La inversión de la relación del yo con el otro

Abstract

The link between Western Sahara and Spain is framed in a contradictory logic in which the boundary between (Spanish) ‘identity’ and (Sahrawi) ‘alterity’ gradually diffuses, as we go back in time and move towards the (literary) space of the former Province no. 53. In their book of poems, Isla Truk (2011), the Canarian authors María Jesús Alvarado and Maribel Lacave – whose childhood is reciprocally linked to Western Sahara – focus on the concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘otherness’ from a dual perspective: both contemporary and far back in time, on their journey towards the utopia of childhood. After a brief historical account, we enter into the subject by highlighting those linguistic and semantic patterns which offer the reader – a ‘visionary reader’ – the key to interpreting the double experience of what we dare to define ‘identity in the Saharawi otherness’.

Keywords

• Identity. Maribel Lacave. María Jesús Alvarado. Otherness. Poetry. Western Sahara