Dreaming of the desert: my life in the Sahara, by Sanmao

Travel writing is ‘the red light district of literature’, as Colin Thubron aptly put it, a space where anything goes. Like punters to the other red light districts, we tend to stick to what we know we like, to our own kind. We travel vicariously with voices that are familiar, or at least intelligible, whose behaviour we can understand, whose narrators we believe we can know. That belief allows them to take us to places we have never seen. How, then, can we follow a foreign author’s account of travelling to, or living in, a place we don’t know? I thought this would be an interesting problem while reading Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara.

Sanmao is not the author’s real name. Born Chen Maoping in China in 1943, she was brought up in Taiwan and educated there, and in Madrid and Germany. In the early 1970s, she married a Spaniard. He loved water, but she dreamed of the desert. Her background is significant because the stories she tells are as much about herself as about the place she found herself living in.

That place was the Spanish Sahara, now the Western Sahara, disputed between Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Had this book been written by a British or American writer, we might have expected tales of long camel journeys, insights into the indigenous Sahrawis and perhaps their struggle against the occupying Spanish, who finally abandoned the colony in 1976, the year this book was first published in Taiwan. Instead, we are entertained with Sanmao’s tales of marrying José, a good man but not the love of her life (there had been a German fiancé, who had died before their wedding); of building a home on the unglamorous side of the unglamorous city of El Aaiún (Laayoune) and of engaging with the impoverished Sahrawis in her neighbourhood and with the wider community.