The Bedouin, or ‘desert dwellers,’ have a rich cultural heritage often expressed through music and poetry. Here Moneera Al-Ghadeer provides us with the first comparative reading of women’s oral poetry from Saudi Arabia. She examines women’s lyrics of love, desire, mourning, and grievance. We come to understand Bedouin mores and—most significantly—the unique description of a desert that is consistently held to be infinite, evocative, stimulating, and liberating. As the first English translation and analysis of this poetry, Desert Voices is both a gesture to preserving the oral poetic tradition of Bedouin women and a radical critique addressing the exclusion of their poetry from current academic literary studies. The book provides invaluable material for reflection in the debates around oral culture and women’s poetic composition while it translates, presents, and critically examines this genre of Arabic poetry and literature to contemporary theory and criticism.

Moneera Al-Ghadeer is associate professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.