Paper short abstract:

Starting from songs and poems dedicated to the figures of martyrs in Western Sahara, our reflection will focus on the role of these artistic productions and their performativity in the intergenerational transmission of stories of violent deaths told in the Sahrawi refugee camps of Tindouf.

Paper long abstract:

Our paper will address the centrality of the figures of martyrs in contemporary Saharawi political life and identity, especially in the refugee camps of Tindouf (Algeria) where the Saharawi state in exile has encouraged the production of a national narrative largely dedicated to the memory of these victims (civil or military) of the violence of the war or the Moroccan repression. These figures of martyrs are largely told by poetry and song which allow, in this society with a strong oral tradition, their transmission from generation to generation. We will see if these stories encourage self-sacrifice amongst certain young Saharawis today, who are disappointed at the failures of the peace negotiations and ready to take up arms, or if instead they rather support a non-violent political line.

At the methodological level, our research consisted first of all in constituting a corpus of poems and songs dedicated to famous martyrs, which we identified on the Web then contextualized in the field, translated from Arabic and analyzed in their content and in their form. It now consists of a filmed ethnography whose purpose is to gather the word of the authors of these tributes but also the stories of the families of martyrs, to study their particular form and see how these stories can be staged in the framework of online or offline commemorations such as the one dedicated to the first Saharawi martyr who died on March 8, 1974, Bachir Lahlaoui.