Roots in exile: Sahrawi women, literature, and activism in Ebbaba Hameida's Flores de papel

Abstract

This article analyzes the novel Flores de papel (2025), by Sahrawi journalist and writer Ebbaba Hameida, from the perspective of testimonial literature and cultural activism. The work is conceived as a testimonial novel with a fictional dimension, in which memory, fiction, and history intertwine to narrate the experience of three generations of Sahrawi women: Leila, Naima, and Aisha. Through the analysis of spaces, bodies, and narrative strategies, the study examines how Hameida’s writing transforms pain into an archive, memory into aesthetics, and the word into political action. The Sahrawi narrative is also connected to Afro-Iberian and Afro-Ibero-American traditions, from Equatoguinean literature in Spanish –represented by authors such as Remei Sipi Mayo and Trifonia Melibea Obono, whose works explore colonial memory and female agency– to the Afro-diasporic writings of the Caribbean and Latin America, where authors such as Mayra Santos-Febres, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Shirley Campbell Barr, and Lucía Charún-Illescas articulate a poetics of resistance and communal care. This network also includes the work of Sahrawi writer Zahra Hasnaui, who turns the word into an act of remembrance and denunciation in the face of exile, and that of Esther Bendahan, whose narrative explores Sephardic identity and displacement from a feminine perspective, situating memory at the crossroads of religion, language, and exile. This literary cartography highlights the centrality of women in cultural resistance and in the projection of emancipatory horizons that transcend national and linguistic borders.