The pervasiveness of poetry's involvement in the social, historical, and political aspects of the tribal lifestyle make it a rich area for investigation. The attachment of the tribal community to poetry is one of veneration and survival. For a tribal people who has long cherished an entirely oral tradition, poetry is everything. The tribal poetry has served a multitude of ends and has taken an infinite number of forms, stretching from the most serious genres, such as heroic epics, to the most entertaining ones, such as nursery rhymes. This paper examines the performative nature of tribal poetry, represented by the form of hedaya. My primary motive is to highlight the ways in which this poetic form in particular challenges the official historical narrative provided by the Saudi government. Limiting its investigation of the hedaya to the form’s relation to history and memory, the paper concerns itself with hedaya-as-performance. It argues that the hedaya, exemplifying Diana Taylor's notion of the repertoire, offers a special opportunity to understand how the invention of this tradition responds to different interpretations of history. Having been part of the hedaya tradition for a considerable part of my life, I will mainly draw from memory, as I have witnessed and participated in numerous hedaya performances. I will also explore the ways in which hedaya has become prone to documentation and change because of technology.