To reach into even the recent past is to imagine a context in which reading and writing were rare. The verbal arts were—and in many contexts still are—dominated by epics, poems, stories, speeches and other spoken genres. As texts are only a shore to literature’s ocean, literary history is incomplete without considering orature. This is particularly true among Arabophone Saharans in Mauritania, Morocco and the Western Sahara, where poetry has retained its prestige in both educational settings and the larger literary culture (Bensaid & Ladjal 2019; McNee 2001; Pettigrew 2007). Yet, the ephemeral nature of vernacular literature presents a dilemma: how can we recover a desert archive if its past use was unwritten, and its current use is not tied to a certain time? Additionally, does archiving the vernacular inevitably strip it of its vitality and remove it from the human memory it is meant to dwell in? Building on Rotimi Omoyele Fasan’s (2011) observance of "a third space, an interstice between the purely oral and written,” I propose dissolving the idea of texts as discretely self-contained literary forms and instead reading certain written genres as part of orature’s archive. Anticolonial resistance leader al-Shaikh Māʼ al-ʻAynayn (1838-1910), for example, wrote sharūḥ (elucidations) of his own poems peppered with the phrase “dear reader or listener,” indicating that the text would be read aloud. He also described the circumstances and reception of his poems in his writing. These traces of the vernacular within the written corroborate other scholars’ observation that manuscripts and early lithographic printings were often a means to preserve what would be recited and received aurally, rather than expressions of a written style per se (El Moudden 1990; HT Norris 1986). For example, letters containing Sufi miracle tales and poems would circulate among North African zawiyas (Sufi lodges) for memorization and recitation rather than for silent, solitary reading (Gutelius 2002). Since these same zawiya leaders would also exchange lengthy scholarly texts, it was the genre rather than the physical medium which coded a work as orature. Using 19th and 20th-century texts from the northwest Sahara, this paper will demonstrate how written literature can be used to recover aspects of an ephemeral desert archive and write it back into literary history.