Human relationships lie at the heart of virtually all great stories. The more discordant the relationship the more fascinating it is for the reader and the more tightly it is likely to hold their attention, forcing them to keep turning the pages. Love stories have always been winners, and what happens when love dies is a close runner-up.
When people marry across class, racial and cultural barriers things hot up still further. From Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Romeo and Juliet the examples of great culture clashes are to be found everywhere in the literature of love.
Over the last 50 years, as multi-racial societies have proliferated and people have travelled further and more often than ever before, various patterns have emerged amongst the cross-cultural love stories that have filled the shelves of bookshops. Traditional tales of princesses falling in love with simple woodsmen and incurring the wrath of their parents have been replaced by more complex dilemmas.
First there were the women who wanted to talk about the agony of arranged or enforced marriages that had gone wrong, leading to terrible abuses and dramatic escapes. Then there were the women from Western cultures who found that dashing young Arabs and Iranians who had arrived in their cities on a wave of oil money and swept them off their feet, then led them into the heart of families who disapproved of everything they were and everything they did. There were tales of ‘mothers-in-law from hell’, and ‘tugs of love’ over children when each parent wanted to instil different cultural values into their offspring, some of them feeling so strongly that they were willing to actually kidnap them from their partners and sweep them off to other countries.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall hordes of beautiful and ambitious girls from the East marched to the West in search of jobs and rich husbands and it was the turn of Western men to fall in love and find themselves out of their depth culturally and emotionally, struggling to keep in touch with their children when their young wives disappeared back to their mothers, taking their children with them.
Sometimes the victims of these marital disasters would come to me hoping for a bestseller like Zana Muhsen’s Sold, but many just wanted to have their side of the story set down so that when their children grew up they would be able to read how hard their estranged parents had fought to keep them. Better to discover that you were a victim of a ‘tug of love’ than being left to believe that one of your parents simply didn’t care enough to put up a fight.