Aida Adib Bamia's book is a significant study of folk poetry as a form of literary resistance and social critique in colonial Algeria just before its war of independence from France (1954–62). Bamia examines the work of Muhammad ibn al-Tayyib עAlili (c. 1894–c. 1954), an Algerian folk poet whose compositions provide a personal and historical documentation of the social concerns of rural Algerians. The poet עAlili worked as a nomadic sharecropper in northeastern Algeria during the final decades of colonization. In a small body of ten poems, he documented rural Algerian traditions and social conflicts, critiquing them from the position of the oppressed. עAlili's poetry was first recorded and collected by his friend and patron Mohammed Hadj-Sadok, a prominent educator and folklorist. The moving story of Bamia's contact with Hadj-Sadok (and thus indirectly with עAlili), as well as her own pioneering work in folklore in 1970s Algeria, informs her argument that understanding the lineage of folk poetry in terms of its inspiration and patronage is essential in determining its multiple meanings. Although the attention to provenance is not unusual in literary study, what is unique here is the perspective from which history is observed. Bamia elucidates the connection between the poet's personal experience and the larger socio-political context of colonial Algeria.