Paper short abstract:

Our communication will assess the role of pro-independence Sahrawi poetry towards the contemporary migratory issues in the Western Sahara.

Paper long abstract:

Since the birth of the Polisario Front in 1973 and the creation of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in 1976, poetry has always been an essential support of political expression and resistance to Moroccan occupation. This strongly politicized artistic production is very popular and is characterized by its strong capacity of circulation and diffusion (via mobile phones and internet) far beyond the refugee camps in Tindouf, in northern Mauritania and in the "occupied" part of Western Sahara.

Our communication will try to examine how these poems and their reception constitute some very important scientific objects to understand their role in spatial but also political mobility of Sahrawi people between those different territories or, at the contrary, in the dissuasion to travel. We will particularly focus on the way pro-independence Sahrawi poets fight the Moroccan politics of "return" ('awda), which consists in encouraging by economic and political advantages pro-independence Sahrawis to rejoin the Moroccan "side" and to adhere to its political project of widened autonomy .

To do so, we will present two famous contemporary poems recently collected in the "occupied" part of Western Sahara that disparage two important political figures of the "return" phenomenon in Western Sahara and which allow to better understand the actual demographic and migratory stakes of this forty years old conflict.