Sinceramente, estos estudiantes me hacen alucinar con su entusiasmo y disponibilidad para la construcción de esa sociedad que conocen a través de sus lecturas [...]
[Truly, these students amaze me with their enthusiasm and eagerness [disponibilidad, lit. “availability”] for the construction of that society that they knew through their readings [...]
Mustafa El Kattab’s short novel Fiesta del divorico is a bit of a mystery to me. I genuinely have no idea how I found it — there are only a few passing references to El Kattab online in articles about Sahrawi literature, and none of them mention this book. also, I have it as a pdf, but I now am unable to find any trace of the pdf online. the only evidence of the book is an old listing for a Portuguese translation in an online bookstore. at some point I noted its publication date as 2013, but I don’t know where I got that information.
El Kattab is, or was, a scholar of Sahrawi poetry and a member of the government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (also known as Western Sahara, though about 2/3 of the SADR’s territory is currently illegally occupied by Morocco); Fiesta del divorcio is both a romance novel, a narrative of life in the early years of the Sahrawi refugee camps, and a politically committed look at the Polisario Front’s efforts to build a new Sahrawi society. all three aspects of the novel are engagingly presented — though the editing leaves something to be desired; commas are scattered everywhere and section breaks are unmarked — and I would recommend the book!
the novel follows first two and then three and then mostly two again characters. first we meet Manna, a nurse, and her brother Mulay, a soldier fighting on the Moroccan front shortly after the Moroccan and Mauritanian occupation of Spanish Sahara in 1975. their parents have died, and Manna is concerned for her brother’s long-term happiness: she wants him to get married. Mulay is resistant to the idea, partly because he isn’t ready to settle down yet and partly because he hasn’t yet met a woman he feels really drawn to. then he meets Maaluma, a young, prematurely widowed teacher, and after an extended courtship the two of them marry. roughly the last 40% of the novel is then split between Mulay’s and Maaluma’s perspectives in a kind of time lapse of the years from ca. the early ’80s to the lead-up to the 1991 ceasefire and the establishment of MINURSO (the UN peacekeeping mission notionally intended to oversee an independence referendum, which Morocco — which has pursued an aggressive policy of settler colonialism — has still not allowed). the novel ends with Mulay en route to meet with UN representatives.
while the war and its politics are always present, they remain largely in the background. for example, Mulay is seriously wounded in a battle a few months after his marriage to Maaluma, but the battle itself is not portrayed on the page: we get only two sentences describing the wound and the circumstances in which he got it (an attack on a Moroccan tank), sandwiched between an extended description of the hospital and then his first sight of his sister upon waking from his coma. the novel’s main focus is on interpersonal relationships and, alongside these, the project of building the SADR and the new Sahrawi society it aspires to. given its strong romance element, the novel is especially interested in gender politics. at first glance, it seems fairly conservative: marriages are contractually negotiated between families, a dowry is exchanged, etc. in point of fact, however, it quickly becomes clear that the nature of marriage is in the process of changing — and, indeed, of being actively renegotiated by Sahrawi society writ large, as evidenced by a debate early in the novel about polygamy (n.b.: the debate is about whether polygamy should be legalized, in response to concerns about demographic collapse, presumably because a large proportion of married or marriageable men are fighting an anticolonial war).
something the novel returns to repeatedly is that the new Sahrawi society envisioned by the SADR is one where many old social relations — in particular “tribal” kinship relations and rivalries — will be obsolete. women will choose their own partners freely; individuals will depend on a broader, all-embracing support network linking state and people (the state is apparently legally obligated to pay for Mulay and Maaluma’s wedding celebration, for example). emblematic of this kind of shift is one of the most striking passages in the novel, where an older soldier responds to a young one’s criticism of what he sees as an “obsession” with ownership marking of camels by reframing the practice not as “tribalism” but as an affirmation of a collective Sahrawi identity:
– No hay que ir en el sentido negativo de las palabras, solamente contéstame tú –indicando al que le preguntó– ¿sabes por qué la mayoría de los saharauis marcan sus camellos con letras árabes o con formas derivadas del árabe y en el lado derecho únicamente?
