ALIVE Book Review: Where Love Crosses Boundaries

At the heels of the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, author Jean Grant’s book called The Burning Veil could not be more timely or relevant with her poignant message of learning about the beauty of other cultures. A labor of love, her 242-page novel offers her readers an up close and personal view of a love story between two young people from different cultures; Dr. Sarah Moss from Wisconsin and Ibrahim Suleiman from Saudi Arabia.

Living in the Middle East for 20 years herself, definitely helped contour her fictional story lines laced with real life experiences, lifestyles and beautiful landscapes. “I lived in Cairo, Egypt for one year, Beirut, Lebanon for 10 years; and nine in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Each country is unique. In Egypt, there was great poverty, but much laughter and culture. It’s a tiny country; so many are jammed into the river delta. Everything is crowded, the trains and shops. We were there when the great Arab nationalist Gamal Abdul Nasser was in power, but many of those we knew opposed him,” said Grant, who was a staff reporter for Arab News in Saudi Arabia.

“In Lebanon, there are mountains and it is a land of extraordinary beauty,” added Grant. “There is also a great diversity of culture, with Muslims and Christians working and living together. It seemed to work beautifully, but then everything fell apart in the mid 1970’s, the beginning of the Civil War.”

Married to Bob Fraga with their two grown sons, Grant hails from Montreal, Canada. Her upbringing and travels as a young adult helped shape her love for various cultures and prepared her for life outside of the United States. “I grew up in Montreal in a Jewish/French neighborhood, so I knew there a great many ways to live one’s life. After getting my B.A., I went to France as a graduate student and traveled to Great Britain, Ireland, Spain and Italy, so by the time I got to Egypt I was already accustomed to a variety of people,” she said.

Grant went to French school for grades 3 through 5 in Montreal, received her B.A. degree in Vancouver, received a French government scholarship and studied the sociology of religion there, then continued with her M.A. in English Literature at the American University of Beirut.

Inspiration for her love story came while she taught at Dhahran Academy in Saudi Arabia. “Since women weren’t allowed to drive, every morning at 7:15 a.m. we teachers were bussed to the school. One morning, I noticed a fellow teacher silently weeping. She was an American married to a Saudi, and the marriage was going poorly,” wrote Grant on her website. “A few weeks later, she left. I met several women like her, who came to the kingdom full of hope and very much in love. A few stayed on. Several left. I was curious about Saudi American marriages. I hoped for a better outcome for my heroine, Sarah.”

Appreciating other cultures is not really how Grant chooses to define things, since she feels that resonates more with tolerance. “For me the key thing is the pursuit of happiness and I’ve gained so much enjoyment from other cultures, their cuisine and literature and different ways of showing affection,” said Grant. “I suppose it is important (appreciating other cultures), but that focus makes it sound like getting to know other cultures is some kind of bitter medicine. It’s not. Or it needn’t be. It’s fun. That said, it’s important to see ourselves as others see us. We may not like it, but many see Americans as spoiled, violent children who have little dignity. The television shows that we export and that the world so loves to encourage this unfortunate perspective.”

While she believes it’s not entirely unavoidable, Grant is not a big fan of stereotyping. “It’s lazy, sloppy thinking. But it’s hard to avoid stereotypes if our lives are not rich with experiences of others who are different from us,” she said. “That’s why it’s marvelous to befriend foreign students, to go to films made by those of other cultures, to read their books in translation and to fall in love with them.”

Currently working on her second book called Faithless in France, which starts off in Beirut in the Civil War, Grant is hoping it doesn’t take nearly as long as it did to write the first one. “I’d write it and then put it down. I had two or three versions with different plot lines. Ten years? Twenty years? It sounds like forever, but it was diddle-daddling trying to find out what I wanted to say. I rarely worked on it full-time,” she said.

Her advice to would-be authors out there is to start small and work your way up. “Almost everyone I know is writing a book. I think those of us who write, do well to read the works of others. We’re all in this together. We learn a great deal by writing and with the advent of e-publishing and print on demand publishing, it’s easy to get one’s work out there,” she said. “Maybe for starters, consider a short, easy book. There’s a need for more “how to” books. e.g. how to grow out your hair; how to use money to help the world. Creative non-fiction is a marvelous field.”

An extract from her next book was first runner-up for the 2011 Maureen Egen Writer’s Exchange Award, and Grant is keeping her fingers crossed for finalist in the categories of fiction-religious and fiction-multicultural in the ForeWord Reviews contest for The Burning Veil. But Grant is not writing for accolades, she’s writing for humanity. “I’d like them to garner a sympathy for the beauty of Islam in everyday life and how it helps people live lives of kindness and generosity,” she said.

The Burning Veil can be purchased at www.Amazon.com or visit her website at www.mishmishpress.com.