Biblio : Back Home At All Cost

On her first visit to see her family after 20 years, Western Saharan author Sara Cheikh is unexpectedly held back due to border closures and the increasing panic around COVID-19. The memoir details the ensuing adventures. It also « explores the history of the war that displaced her family as she negotiates the culture clash between the Saharawi society into which she was born and her Western upbringing. » She left Western Sahara as a young child, migrating to Spain with her family, and although she has returned briefly in-between, she is now both a Westerner and yet still Saharawi, something she explores in this memoir.
With dry wit, she tells us how she wanted to get back to see her grandmother and immerse herself in her people’s ways again, but her visit coincided with the first Covid lockdowns. Her journey back from the desert to Paris is an epic story of endurance, complicated by her personal identification documents, time in a camp near the Algerian border, a lot of thinking on her feet, and much more. On her odyssey back home through a changing world, she faces starvation, the possibility of arrest, and kidnapping, as she attempts to cross the border into Algeria by all means possible. Alternating be...