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My Mother, My Teacher: A Memoir from Western Sahara
Separated from his family in the aftermath of the failed decolonization process in Western Sahara, Bahia Mahmud Awah was sustained by recollections of his mother. In this memoir, he describes her sacrifices, her optimism, and her deep love. His family's experiences exemplify the larger story of loss and displacement in the region even as his story shows how shared memories can nourish community and culture across generations, even in exile. Incorporating poetry in Hassaniya, the traditional Saharawi language, the work highlights the role of language in shaping identity and resisting colonialism.
First published in 2011 as La maestra que me enseñó en una tabla de madera (The Woman Who Taught Me on a Wooden Slate), this edition includes the first complete English translation and a new epilogue by the author featuring further remembrances of his mother and examples of her poetry.
First published in 2011 as La maestra que me enseñó en una tabla de madera (The Woman Who Taught Me on a Wooden Slate), this edition includes the first complete English translation and a new epilogue by the author featuring further remembrances of his mother and examples of her poetry.
181 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 31, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 20, 2025
I love Sahrawi storytelling. It goes against the rules we are taught in the West - there is no focus on dynamics, no vivid descriptions of people or of setting the scene. We rarely get to know what someone looks like; instead we learn how their presence feels.
My Mother, My Teacher is one of the very few works of Sahrawis available in English and that makes it even more precious. Bahia Mahmud Awah gives us here something more than just a memoir - his book is a whole act of resistance. It’s fragments of memories, poetry, family stories, and oral tradition woven together. This is exactly how Saharawi identity survives in exile: through memory, gatherings, poetry, and the voices of women, like his mother, who is at the centre of the book. Through her, Bahia Awah shows how women safeguard identity in exile, even as they face loss, displacement, and never seeing home again.
It’s also political: the stories of family, of camels and gatherings, even of pulling down Spanish flags, are all about resistance to colonialism and occupation. His use of Hassaniya words, poetry, and oral storytelling keeps Saharawi culture alive throughout the book.
Reading it, you feel like you’re sitting among Sahrawis, on the badia, drinking tea while Bahia’s mother tells her stories.
My Mother, My Teacher is one of the very few works of Sahrawis available in English and that makes it even more precious. Bahia Mahmud Awah gives us here something more than just a memoir - his book is a whole act of resistance. It’s fragments of memories, poetry, family stories, and oral tradition woven together. This is exactly how Saharawi identity survives in exile: through memory, gatherings, poetry, and the voices of women, like his mother, who is at the centre of the book. Through her, Bahia Awah shows how women safeguard identity in exile, even as they face loss, displacement, and never seeing home again.
It’s also political: the stories of family, of camels and gatherings, even of pulling down Spanish flags, are all about resistance to colonialism and occupation. His use of Hassaniya words, poetry, and oral storytelling keeps Saharawi culture alive throughout the book.
Reading it, you feel like you’re sitting among Sahrawis, on the badia, drinking tea while Bahia’s mother tells her stories.
February 5, 2026
Reflection on My Mother, My Teacher
My Mother, My Teacher is both an intimate homage and a collective memory. Through the figure of his mother, Detu, Mahmud Awah tells the story not only of a woman but of an entire people forced into exile. Growing up as the son of a Western Saharawi mother during and after the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara, the author situates his personal memories within the larger historical rupture that began with Spanish colonialism and culminated in the 1975 Moroccan invasion. The book is shaped by remembrance—of a homeland lost, of traditions carried across borders, and of a mother who became the primary transmitter of history, culture, and identity in exile.
Detu emerges as both a maternal and pedagogical figure. Through her poems, stories, and presence at communal gatherings, she embodies the role of the elder who keeps the homeland alive for those who can no longer access it physically. This is especially significant for Saharawis born in exile, who must imagine home through inherited memory rather than lived experience. The book implicitly asks how displaced people construct a national identity when return is impossible, and it suggests that memory, oral tradition, and cultural practice become forms of resistance. In this sense, Detu—and women like her—are not only caregivers but custodians of territory.
