On the Rabouni Woven Panel
by Mark Drury
In the midday heat, in the shelter of a tent on the margins of the Sahrawi refugee camp of Smara, in southwest Algeria, a woman gestures toward her niece’s son. Pointing at his pants, she grins and says, “Look at these: they came from Souq ar-Rhiba!” in reference to the popular, open-air market in Laâyoune,[1] the largest city in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara.
In the coastal Mauritanian city of Nouadhibou, roughly 1,700 km away, the rumble of trucks emblazoned with the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) flag punctuates the carefree, late-night strolling that takes place during the summer months.
And at MoMA, in midtown Manhattan, a stunning woven panel made by Sahrawi women depicting a map of Rabouni, the administrative center for the Sahrawi refugee camps, hangs on the wall.
The Sahrawi refugee camps, established in 1975 in southwest Algeria when thousands fled Morocco’s armed invasion of Western Sahara, are, in certain respects, not typical refugee camps. As in other refugee contexts, the camps are provisioned by the UNHCR, the World Food Program, and various NGOs. Since forming, however, these camps have been administered by leaders of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and defended by Polisario, the Sahrawi national liberation front.[3] In addition to overseeing the distribution of aid through its own Red Crescent administration, SADR has negotiated education, health care, and humanitarian arrangements, primarily with the Cuban and Algerian governments, and Spanish civil society.
This is not to say that Sahrawi refugees are exempt from many of the acute concerns of displaced persons elsewhere in the world. In the fall of 2015, heavy rains wiped out many of the mud-brick houses in the camps, effectively destroying most of the Dakhla settlement.
As part of an interrupted decolonization process that remains entangled in a regional power struggle (between Morocco and Algeria) and UN mechanisms (Committee on Decolonization) that offer few signs of change, the refugees remain party to a seemingly intractable political dispute. And, as the problem of refugees has intensified recently across Europe and the Middle East, longstanding sites of displacement, including the Sahrawi camps, have increasingly faced a scarcity of aid as they struggle to continue drawing humanitarian attention.
However, these arrangements have provided important outlets for refugees, as well as reliable services for the camps: opportunities to pursue higher education in Cuba, Algeria (and, previously, Libya), which have been ongoing for almost two generations now; opportunities for refugee families to send their children to live with families in Spain, through humanitarian NGOs; and a rotation of Cuban doctors providing healthcare at a Sahrawi national hospital in Rabouni. In addition to these international connections, the camps are renowned for a government administration that is active at all levels of camp life, from the local neighborhood hayy to the central administration in Rabouni. By provisioning the camps with health and education services that go beyond the “bare life” necessities associated with refugee status,[4] these connections have fostered a tremendous sense of pride among Sahrawis for both the orderliness of camp society and the worldliness of many Sahrawi refugees, even as an older generation has been living in exile for nearly four decades.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the Sahrawi refugee camps draw attention for their unique qualities. Important studies, some of them the first of their kind to have been carried out in the camps, have suggested that camp governance constitutes an “experiment” in participatory democracy, with an emphasis on forms of autonomous self-governance.[5] Others have framed the camps as a space of political resilience, foregrounding the role of Sahrawi nationalism in producing “citizen-refugees” committed to “prefiguring” the state while in prolonged exile.[6]
While these approaches certainly help to dispel the notion of the camp as a negative space — of sovereign exception, of humanitarian intervention, or of deprivation and need — these approaches nonetheless tend to represent the refugee camps as a discrete political unit and isolated geopolitical space. While there may well have been a time when the Sahrawi camps were isolated (during the peak of the war with Morocco from 1975 to 1982, for example), they have long since been imbricated with processes that ramify beyond the space of the camps, such as regional circuits of mobility and exchange, and the international politics of recognition.
The panel itself attests to these connections, in ways both subtle and direct. Made by members of the National Union of Sahrawi Women collective, the work presents a map of Rabouni, the administrative headquarters of the Sahrawi refugee camps. The distinct outlines of the camp replicate the bounded geography of the territorial nation-state. Although it is just one camp among several spread across hundreds of miles in the desert of southwest Algeria, the work’s focus on Rabouni presents the government center as a metonym for the Sahrawi nation as a whole.[7] Yet perhaps most striking about this map are the labels for the government ministries, each written in block letters and in English. Coexisting with the structures and symbols for each of the different ministries, the labels ensure that the map is read as a space of orderly, working government. Between the border and the labels, the woven panel as both rug and tapestry refigures the camps into a space of autonomous and independent self-government.
