Ebbaba Hameida, journalist and writer
“The need to tell the Sahara comes from the answer you try to give every time someone asks you who you are,” says Ebbaba Hameida, who has published her first novel, paper flowers (Península, 2025), a story that addresses the history of the Sahrawi people from the point of view of three women inspired by their grandmother, their mother and their experiences as a child.
Ebbaba Hameida was born in 1992 in a refugee camp in Tindouf (Algeria). She arrived in Italy at the age of five, after being diagnosed with celiac disease, and lived with an Italian family for the next nine. He returned to the Sahrawi camps and at the age of 16 he went to Spain to live with a woman in Extremadura. «When I was little in Italy, I found that for people the Sahara was a desert and that’s it, where there was nothing. It’s like an insult, right? How come there is nothing?
Throughout his life he has had to face the great lack of knowledge that exists in Europe about the situation of oppression and exile in which the Sahrawi people live and about the historical process that has led them there. For the new generations, he explains to MN during an interview at his home in Madrid, the lack of knowledge is even greater. “Having to tell your peculiarities, your oddities, what it’s like where you come from, that you were born in a refugee camp… Having to talk about this over and over again made me realize that everything I’ve experienced is due to a political conflict, which I didn’t know about before and neither did those around me.”
He ended up becoming a journalist. «I started on the radio, telling the stories of others, stories on the margins. I covered migrations and conflicts and I began to feel that I had a personal debt, to tell about the Sahara. The result is paper flowers, a book that is also born from a need for self-healing, from an exercise to understand who I am and where I come from. And, at the same time, an exercise in reconciliation with the women in my life. “I had many reasons to write the novel.”
He started working on it during the pandemic, after a therapy process that helped him manage an identity crisis. Her psychologist encouraged her to write down her story with the aim of reconciling with the girl she was. He began writing what would later become the novel on Aisha’s part – her alter ego–, and at that moment the ceasefire was broken and war broke out again in the Sahara. He wrote an article about the conflict for the magazine 5W titled “The Weight of Silence”, told in the first person. Later, the Península publishing house proposed to him to write a longer essay. He accepted, but as he wrote he realized that it fit better in the format of a novel. «paper flowers It has a lot of autobiography and explanation of the context, but I needed to include fiction. It’s strange to say it as a journalist, but I have used fiction to complete the story, because I am not only telling my story, but also that of my mother and my grandmother. “I needed fiction to feel like I had license to talk about them freely and reconstruct their stories from an emotional point of view.”
Contact with family
During the almost five years of writing – “with pauses and periods of silence” – he had many conversations and calls with his family in the camps. In the middle of the process, his grandmother suffered a stroke that put an end to those talks. We asked them what they thought about their story becoming known. «I don’t know if my family was aware of what it means to publish a book here, because ours is an oral culture. Maybe if I had told them that I was going to write poetry or that I was going to make a song, it would have impacted them more. When I told them, they said, “Well, write.” “They have understood my curiosity and respected it.”
The development of the novel has opened many pending conversations. “It was like lighting fires all the time about a past that we had not addressed, about topics that are not talked about there.” Hameida remembers a talk with her grandmother, shortly after her grandfather died. «It was the first time I saw her cry for him. The Sahrawi is a society where love is not shown, where couples maintain apparently much colder relationships and intimacy is relegated to the darkness, to the night. She explained to me what it meant to meet my grandfather, to be his fourth wife, to travel with him to the Sahara as a Mauritanian, to go from a nomadic life to a sedentary one, everything they experienced together, the exodus, the family they built… She told me: “I left when I was very young.” These emotions, these pains, these keys from the past are not touched there. “The Sahrawis always look forward.”
The same thing happened with his mother, who told him about how she met his father, how they got married, their first sexual relations, and a childhood marked by napalm and white phosphorus bombings during the Moroccan occupation. Experiences that the author would never have known if it were not for the book.
