Nationalism, resistance, and patriarchy: the poetry of Saharawi women

The arts, and in particular poetry, have been swords of resistance for the Saharawis since the 1975 Moroccan and Mauritanian invasion and subsequent occupation of their country. In this article, I aim to investigate whether Saharawi women writers go further than the more common objects of Saharawi resistance and fight against patriarchy. Firstly, I focus on the work of the Saharawi 'Friendship Generation' of writers, exploring the Generation's collective (nationalist) aims. Secondly, I look at the construction of gender in Saharawi poetry, analysing how gender, particularly the idea of woman and femininity, are imagined according to the sex-identification of the author.