Not Without My Daughter on Parental Abduction, Orientalism and Maternal Melodrama

04 de Hart (jk/d) 3/1/01 2:36 pm Page 51 Not Without My Daughter On Parental Abduction, Orientalism and Maternal Melodrama Betty de Hart UNIVERSITY OF NIJMEGEN ABSTRACT In 1987 the book Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody became a worldwide best-seller. In the line of Mahmoody’s book, similar ‘true stories’ of western white women with oriental husbands were published. These books con- centrate on topics like bad marriages, abuse and international parental abduction. In this article the books are analysed as popular culture products of orientalist discourse on mixed marriages. They are maternal melodramas in which women who are victims of their intermarriage become heroines by sacrificing themselves for the sake of their children. As ‘learned foolhardy women’ the authors of these stories are cultural reproducers of the West; their function is to warn other women not to enter into a mixed marriage and to warn western society about the dangers of racial and cultural intermixture. KEY WORDS gender N mixed marriage N motherhood N orientalism N parental abduction N white women INTRODUCTION In 1987 Not Without My Daughter, a ‘true story’ by Betty Mahmoody, became an international best-seller. The book tells the story of a white American woman who was forced to stay in Iran by her Iranian husband, together with her four-year-old daughter. Eighteen months later, after a treacherous trip through the Turkish mountains, she and her daughter fled back to the USA. The publication of 13 similar ‘true stories’ followed between 1987 and 1998. These books tell of bad marriages, abuse and international parental abduction. Most books were written by the mothers themselves, often with the help of a ghost writer.1 Many books were first published in Great Britain (five) and the USA (four), plus others in Italy, Germany, France, Australia and the Netherlands. They were translated into many languages and movies or The European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 8(1): 51–65 [1350-5068(200102)8:1;51–65;015616] 04 de Hart (jk/d) 3/1/01 2:36 pm Page 52 52 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 8(1) documentaries based on the books were released. It could be stated that the whole western world is familiar with the books. In 1990 Betty Mahmoody was elected ‘Woman of the Year’ and ‘Most Courageous Person of the Year’ in Germany. A Dutch newspaper called her ‘Mother of All Mothers’. In 1992 Not Without My Daughter won the Dutch readers’ prize for best book. The books received positive reviews in the European press, depicting them as the accounts of mothers fighting for their children, and as women fighting for their rights as western women. A Belgian newspaper described the story of Patsy Heymans as ‘the fight against a man, a culture’.2 The caption to a photograph of Zana Muhsen with her daughter was: ‘Zana’s daughter has the luck to grow up in a country [i.e. the UK] where women are respected’.3 The German magazine Der Spiegel wrote about Mahmoody: She is the pure West. She is brave, wise at the right time, crying at the humili- ation and cold-blooded only when necessary. Her husband is the dark mystery, whose change from American into Iranian resembles the change from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde.4 However, the books also met with criticism. In Europe, public protests came from organizations of binationals. Furthermore, several books and brochures either by Iranian intellectuals or organizations of binationals were published. Their main criticism concerns the prejudices against Iranian culture and binational relationships.5 Other comments focus on the gender issue. In a special issue on ‘Women and Islam’ of the Dutch magazine Buitenlandersbulletin (Foreign- ers’ Bulletin) the journalist Sietske de Boer criticized the way the books were represented as ‘junk’ (de Boer, 1993). According to her the books, although no intellectual fireworks, are informative about the cultural conflicts between East and West and the struggle of women for their identity. The authors know both eastern and western culture and refuse to ‘convert’ to the eastern culture. The stories tell of their ‘literal and figura- tive return to the West’, although not necessarily to a western lifestyle. What the authors look for is a space-in-between, a synthesis between East and West. According to de Boer, the books prove that the negative images of the West about the East are not only fantasy and production, but are based on facts and own experiences. That the books became such a huge success, proves that people in the West do not want to make the West a little bit eastern (de Boer, 1993). Others, such as Lutz (1993), Ware (1992) and Robinson (1996) present a different analysis. In a