The publication of paper flowers It has had a healing effect for the writer – “I didn’t know that literature could be such a powerful weapon,” she says – and, at the same time, it is being very well received by the public, with presentations that have exceeded her expectations. For Hameida, there is a great need to talk about Western Sahara and to do so in new formats. «When there is a conflict that has been going on for so long and there is so much silence that buries it, it is necessary to humanize it. People see images of refugee camps on TV, but perhaps they are not able to understand the situation and create a bond from empathy. You see it and that’s it, just as you see images of other very harsh realities every day. Therein lies the challenge when writing: to excite. My objective was to tell the Sahara by humanizing it, but humanizing the desert is not romanticizing it. “It is explaining its beauty and also its hardness and cruelty.” The author has used the characters of Leila, Naima and Aisha so that the reader better understands the situation of the Sahrawi people, empathizes with them and recognizes through them the life of thousands of Sahrawis in the refugee camps and outside them.
A live conflict
We asked him how he assesses the current moment, when the conflict remains unresolved and Morocco insists on its autonomy proposal for Western Sahara – in opposition to the self-determination referendum demanded by the Sahrawis – while a large part of the international community turns its back on them. “We are in a situation of impasse. This year marks 50 years of life in exile. In 2020 there was emotional euphoria with the return to armed struggle, believing that the war could once again put the focus on the conflict. We came from a long war between ’75 and ’91 in which the Sahrawis dominated part of the territory because they knew the terrain and controlled the combat tactics in the desert. But in 2020 this changed radically. They encountered a context of asymmetric war. Unfortunately, Morocco has gotten closer to Israel and has the ability to use drones that, if any movement occurs, even if it is a herd of camels, they launch a missile and that’s it. “It is an unequal war with a humanitarian crisis that is not talked about.”
Hameida regrets the freezing of international cooperation funds by the United States, which has repercussions on the camps, and expresses her disappointment with the Spanish Government’s policy of supporting the Moroccan identity of the Sahara against all international legality. She is also concerned about the lack of prospects for Sahrawi youth: “I am worried about what may happen to my nieces, the future that awaits those children who are growing up in a refugee camp. There are many generations and it is an inhospitable place where you cannot plant crops, no matter how hard you try, where it is very difficult to see life flourish. They are already born with the wound of being an exile and a refugee. “They grow up with many scars, with a very large backpack that will mark their future.”
Given this panorama, we ask him if the new generations maintain the hope of seeing a free Western Sahara. «I think there is no surrender, I don’t perceive it. Yes, there is a very minority group that defends an autonomy project within Morocco, an option that responds to the interest of receiving something in return from Morocco, compensation that makes your life a little easier. In the occupied areas there is a movement that has accepted the Moroccan identity of the Sahara, because in the end, in order not to be discriminated against, to have access to education, to the university, you must accept that project. There are also many silenced activists and many people who risk their lives just to say “I am Sahrawi and I am not Moroccan.” But I don’t see surrender in the camps. The stoicism of the Sahrawi people, their philosophy of constantly living in the present, does not allow this. Don’t ask my mother about the future. The future does not exist, what matters is what we have to do now, why we have to fight today, what we are going to eat. “What matters is the survival of the community.”
Ebbaba Hameida, who works at RTVE, from where she reports on conflicts such as those in Ukraine or Gaza, humanizing the information as much as possible, travels once a year to the Sahrawi camps. You need it. He enjoys the reunion with his family, the feeling that comes from getting off the plane and feeling that warm, dry air on his face, the silence of the desert, that way of living in the present from which he learns so much. That everything there is communal and choral. “Loneliness does not exist in the camps,” he says. His relationship with the Sahara has been a story of comings and goings marked by love, pain and frustration. A constant search for balance between two worlds, in which writing this novel has been a key piece. With paper flowers, Hameida not only reconstructs the memory of her family and the history of the Sahrawi people with a deeply human perspective, but also helps to fill an unfair information gap.