But the project of making the work shown at MoMA is also part of a decades-long struggle to make these camps legible to the international community (and, largely, the West) as not only camps, but as components of a viable nation-state. Like the “state-movement”[8] that organizes the camps, the woven panel is a form of self-representation that seeks to remain visible before multilateral institutions such as the UN — and specifically Security Council members such as the US and France[9] — that play key roles in granting or blocking access to the legal right to self-determination (itself a means to national sovereignty). Like the audience that this work seeks, its authors are products of this struggle’s mutual imbrication with the international politics of recognition, as women have long played a “hyper-visible” role in SADR’s efforts to gain legitimacy before the international community.[10] In this sense, the panel might be seen as an artifact of popular diplomacy.
Finally, it is worth noting the roads that breach the borders of Rabouni and extend beyond the map. Since a cease-fire was established between Morocco and Polisario in 1991, movement between Moroccan-occupied territory and the Sahrawi refugee camps has increased. However, because of a militarized sand berm built by Morocco in the 1980s, with backing from the US, France, and Saudi Arabia, among others, movement between the spaces takes place via a circuitous route overland through northern Mauritania. Nonetheless, the roads depicted on the Union’s woven depiction of Rabouni point, in this sense, not only to the other camps, but elsewhere: to Algeria, where many Sahrawis are educated; to Mauritania, where many Sahrawis conduct trade and have family; to northern Mali, where some disillusioned Sahrawis have joined armed conflict over the unrecognized state of Azawad in recent years; and to Moroccan-occupied territory, which Sahrawis frequently visit, sometimes move to, and occasionally escape from — and whose political developments Sahrawis follow on a daily basis. These lines, innocuously leading beyond the panel’s edges, suggest the kinds of movement and mobility mentioned at the beginning of this essay that have always troubled borders in the Sahara.
In pointing toward interconnections even as it foregrounds a bounded political entity, the woven panel might be seen as a manifestation of the tension between autonomy and dependency that characterizes postcolonial national sovereignty — and to which refugee camps are no exception.
[1] The name of this city is transliterated differently by Morocco (Laâyoune) and SADR (El Aaiún). Here, I am using Morocco’s spelling to distinguish between the city, which is under de facto Moroccan control, and the Sahrawi camp in Algeria.
[2] Thank you to Julie Skurski for drawing my attention to this exhibit, and to Sean Anderson for the invitation to submit some thoughts on this work.
[3] Also referred to as the Polisario Front. The acronym is derived from the Front’s Spanish name: Frente Popular para la Liberación de Saguia el-Hamra y Rio de Oro. Saguia el-Hamra, in the north, and Rio de Oro (sometimes Wadi Dahhab, or, less frequently, Tiris Gharbiya) in the south are the two main regions that constitute Western Sahara.
[4] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. (Stanford Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
[5] Stephen Zunes, “Participatory Democracy in the Sahara: A Study of Polisario Self-Governance,” in Scandinavian Journal of Development Alternatives, 1988; Manuel Herz, From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara (Zurich, Switzerland: ETH Studio Basel, Lars Muller Publishers, 2013).
[6] Pablo San Martin, “Nationalism, Identity and Citizenship in the Western Sahara,” in The Journal of North African Studies 10, no. 3 (2005): 565–92; J Mundy, “Performing the Nation, Pre-Figuring the State: The Western Saharan Refugees, Thirty Years Later,” in Journal of Modern African Studies 45, no. 2 (2007): 275–98.
[7] Herz, From Camp to City, 186.
[8] Alice Wilson, Sovereignty in Exile: A Saharan Liberation Movement Governs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
[9] Stephen Zunes and Jacob Mundy, Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution, 1st ed. (Syracuse N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2010).
[10] Vivian Solana, Regenerating Revolution: Gender and Generation in the Saharawi Struggle for Decolonisation (Toronto: Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, forthcoming); Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, The Ideal Refugees: Gender, Islam, and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014).