reaction to de Boer, Helma Lutz rejects the view of Mahmoody as a source of information about culture conflicts between East and West. She indicates that Iranian women and women married to Iranian men protested against the stereotyping in Mahmoody’s book on 04 de Hart (jk/d) 3/1/01 2:36 pm Page 53 de Hart: Not Without My Daughter 53 Iran, Iranian culture and mixed relationships. Lutz labels the review of de Boer a ‘West is best’ approach, which divides women into more, or less oppressed. According to Lutz, the books serve a function for the privileged: contrasting those to the other, who have not reached the higher stage of development yet (Lutz, 1993). The attraction of the Mahmoody story can be explained by the ongoing ancient animosity of Christianity towards Islam. Furthermore, it deals with the construction of western gender relations, of western femininity and masculinity. The Mahmoody story legitimizes western superiority: ‘Betty Mahmoody fights for all of us, we are Betty Mahmoody’ (Lutz, 1992: 69). According to Robinson (1996) in her analysis of the Australian media coverage of the story of Jacqueline Gillespie, images of women in other societies reinforce norms of subordination in western societies. As Gillespie’s story shows, if western women thought they had it bad, it is nothing compared to the situation of women in the East and therefore western women should not complain (Robinson, 1996). According to Naber, the Mahmoody story portrays Arab women as a super-oppressed and inferior group in comparison with white American women, who are represented as the most liberated and superior group of women on earth (Naber, 2000). Ware writes on the book written by the British journalist Eileen Mac- Donald about her involvement with the struggle of Zana Muhsen and her mother: The reader is invited to share her evident distaste for a society in which women appear to be simply bought and sold by their elders, and to view its inhabitants with a rather more derisory sort of scandalised sneer. While the act of comparing social and sexual relations in two different societies may seem like pertinent journalism, the way it is done in this example confirms to a broader ideologically charged survey in which the position of women in a society indicates the level of civilisation it has reached. (Ware, 1992: 14) Lutz’s, Naber’s, Robinson’s and Ware’s analyses of the books as modern products of orientalism, hostility against Islam and gender relations in the West offer important insights. However, it is not the complete picture. The books are being analysed in the West–East dichotomy, which disregards one aspect. Since the white western women crossed the border between West and East by marrying an oriental husband, these books present a mixture of East and West. The discourse on mixed marriages, and white femininity within this discourse, is a specific one. As Ware points out, ‘love across the color line’ is a theme in itself, independent of political themes (Ware, 1992: 233) – or rather, other political themes, since mixed marriages are definitely a political issue. It is this discourse on mixed marriages that I analyse in 04 de Hart (jk/d) 3/1/01 2:36 pm Page 54 54 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 8(1) this article, taking the 13 books on intermarriage and parental abduction as a starting point. THE INTERRACIAL FAMILY ROMANCE In colonial and orientalist discourse miscegenation, mixed marriages and half-breeds are major issues. Interracial or interethnic relationships and marriages cross borders between East and West, and they show what happens in the ‘contact zone’ of different cultures, ethnic and racial groups. Part of this discourse is the power of the lascivious oriental woman who seduces the white male, but far more common is the threat of the oriental male to white western women. The love of a white woman and oriental man upsets ‘natural’ gender roles and traditional hierarchies and their transgression is catastrophic (Zantop, 1997). Through the relationship with a black or oriental man, the white woman becomes ‘racialized’. This does not mean that she is ascribed the same position as an oriental woman, she is ascribed a particular and qualitatively new position as a white woman and a mother in a mixed marriage (Durrow, 1995; Frankenberg, 1993; Ifekwunigwe, 1999). The discourse is often very negative, but even if a sympathetic attitude towards the interracial romance is taken up, things are bound to go wrong. The interracial romance cannot survive in a racially divided world (Zantop, 1997). The ‘interracial family romance’ ends with divorce, violence and often death of the child born out of the relationship, or that of one or both of the spouses (see analyses by Hueng, 1997; Marchetti, 1993; Young, 1996).

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