Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Insha Allah
How The Journey Back To My Roots Became An Adventurous Escape From the Sahara
The cosmopolitan daughter of Saharawi émigrés travels to visit her family in the forgotten refugee city-camps scattered in the Western Sahara Desert.
Where is home to a refugee? In the spring of 2020, Sara Cheikh leaves her Paris home to visit her grandmother and extended family in the politically forgotten Western Sahara. Her two-week vacation becomes an unexpectedly prolonged adventure as borders close and panic about a new virus grips the world.
Sara negotiates the culture clash between the Saharawi society into which she was born and her Western lifestyle in Europe. Stuck in the desert, she considers what home means to her and her family as she defies government decrees to get back to France by any means necessary. She faces hunger, arrest, and kidnapping as she and an unlikely and unruly group of strangers and distant relatives attempt to go home.
Sometimes tense, yet always poignant and filled with wry humor, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Insha Allah explores the plight and history of the forgotten Saharawi people as readers come to know Sara and her sometimes frustrating but always loving family.
Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Insha Allah is the first book written by a Saharawi woman published in the United States. Includes archival and personal pictures of the Saharawi territories and the people who live there under occupation by multiple colonial powers.
Sara Cheikh is a Product Designer living in Barcelona. She was born in the Smara refugee camp in Tindouf, Algeria, where she lived until the age of six. Her father is a former political prisoner who worked as a translator for MINURSO (the UN mission in charge of the conflict between Western Sahara and Morocco). Through his work, brought Sara and her siblings to Spain in 1998.
Aware of the opportunity she had to grow up in Europe, Sara has always felt the duty to give a voice to the more than two hundred thousand people in the refugee camps hoping to return to the occupied Sahara. She is honored to be a spokesperson for Sahrawi society and its culture and struggle.