– Sí –contestó el joven en un tono arrogante. Con eso diferenciaban sus pertenencias para impedir las famosas querellas entre las tribus por un pozo de agua, o por un camello...
– Cierto, eso es como aparentan las cosas, pero en lo profundo sobrepasa las diferencias tribales, porque esencialmente significa compartir algo común y general, es algo así como un documento de identificación. ¿No fueron nuestros antepasados los que dijeron que los cuellos de los camellos anuncian sus propietarios? Entonces sería justo preguntarse hoy, ¿qué te informan los camellos saharauis?, ¿no ves que anunciarán al lejano, antes que al próximo, esa identidad, pura, original, dura de borrar y que niega la anexión, plasmada en los nombres, la tierra y las pertenencias? Es verdad que con ello algunos de nosotros diferencian sus camellos de los camellos de otros, ¿pero el otro, el extranjero, que verá en nuestras marcas?
[“There’s no need to take the words in such a negative sense, just tell me,” — indicating the one who had asked him — “do you know why the majority of Sahrawis mark their camels with Arabic letters or with shapes derived from Arabic, and only on the right side?”
“Yes,” the young man replied in an arrogant tone. “That’s how they differentiate their belongings to prevent those notorious disputes between tribes over a well, or a camel...”
“True, that’s how things seem, but deep down it goes beyond tribal differences, because at its heart it means sharing something common and general; it’s something like an identity document. Weren’t our ancestors the ones who said that the necks of camels announce their owners? Then it would be fair to wonder today, what do Sahrawi camels tell you? Don’t you see that they will announce, to those far away before those close by, that pure, original identity, hard to erase, which rejects annexation, conveyed in names, land, and possessions? It is true that by marking some of us distinguish their camels from others’ camels, but the other, the stranger, what will he see in our marks?”]
I love this. (forgive the clunky translation; it’s just off the cuff.)
you can tell that El Kattab was involved in the Polisario government, and some aspects of the novel’s sociopolitical imaginary are, I think, aspirational rather than necessarily reflecting the reality on the ground. but taken as a statement of political ideals I think there’s a lot to like here. the society it imagines is not an end point — there remains a strong gendered division of labor for example — but it is an effort to make something new. the novel repeatedly foregrounds women’s contributions not only to professional spheres (nursing, teaching) or to domestic labor (which the novel encourages us to recognize as labor, though it’s not as forceful on this point as I might like) but also to every aspect of camp administration. on one of his first visits to the camp early in the novel, Mulay is surprised to find a group of women in variously-colored clothes doing work around the camp. one of them informs him that they are the representatives of various administrative bodies and committees dedicated to maintaining, analyzing, and if necessary changing the camp environment. he’s momentarily taken aback by this, but as his sister pointedly reminds him, while the men have been fighting a war it’s the women who have been physically, administratively, and socially building the camps they will come home to.
I really enjoyed the book; if you can find it anywhere (perhaps it’s more accessible in Portuguese, if you read Portuguese?) I would definitely recommend it. one final highlight: during the first few years of revolutionary enthusiasm, Manna has four children; their names are Shuruk (sunrise), Ali, Gadafi (presumably as in Muammar), and...Aljamhuria (i.e., “the republic”). Aljamhuria is an endearing name in and of itself, but it’s made even more so by the fact that Mulay addresses his niece affectionately as “mi pequeño estado” (my little state). absolutely adorable.
(if you’re interested in Sahrawi literature and only read English, to my knowledge the only Sahrawi literature available in English translation is the poetry anthology Settled Wanderers, translated by Sam Berkson and Mohamed Sulaiman. there are a bunch of Spanish-language anthologies and some single-author books I’m aware of but they’re very difficult to locate.)
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