Into the Wadi is a memoir written by Australian author Michèle Drouart about her time in Jordan. She met her future husband, Omar, while at University in America in the 1980s and followed him back to Jordan.

The memoir describes her love for Jordan and the close knit family, but also its strangeness to her as a Westerner, an outsider. She struggles with the inability to find any time either alone, or with her husband. “Those were the moments when they felt homesick, as I did now, stifled, almost gasping for breath among these voluminous women.”

She also poignantly describes the gradual deterioration of her relationship with Omar, and of their ultimate inability to “walk together as one.” Of her struggle with his authoritarian masculinity and unapproachability, so different to the persona he had first portrayed. She reflects honestly on her own thoughts and motivations, acknowledging the role of her own romanticism and fascination with the exotic. She describes her conflicting emotions and responses:

“By day the colours are brighter, the contrasts stronger. They remind me of other contrasts, of the strange way opposites come together for me in this country, without melding or blending. No compromise. All I love most and least like about this world constantly appears at one and the same moment it seems, so that I can hardly tell them apart. Or they follow on so quickly from one another that the impression is the same….Anger and caring, pleasure and embarrassment, affection and suffocation, generosity and secrecy, these and other things all seem perversely paired.”

This was an honest and thoughtful memoir, giving an outsider’s view of a culture and way of life, while attempting to retain a balance and a positive outlook. The timeline seemed somewhat confusing, moving back and forth between Michèle’s various visits to Jordan in a somewhat haphazard fashion. Overall I found this an interesting read.

“As I grew older, the bush and the beach remained the only places where I could lose the sense of not fitting in, a sense of foreignness in my own country.” “Surely I could by experiencing the wider world, finding out the lay of lands and hearts.’ ( )