Can one be an exile within the nation? What is one when one is not a national? How does the position of such individuals call into question such categories as the national, the regional or the international? This paper seeks to examine these questions through a reading of novelist and activist Mus‘ad Abu Fajr’s first novel Tal‘at al-badan (2007). Focusing on the Bedouin communities of Sinai, Egypt the author examines the position of these groups within the national and regional context. The novel, whose actions span the twentieth century, both problematizes the image of the Bedouins of Sinai as it has been articulated by the official, Egyptian (and to a degree Western) discourse and draws attention to their ongoing marginalization and persecution. Through the telling of stories Fajr’s characters construct an alternative narrative for their people, alerting the reader to the ways in which time and time the Sinai Bedouins have been exiled from their lands. This project of narration is itself conscious: the reader is privy to the narrator’s process of selection and deletion, telling and re-telling. By tracing the effects of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, Fajr also traces the ongoing displacement of the Bedouins-a group that has not historically been represented as the ‘victims’ of these conflicts. Beginning in 1948 al-Fajr presents the Egyptian and Israeli struggle for land, a struggle that included Bedouin land. It is the construction of the national which concerns this paper: what happens to those who are left outside of this construction? What is the political and geographical fate of these ‘outsiders’ and how does there existence call into question the very category of Egyptian or Arab?