Aqaba Governate in Jordan has been home to generations of Bedouin poets. Photo by Maira Seeley.

“So, why have you come all this way to learn about Nabati poetry?” Muhammad, the television host, wants to know. We are sitting in his studio in Amman, Jordan, winding down a lengthy cultural programme on Arabic colloquial poetry. It is past midnight, and despite the cups of coffee in front of us, I am sleepy and not quite sure how to explain myself. Muhammad is speaking in formal, urbanite Arabic and I’ve spent the last two months trying to wrap my brain around a very different Bedouin dialect.

“Well…” – I hesitate. “It’s the sound, I guess. The rhythm of the words, how you feel them.”

Muhammad smiles and nods, as if I’ve just fulfilled some expectation. His question was meant mainly to draw me out – there is little surprise here that someone would travel so far simply to hear poetry.

Spoken words hold a power in the Middle East that is difficult to imagine outside the region. Islamic pedagogy is based on children’s ability to recite the Qur’an from memory, and although the literacy rate in Jordan is nearly 100%, most Jordanians that I met kept a personal library of verse in their heads. In “Million’s Poet”, the Middle Eastern counterpart of American Idol or Britain’s Got Talent, contestants take the stage, sometimes in costume, and use only their inspiration and their voices to make it through the rounds. I heard poetry recited in city taxis, at office coffee breaks, at family gatherings, around shisha pipes, and in contests hosted at a rural camel racetrack. Some of the words I heard were intended for vast audiences, while others were recited by women working alone.

Outside the Middle East, perhaps the best-known Arabic poetry is the “great tradition” of literate verse that includes the works of Mahmoud Darwish, Hafez Ibrahim, and Ahmed Shawqi. This poetry is a testament to the beauty of formal, literary Arabic, but its fame perhaps obscures another tradition: the colloquial Bedouin verse known as Nabati poetry. Composed in a less formal register, Nabati poetry has been sometimes maligned as unsophisticated or “incorrect” language, as it often uses rural Bedouin dialects and pronunciation. Nabati poetry traditionally remained unpublished and was transmitted orally, and although the internet has become a massive tool for its dissemination, many poems are not transcribed but uploaded as recordings or videos. Simply reading a Nabati poem silently on paper is not enough: its real power is in the poet’s voice.

I spent the summer in Jordan listening to men and women speak about poetry and about themselves as poets. Nabati poetry in Jordan is primarily composed by those of Bedouin descent, who form a socially powerful minority in Jordanian society. Most Jordanian Bedouin no longer follow traditional migration cycles, having settled in towns and villages in the past few decades to grow food and find employment in the tourism industry, the military, the police force, or the government. Bedouin women have largely lost their traditional roles as contributors to the household’s subsistence – today yoghurt is bought, not churned in a goatskin – and they have suffered a corresponding loss in their decision-making power and authority. Bedouin women’s activity outside the home can be heavily restricted by traditional moral standards that emphasise women’s isolation from unrelated men. Nabati poetry, however, seems to create an exceptional context. A teenage girl poet who could not be seen walking in a nearby village for fear of shame was favourably received as a poet reciting before an enormous mixed audience. Other Bedouin women poets used their poetry as a point of entry into local or national politics, voicing controversial views and thus entering a political sphere from which they are usually excluded. I spent a memorable July evening as the only woman in an audience of 300 southern Jordanian Bedouin during a rural Nabati poetry evening (umsiyyah), but noticed that two of the six poets reciting were female. A poetess’ voice carries much further than other women’s words.

Ramadan brings nightlong gatherings, women and men clustered in separate courtyards around shisha, tea, and coffee. Teenage Fatima, tired of sitting, invites me to walk in the olive groves surrounding her family’s house. We wander a little ways, eyes on the lookout for the shabab youth whose presence we must avoid, talking about nothing in particular. Nine-year-old ‘Azzeh follows at a distance until we decide to sit on the pebbles under one of the silvery trees. “Recite something, tell us something in English,” Fatima asks. “Don’t you know any poetry?” A folksong is the best I can muster, and she follows it with a secret ghazal, a love poem that transforms her voice from an excited whisper into something rich and delicious. “It’s my turn!” ‘Azzeh stamps her foot when Fatima’s ghazal is over. She begins to recite, something nationalistic she heard from her mother, making a few mistakes but correcting them with Fatima’s help. I can hear the TV in the kitchen at a distance. I know it’s playing a Turkish soap opera, and I know too that no one is watching it – they are absorbed in each other’s overlapping voices. ‘Azzeh and Fatima continue to trade poems under the trees, and I know that we will be here a long time.