JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: One of the reasons we tend to love mysteries set in foreign (to us) lands, is the pleasure of armchair traveling. As the song goes, "See the pyramids along the Nile, watch the sunrise on a tropic isle..."
But the other gift of fiction from far-flung places is the chance to get a deeper understanding of what life is truly like, with all its ambiguities and imperfections. My mental image of Switzerland, for instance, was heavily influenced by Richard Scarry books and the the cuckoo clocks my mother collected (both from my childhood in Germany, which is no coincidence.)
Kim Hays has given me an infinitely better understanding of her adopted home. In her Linder and Donatelli series, she's examined the clash between development and rural values, the rigid social structures dominating Bern society, and now, in A FONDNESS FOR TRUTH, the lives of immigrants in a famously heterogeneous society. Along with the charged, complicated relationship between her two detectives and mysteries as intricate as the workings of a Tissot watch... well, you can see why she's on my auto-buy list.
The last two times I had a mystery come out, I wrote something about Switzerland for this blog since that’s where my books are set. In fact, my
first guest post for JRW was about Swissness itself and how to define and
convey it. Today, however, I want to write about the people who live full-time
in my adopted country and are not Swiss.
Different nationalities use different ways to create citizens. A baby acquires Canadian or US citizenship, for example, by being born on those nations’ soil, even if the baby’s parents are not citizens and later leave the country. This form of “birthright” citizenship exists in New World countries settled primarily by immigrants from many nations.
Most European countries—in fact, most countries in the world—think about nationality as a family matter. You are Swiss, for example, if you are born to at least one parent with Swiss nationality. If you aren’t a Swiss “by blood,” you must apply for Swiss citizenship. The process is long, complicated, and expensive, and you need to have lived in the country for at least ten years. Generations of foreigners living and working legally in Switzerland and paying taxes haven’t bothered to become citizens—which means they can’t vote in federal and (with a few exceptions) cantonal and local elections. This is a tragedy.
The US is the country that takes in the largest number of immigrants but by no means the largest percentage: only 15% of its 335 million people are foreign-born. This proportion of foreigners is about the same as it was between 1890 and 1910 when many of our great-grandparents arrived in America. Contrast this US percentage with that of the United Arab Emirates, which hires its workforce from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh and is, therefore, 88% foreign. The populations of Australia and New Zealand are each about 30%, and Ireland and Germany, around 20%.
Switzerland has 8.9 million people, and 27% of them are foreign-born. A further Swiss statistic involves a category of residents called “people with a migration background.” This is defined as everyone who is not a citizen of Switzerland, no matter how long they’ve lived here, along with first-generation foreigners who have acquired Swiss citizenship plus citizens with one or both parents born abroad. By this definition, 40% of Switzerland’s residents have a migration background. Most of them are Europeans, the majority from the seven ex-Yugoslavian countries, followed closely by Italy, Germany, Portugal, and France.
My latest mystery, A Fondness for Truth, is the third in the Polizei Bern series featuring detectives Linder and Donatelli. It introduces a set of Swiss residents with a “migration background” who aren’t European: around 50,000 Sri Lankan Tamils. In 1983, fighting broke out in Sri Lanka between the majority Singhalese and the minority Tamil populations, continuing until 2009 and killing at least 100,000 people, including many civilians. During this civil war, Tamils dispersed worldwide, seeking safety, and Switzerland became one of their refuges.
Fifty-thousand Sri Lankan Tamils are not many, but in a country as white-skinned as Switzerland was in the 1980s, they stood out. Although it’s the nation’s capital, my city of Bern was particularly vanilla-looking. On my first walk through Bern in 1987, I told my Swiss husband-to-be that I’d never been in such a white city—and I didn’t mean the color of the walls.
I don’t know how many insults, how much violence, and what kinds of discrimination those first Tamil asylum seekers experienced in the 1980s, but, like every Swiss, I saw how determinedly they went to work. For over a decade, it seemed as if every restaurant kitchen in Bern was peopled by dark-skinned men mopping floors, washing dishes, and chopping vegetables. Tamil mothers and fathers, many with good educations, went to work at menial jobs, determined that their children—boys and girls—would have better lives. The young Tamil parents who arrived in the 1980s and 1990s are grandparents now; the younger generations speak perfect Bernese German and work at skilled jobs.
But although they seem so well integrated, the process of assimilation hasn’t been easy for them, trying to meet their parents’ high expectations and preserve Tamil culture in their homes while yearning for the independence of their Swiss peers. This dilemma is something I examine through the character of Nisha Pragasam, a Swiss Tamil who plays an essential role in A Fondness for Truth.
Like its predecessors, Pesticide and Sons and Brothers, my third book starts with a death and proceeds to my detectives' investigation of it. Into this story of Giuliana and Renzo’s police work, I’ve woven an examination of the struggles to communicate that parents and children of all ages experience. Second-generation immigrants like Nisha, brought up in a country so different from their parents’, have particular cross-cultural problems to overcome—but every family has its roadblocks. The first and possibly hardest step is recognizing them so the dismantling can begin.
Some families in A Fondness for Truth make a good start at it. Others don’t.
As Bern homicide detective Giuliana Linder pieces together the details of Andi and Nisha’s lives, her assistant Renzo Donatelli looks into Andi’s job advising young men who’ve been drafted into Switzerland’s civilian service. Working closely together on the case, Giuliana and Renzo are again tempted to become more than just friendly colleagues.
As both detectives dig into Andi’s life, one thing becomes clear: Andi’s friends and family may have loved her for her honesty, but her outspoken integrity threatened others, including, perhaps, her killer.
Photo of Tamil Temple from the Swiss State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) site.
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