharawis were showed to an overwhelmed public. The risk that this deeply rooted artistic tradition, spread by women and men highly aware of their culture and past, would sink into oblivion has been warded off so far. For how long if the political situation of the region remains so uncertain?
Western Sahara is a non-self governing territory. The former Spanish colony was the setting of a harsh war between the troops of Morocco, that together with Mauritania occupied the territory in the 70s, and the Polisario Front, a nationalist movement claiming independence. After the cease-fire agreement in 1991, the United Nations proposed a referendum and a peace plan as possible solutions to the controversy, but an agreement still needs to be found. Nowadays, roughly 350,000 Saharawis are divided between the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara and the Polisario refugee camps in Algeria, living between war and peace. In fact, the presence of mines scattered by the Moroccan army jeopardises the lives of many Saharawis.
Richmix opened its doors to some of them, hosting a genuine melting point of races and cultures. The Saharawi performers, wearing long Bedouin tunics over their Texan boots and baseball hats as accessories, danced together with the public, who on their part were taking pictures with mobile phones. As a “Western woman” standing in a crowd of people from all over the world dancing and indulging in the atmosphere created by Tiris, one felt as Bedouin as the Saharawis. These people are willing to share, have an innate sense of the collective. It doesn’t matter if it is a long existing community or a fledgling one, constituted not even an hour before: they can transform a crowd into communal dancing corps.
In their community everybody participates in both the social and the cultural life and roles are shared interchangeably. Saharawi women don’t dance and sing to perform or show off their bodies. Dramatically different from the dancers whom the modern times accustomed us to, “Our women are symbolic dancers“- says Malainin Lakhal, Saharawi poet and Secretary General of the Saharawi Journalists’ and Writers’ Union -“Their aim is to explain the lyrics through movements and gestures.” Malainin is an authentic voice of his people’s experience and active refusal of the Moroccan sovereignty, as his personal involvement in many acts of open (and lately necessarily undercover) protest against the occupation forced him to leave his home country through a four-day long, daring escape along the wall guarded by Moroccan soldiers that divides Western Sahara from north to south, and finally reach Mauritania.
Malainin is the first one to mention the Saharawi women’s power when he plays around with words and says “Soon we will need an organization for the Saharawi men!”. Women have been the fixed foot of the compass represented by the often endangered Saharawi society. They were already involved in the Bedouin life, which was hard and needed many hands. Successively, Saharawi women became the forerunners of their people’s struggle for independence from the Moroccan occupation, which has been affecting the stripe of land bordered by the Atlantic Ocean for 32 years. During the revolution Saharawi men were in exile abroad or held in prisons and the women had to balance their absence by completing several tasks at once: They did the housekeeping, worked and constituted the municipalities, starting to play a prominent political role. They also campaigned for literacy as they understood its importance in the fight against the political oppression exerted by Morocco.
“Our women understood that it is all about culture and identity. The attachment to your own culture is what makes impossible for the others to dominate you”, carries on Malainin. This is the most likely reason why Moroccans hindered the constitution of Saharawi independent cultural organizations and did not build any high schools or universities in the territory. Nonetheless, in the 90s the manifestations of the Saharawis’ awareness of their situation, their strong commitment to the cause and will of independence increased in number, strength and impact on the development of an active and peaceful popular uprising in the zone of Western Sahara under Moroccan occupation.
Arts have been part of the Saharawis’ life since the human memory recollects. “All Saharawis are poets, or do ‘taste’ and like poetry”, says Malainin. On one side, as part of the desert culture, children would perform at families’ gatherings and learn poetry by heart in schools. On the other side, the Bedouins have a “blank, uncontaminated memory”, as they don’t get distracted from the metropolis, and are completely open to the inputs from the surrounding world. Among the dunes life goes at a very slow pace and there is time dedicated just to meditation. Is this one of the reasons why so many Saharawis are poets?
Malainin confirms that it is impossible to estimate the exact percentage of Saharawi poets, both for the lack of statistics in the occupied zones and for the problems they encounter in publishing their works. Nonetheless, the Sandblast Festival made perceptively clear that arts have traditionally been held in high esteem by the Saharawis. Without postulating a mysterious, innate poetic ability, it is clear that the Western Sahara conditions have always favoured artistic penchants. “There are still nomads especially in the liberated zones of Western Sahara, but many Saharawis still go to the desert from time to time, especially when the landscape is green after rain, to connect with their roots”. Malainin himself writes poetry in Arabic and reads it in French, English and Arabic. “Poetry and language are our primary sources of communication. They are the tools helping us to detect reality and share it”, he clarifies.
Poetry and arts in general also became the Saharawis’ persisting “weapon of mass distraction” in their striving for independence long ago. Notwithstanding, their artistic production isn’t limited to a political “J’accuse”. And showing to the Londoner public the multicoloured homage of both “not yet national” and international artists to the Sandblast Festival remarkably underlined it: The kermes dealt with culture and people, rather than with politics, reminding us that behind the international controversy there are individuals’ faces. Attracting the attention on the Western Sahara’s cause means, nowadays as before, not letting the Saharawi culture get sandblasted by common indifference.
www.sandblast-arts.org
//-->
