Hamza Lakhal was born in El Aaiún, capital of Western Sahara, eight years after the 1975 invasion of his country by Morocco. His first poetry collection, published in Arabic by L’Harmattan-RASD, talks of a young man’s passion for his violated but resistant homeland. Joanna Allan interviews Lakhal about the struggles of a poet and activist living under a brutal and repressive occupation.

Edited by Samia Errazzouki and Allison L. McManus 

In the past few decades, both media and academic scholarship have marginalized the Western Saharan conflict, rendering it largely insignificant within regional and global political imaginations.