Sylvia shares her experiences of starting out married life in the same building where her mother-in-law and other extended family members lived. Sylvia found herself in a new land with a new husband and where everyone spoke a language she did not understand.
This was before it was natural for most homes to have satellite TV. This was before the internet was readily available in Saudi Arabia. Instead of her dream of becoming an international journalist, she found herself a young mother and new wife living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. They had a fast courtship and were soon married. Here is a tale of the passionate human heart and the choices some women make to follow it.American Bedu recently completed reading the book “The Red Sea Bride.” “The Red Sea Bride” is the autobiography of Sylvia Fowler, a woman who met her Saudi husband when he was a student in Texas during the 1980’s. The author tells not just her own story, but those of her friends as well as of Saudi women she came to love as fiercely as her own blood relatives. Sylvia merges into a coterie of Western women married to Saudis, all of whom rely on their hearts and wits to keep an even keel. Love struggles in this magical world of the seen and the unseen, where jinn and angels are as palpable as the sand of the desert. Duped into working at King Abdul Aziz University, she is refused a salary. When she gives her husband money to buy a piece of land, the deed is in his name and she is barred inheritance. Her college degrees are valueless in the eyes of the Saudi government. In Jeddah, Sylvia loses all rights: to work with pay, to walk on the street or to have a telephone. She meets Malik's mother and grandmother, both of whom married when they were children of 11 or 12. After obtaining two college degrees and marrying Malik, she accompanies him to his five-thousand-year-old city, Jeddah, situated by the Red Sea. At a language school on the Pacific Ocean, 18-year-old Sylvia falls in love with a devastating young Saudi man named Malik.
0 kommentar(er)