The continuation of Saharawi traditions throughout the narrative reinforces this idea. Customs such as gifting a bride a white camel when she leaves her mother’s home, the jaima as a portable tent, or the organization of families into frigs reflect a nomadic culture deeply tied to land and movement. Practices like tberaa, women’s poetic songs composed in spaces free from male presence, reveal how expression, desire, and resistance coexist within Saharawi society. Even language itself—shared across borders with Mauritania and distinct from Moroccan usage—becomes a marker of continuity. The way Saharawis refer to the Moroccan-led Green March as the “Black March” underscores how naming is itself an act of political memory.
Historically, the book traces a long arc of dispossession. The Saharawi uprising against Spanish colonialism, including the Zemla Intifada of 1970, and earlier resistance movements described as partisanos, show that Saharawi resistance predates Moroccan occupation. The author’s reflections on Spain’s abrupt withdrawal are particularly striking: abandoned towns, power stations left to decay, schools shuttered with books scattered on playgrounds. What is presented as “civilization” simply turns its back, leaving behind a vacuum soon filled by war and displacement.
Exile fractures families as much as it fractures geography. Detu’s siblings are scattered across occupied cities and refugee camps, some never to be reunited. The author himself becomes “a child of the war,” separated from his family for ten years, surviving on fragments of contact and unanswered doubt. These personal losses mirror the collective Saharawi experience—lives suspended between absence and endurance.
One of the most poignant moments is Detu’s grief when she sees a broken-down vehicle that must be push-started. Her tears are not for the machine itself but for the camels she once traveled with, which carried her belongings effortlessly across the land. The scene encapsulates the broader transition from autonomy to dependence, from a life structured around indigenous knowledge to one constrained by displacement and scarcity.
The book culminates in Detu’s poetry, where faith, homeland, and longing converge. Her prayer—to live long enough to see freedom, or at least to die on Saharawi soil—captures the emotional core of the narrative. Even in death, her words affirm that the struggle is not only about survival, but about dignity, memory, and return.
Ultimately, My Mother, My Teacher is not solely a story of suffering. It is a testament to continuity. Through Detu’s life, the book shows how culture survives occupation, how identity is taught rather than inherited automatically, and how mothers become the living archives of a nation in exile. The homeland may be physically inaccessible, but through memory, poetry, and tradition, it remains present—taught, remembered, and claimed.
My Mother, My Teacher is both an intimate homage and a collective memory. Through the figure of his mother, Detu, Mahmud Awah tells the story not only of a woman but of an entire people forced into exile. Growing up as the son of a Western Saharawi mother during and after the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara, the author situates his personal memories within the larger historical rupture that began with Spanish colonialism and culminated in the 1975 Moroccan invasion. The book is shaped by remembrance—of a homeland lost, of traditions carried across borders, and of a mother who became the primary transmitter of history, culture, and identity in exile.
Detu emerges as both a maternal and pedagogical figure. Through her poems, stories, and presence at communal gatherings, she embodies the role of the elder who keeps the homeland alive for those who can no longer access it physically. This is especially significant for Saharawis born in exile, who must imagine home through inherited memory rather than lived experience. The book implicitly asks how displaced people construct a national identity when return is impossible, and it suggests that memory, oral tradition, and cultural practice become forms of resistance. In this sense, Detu—and women like her—are not only caregivers but custodians of territory.
The continuation of Saharawi traditions throughout the narrative reinforces this idea. Customs such as gifting a bride a white camel when she leaves her mother’s home, the jaima as a portable tent, or the organization of families into frigs reflect a nomadic culture deeply tied to land and movement. Practices like tberaa, women’s poetic songs composed in spaces free from male presence, reveal how expression, desire, and resistance coexist within Saharawi society. Even language itself—shared across borders with Mauritania and distinct from Moroccan usage—becomes a marker of continuity. The way Saharawis refer to the Moroccan-led Green March as the “Black March” underscores how naming is itself an act of political memory.
