SA L E K L AU GHS AT ME FOR BE ING AFR A ID OF L A ND MINE S
best morsels of lamb over to me. They fill my glass of apple Fanta before it is finished, and when I mention how much I like the camel, the rest of the kebabs are saved for me. There is nothing separating the visitor from the Saharawis. There are no social protocols to meander through, and it takes no time to earn their trust. Every family I visit is the same. I need only appear and their world opens to me. The moment I sit, a glass of tea is placed before me and a pillow comes for my head. Laughter is immediate. I am invited to rest, to eat, to sleep. There will be bread in the morning. Sterilized milk from a box. A can of berry jam. These rations come from international donors, and they are precious. After we eat, Abdulahe, Mohammed and I stretch out on the blankets while one of Abdulahe’s cousins brews more tea in the corner. Mohammed tells us about fighting the Moroccans as a Polisario soldier in the 1970s, when the war was at its fiercest. I turn to one of the cousins. She is in her early twenties and was born in the camps. She has never seen the land her father fought for. “What do you think the Western Sahara is like?” I ask. She turns her eyes upward. “El Aaiún is very pretty,” she says. “There are real streets and buildings. Lots of cars. The ocean is nearby, and it is a huge distance filled with water. You can swim in it, and there are fish. And it can rain there for days.”
I
n the Saharawi tradition, tea is a trinity. The tea ceremony is a refrain of three holy essentials, each beginning with the Arabic letter jim. Jama’a is the gathering. To drink tea alone is to waste it. J’jar is slowness. Proper tea cannot be brewed in haste. Jmar is the charcoal. Tea demands burning and boiling. At another house, I don’t know whose, in Auserd camp, Abdulahe and I take tea with Kamal, his mother Damaha, and a cast of Abdulahe’s relatives who come in and out of the room at random. A considerable jama’a. Kamal splashes a stream of hot tea into a row of glasses and tells me about the Scottish trader who first
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brought tea to the Sahara in the nineteenth century, and how you could once buy a camel for a cup of dry leaves. Then he tells me about his mother. Damaha was already a fighter before the Wall. She was a regular face among the protesters in the town of Tan Tan who agitated against the Spanish colonizers in the years before 1975. Damaha had little education, but the leaders of the resistance tutored and inspired her. By the time the Moroccans replaced the Spanish as the region’s occupiers, Damaha had given birth to Kamal and divorced her husband. Her home became a Polisario safe house, where Damaha hosted activists to discuss strategy and raise money. “Everybody gave what they could,” she says, eager to add to her son’s account. “I know one woman who stole her husband’s revolver to give to the soldiers.” One morning, in the winter of 1978, Damaha was at home, hosting a monthly committee meeting, when an out-of-breath Polisario official pounded on the door. “There will be a battle today. Our soldiers are ready to attack Tan Tan. Be ready to assist the soldiers with whatever they need.” The soldiers attacked Moroccan army positions at midday. They held the town for four hours, during which time they released prisoners from the jails. The streets were in a panic. Three Land Rovers drove up to Damaha’s house in the early afternoon. Polisario soldiers came out. “It is no longer safe here. We are collecting all the activists and taking them to the refugee camps.” Damaha had known this day would come; Saharawi activists in the Western Sahara may cling to hope but not illusions. She already had a bag packed. But Kamal was not home. He had gone to play with his cousin that morning and had not returned. She called for him but he didn’t answer. There was no time to look for him. She said a prayer that Kamal would find his way to his father’s house, boarded the Land Rover and escaped to the camps. Almost a year passed before Damaha heard that Kamal was alive and safe. “It was October 14th,” she says. The date hangs at the front of her memory. Twenty more years passed before