Desert Voices: Bedouin Women's Poetry in Saudi Arabia

This is a poetry challenged for survival – first, being an oral poetry in Bedouin dialect, where written classical Arabic has been considered the high culture vehicle; second, being by women. Even when the ‘popular’ Bedouin poetry is attended to, women’s can slip through the safety net; this text works with the single collection of nomad women’s poetry, made in the 1950s.

It isn’t an anthology but a study, using the latest critical techniques. The author makes her argument for this in the introduction. Here a poetry unseen in English translation before – ‘marginalized’ several ways over -- is given the dignity of full critical treatment.

The poetry itself? Most poetry, everywhere, is about grief, isn’t it? The show more melancholy mood, above others, is singable. It seems to be here. I loved the yearning for the desert when the poet finds herself stranded in a town, and the intimate use of landscape and its animals:

"The khaluj [a she camel that has lost its calf] is the most compelling image of grief in the Bedouin Arabic dialect. The she camel is perceived as the animal most vulnerable to loss, displaying its reactions in extended and lingering mourning intervals. Sometimes its extreme mourning leads to death... its anguished and persistent moans haunt Bedouin poetry."

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