Historically, the book traces a long arc of dispossession. The Saharawi uprising against Spanish colonialism, including the Zemla Intifada of 1970, and earlier resistance movements described as partisanos, show that Saharawi resistance predates Moroccan occupation. The author’s reflections on Spain’s abrupt withdrawal are particularly striking: abandoned towns, power stations left to decay, schools shuttered with books scattered on playgrounds. What is presented as “civilization” simply turns its back, leaving behind a vacuum soon filled by war and displacement.
Exile fractures families as much as it fractures geography. Detu’s siblings are scattered across occupied cities and refugee camps, some never to be reunited. The author himself becomes “a child of the war,” separated from his family for ten years, surviving on fragments of contact and unanswered doubt. These personal losses mirror the collective Saharawi experience—lives suspended between absence and endurance.
One of the most poignant moments is Detu’s grief when she sees a broken-down vehicle that must be push-started. Her tears are not for the machine itself but for the camels she once traveled with, which carried her belongings effortlessly across the land. The scene encapsulates the broader transition from autonomy to dependence, from a life structured around indigenous knowledge to one constrained by displacement and scarcity.
The book culminates in Detu’s poetry, where faith, homeland, and longing converge. Her prayer—to live long enough to see freedom, or at least to die on Saharawi soil—captures the emotional core of the narrative. Even in death, her words affirm that the struggle is not only about survival, but about dignity, memory, and return.
Ultimately, My Mother, My Teacher is not solely a story of suffering. It is a testament to continuity. Through Detu’s life, the book shows how culture survives occupation, how identity is taught rather than inherited automatically, and how mothers become the living archives of a nation in exile. The homeland may be physically inaccessible, but through memory, poetry, and tradition, it remains present—taught, remembered, and claimed.
May 16, 2026
I love Sahrawi storytelling. It goes against the rules we are taught in the West - there is no focus on dynamics, no vivid descriptions of people or of setting the scene. We rarely get to know what someone looks like; instead we learn how their presence feels.
My Mother, My Teacher is one of the very few works of Sahrawis available in English and that makes it even more precious. Bahia Mahmud Awah gives us here something more than just a memoir - his book is a whole act of resistance. It’s fragments of memories, poetry, family stories, and oral tradition woven together. This is exactly how Saharawi identity survives in exile: through memory, gatherings, poetry, and the voices of women, like his mother, who is at the centre of the book. Through her, Bahia Awah shows how women safeguard identity in exile, even as they face loss, displacement, and never seeing home again.
It’s also political: the stories of family, of camels and gatherings, even of pulling down Spanish flags, are all about resistance to colonialism and occupation. His use of Hassaniya words, poetry, and oral storytelling keeps Saharawi culture alive throughout the book.
Reading it, you feel like you’re sitting among Sahrawis, on the badia, drinking tea while Bahia’s mother tells her stories.
My Mother, My Teacher is one of the very few works of Sahrawis available in English and that makes it even more precious. Bahia Mahmud Awah gives us here something more than just a memoir - his book is a whole act of resistance. It’s fragments of memories, poetry, family stories, and oral tradition woven together. This is exactly how Saharawi identity survives in exile: through memory, gatherings, poetry, and the voices of women, like his mother, who is at the centre of the book. Through her, Bahia Awah shows how women safeguard identity in exile, even as they face loss, displacement, and never seeing home again.
It’s also political: the stories of family, of camels and gatherings, even of pulling down Spanish flags, are all about resistance to colonialism and occupation. His use of Hassaniya words, poetry, and oral storytelling keeps Saharawi culture alive throughout the book.
Reading it, you feel like you’re sitting among Sahrawis, on the badia, drinking tea while Bahia’s mother tells her stories.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews