Poetry from the camps of Western Sahara, with my guest Sam Berkson, who together with Saharawi artist and translator Mohamed Suleiman collected translations of these poems in ‘Settled Wanderers’ (published by Influx Press).
It’s the first collection in English of poets such as Beyibouh Al Haj, Mahmoud Khadri, Badi and Al Khadra, and gives us a unique insight into the political situation for the Saharawi people; their rich culture, history of oppression, and continuing resistance.
Sam Berkson also wrote a series of poems while in the refugee camps over the border in Algeria – where half the population of the formerly nomadic people live in exile. He initially went to the Western Sahara with Olive Branch Arts – an organisation in London working for years with various Saharawi arts and community initiatives. We’re really lucky to have original recordings of two of the poets (Badi and Al Khadra) who Berkson recorded – and who recite in the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic.
‘Settled Wanderers’ contains biographies of the poets Berkson met – like Hossein Mo’ulud who told him that ‘poetry is a means to carry on the struggle’. And Nadgem Said Oala who was born in Aossard camp and is writing a Saharawi Illiad with each section 40 lines long – one line for each year of the struggle.
He also met Hadjutu Aliat who’s written about women activists, and who had to leave the Occupied Zone where she was born, and move to Aossard camp because of poems she’d written about political prisoners interned in Morocco.
And of course, one the best known Saharawi poets, Al Khadra, who reads her poem, ‘The Army’, and the late Badi who reads ‘Tishwash’ (roughly translated as the pleasure of remembering the past). We also hear the translated poems of Mahmoud Khadri, Bashir Ali, and other Saharawi poetry which, as Berkson notes, ‘sometimes have more in common with the poetics of Chuck D than with Seamus Heaney.’
Huge thanks to Sam Berkson and Mohamed Suleiman who have brought us this book – the only translation into English of this poetry.
