Petra's Author

By Margaret S. Hamilton

When we visited Petra, a UNESCO world heritage site in southwest Jordan, our guide introduced me to a jewelry vendor, Marguerite van Geldermalsen. She was born in New Zealand to Dutch parents, married Mohammad Abdallah in 1979, and lived with him in a cave on the Petra site until 1985, when the Petra Bedouin were resettled in nearby government housing. She learned Arabic, converted to Islam, and gave birth to three children.

After the death of her husband in 2002, Marguerite and her children lived in Sydney, Australia, during which she wrote and published a memoir, Married to a Bedouin, about her life in the Bedouin community. She is now back in Petra, employing local women to make exquisite silver jewelry. Her memoir has been translated into more than ten languages, and is available in her jewelry stall.

“It was as Mohammad guided us singing through rocky, oleander-crowded canyons that I fell in love with him. Why I hadn’t noticed his quick, eye-crinkling smile the day we met I don’t know, but I noticed it now. I loved his simply confident, fun-filled manner. He lit our cigarettes, and gave us a hand up, and had other gentlemanly habits which I would have scorned as a liberated woman in New Zealand, but which appealed to me now. He fixed his red and white mendeel, throwing the knotted ends up over his head into an exotic Bedouin turban, and flashed me a smile.” (p.29)

Marguerite is crisp and professional, happy to sign a book before she returns to selling jewelry. In her memoir, her narrative voice is tender, her humor wry, as she describes her nursing job and huge extended family. She writes short chapters detailing the intricacies of cooking shraak, or flat bread, preparing vegetable soup, and washing clothes in a stream. Wedding celebrations are multiple day events with horse races, rifle shooting, and goats boiled in yoghurt.

The "Treasury"

“The path wound along the dry riverbed in the shade of gigantic oleanders. There were usually others on their way to the spring. A young man playing a tin flute might be going to check his father’s olive tree garden; a goatherd might be leading her goats down for a drink. There were always children on their way to get water, racing their donkeys for the fun of it. Their shouts were music, their bouncing jerry-cans drums, and the whole scene echoing off the mountainsides was intoxicating.” (p.83).

 Petra is a vast area of rose-colored sandstone, with many tombs and temples carved into the cliffs (200 BC), the most famous of which is Al Khazheh, or the “Treasury”, featured in the Indiana Jones movie The Last Crusade. Petra was the capital of the Nabatean Kingdom of nomads who made it a thriving trading hub of 20,000 people. The Nabateans specialized in harvesting rainwater (and piping it throughout the city), agriculture, and stone carving. It accommodated large caravans of camels traveling the route from Arabia to Damascus.

The "Monastery"

Before she moved from Australia back to Petra, Marguerite wrote:

“The Bedouin have settled in to Umm Sayhoon, but by day they inhabit the ruins of Petra. They bring them back to life—using donkeys to take tourists to the High Place and the Monastery, camels to get them to Wadi Sabra and Jabal Haroon, and almost any means at all to get them into the shade for a glass of mint tea. And, if there’s one happening, they invited them with typical enthusiastic hospitality back to up to their village for a Bedouin Wedding. But I wasn’t in Petra for the mountains or the history—nor even for the culture. Without Mohammad to hold me I am no longer married to a Bedouin and, despite all the things we have accumulated, I have become a nomad once again.” (p. 276)

Readers and writers, have you visited Petra or lived in a similar isolated community without plumbing or electricity?

Married to a Bedouin, Marguerite van Geldermalsen, London: Virago Press, 2006

Marguerite's jewelry designs, Petra Pieces, are not displayed on-line. Learn more on her Petra Pieces Facebook site.

Photos: Margaret Hamilton Turkevich and Leonid A. Turkevich