Title: All Love Prohibited
Author: Anders Eklof
Publisher: Toplink Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 1949804666
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 388
Interviewed by: Aaron Washington
Author Interview with Anders Eklof
HBR: What inspired you to start writing?The novel “ALL LOVE PROHIBITED” was inspired by my own life experiences. Mostly by what happened when I first arrived in the United States. Being transplanted from liberal, peaceful, homogenous, and secular Sweden to the American South in 1961 produced a real culture shock. Racial prejudice, plus fundamentalist Christianity and its puritanical sexual mores were in stark contrast to the mores and beliefs I was brought up with. I was an idealistic and naive man all of 20 years of age and felt a great deal of sympathy with the beginning civil rights movement. My loyalty to the black American population grew as I fell in love with a beautiful black woman.
HBR: How long have you been writing?
I enjoyed writing as soon as I learned to write as a child. As an adult, most of my writing has been technical documents for work, such as manuals, specifications, handbooks, patent applications, et cetera. From time to time I have written various essays and short stories, usually on subjects of history, religion, and psychology. I have been very interested in those subjects since I discovered that American racial prejudice could be fully understood only with a good knowledge of all three of those. So far, “ALL LOVE PROHIBITED” is the only story I have published.
HBR: Where do you get your inspiration?
From my life experiences, certainly. I have been married to two women of African ethnic background. In total, the two marriages have lasted for more than thirty years so far and have each produced two children. My circle of close friends has also contained mostly black individuals. That is in contrast to my high-tech professional life. There, I have worked almost exclusively with individuals of European and Asian ancestry. Many of them have not known the ethnicity of my wife and friends. Occasionally, especially in the 1960s and ‘70s, I heard comments, mostly from white Americans, revealing their prejudices and narrowminded beauty standards. That, and the extensive reading I have done over many years on history, religion and psychology have been a great inspiration. They all motivated me to write a story that reaches into all those subjects.
HBR: What do you hope your readers take away from this book?
I hope that the younger generation of Americans will learn how thoroughly racial prejudice and oppression has permeated American society in the past. American schools teach a very skimpy, shallow and sanitized version of American history. My own children can testify to that. In my experience, white Americans of all ages are shocked and offended if one attempts to tell them the full truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about slavery, the Jim Crow era, and the violent oppression that black Americans suffered well into the 1960s. It is, ironically, received as “anti-American.”
HBR: What was the highlight of writing this book?
Reaching back in memories to almost forgotten feelings, events, and situations. It was like blowing on ashen embers and seeing the glow return and feeling the heat of the fire that was once there. It was enriching. The view of my life became a panorama full of passions rather than a myopic view of today’s trivial concerns.
HBR: Who is the author you most admire in your genre?
I really don’t have a “genre.” One might consider ALL LOVE PROHIBITED to be in the genre of romance/drama, or interracial romance, or historical romance. However, it could also be considered a study of obsession, or limerence, or some even deeper currents of human psychology. Or a deeply felt social commentary.
I have wide-ranging interests, and great admiration for all people who have been brilliant, revolutionary and iconoclastic in their thinking: Pharaoh Akhenaten, Newton, Copernicus, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and others who have turned conventional thinking upside down. That is why I named my new website “voicesfromoutsidethebox.com.” For the moment it only talks about the book ALL LOVE PROHIBITED,” but the intent is to post a lot more material on a variety of subjects.
The ones who have had the most significant influence on my writings are probably Sigmund Freud and Richard Dawkins in how I view human nature, and Erik Foner and Eugene D. Genovese in researching the history of race relations in America. In the genre of romantic novels, I am old-fashioned. I like stories like “The Count of Monte Christo” by Alexandre Dumas! (Don’t laugh.)
HBR: Do you plan to write any more books?
I have a second manuscript that just went through the gruelling, three-round editing process of the Kirkus Review “Pro” program, where it received high praise. It is not a novel but a work in a more academic style, titled “Racial Prejudice in America: A Different View.”
I am not allowed to quote verbatim from their report, but their editors were very impressed by the research that had gone into it as well as the easy-to-follow writing style. It traces the origin of racial prejudice from the beginnings of slavery in America through the slavery and Jim Crow eras and goes into great historical detail of the “1960s,” which was really the two decades from the 1954 “Brown vs. Board of Education” decision to the 1975 end of the Vietnam War. The last chapter of that book is called “Sex and Sin in America.”
A third manuscript, “The Divine Tragedy: The Vengeance of the Forsaken Gods” is in process at Kirkus Review and has also received great, I could say effusive, praise in supplementary comments by the editors. It is a historical review of religion as an evolutionary-psychology phenomenon, going back many tens of thousands of years in its origins.
It begins by laying a foundation of scientific knowledge about the origins of the universe, our planet, and earthly life. It then explores the deep human instincts of family and tribal bonds. Religious notions are seen as the conceptualization, idealization, and iconification of those instincts. The history of religion leads via prehistoric fertility gods through classical Egyptian polytheism, the revolutionary monotheism of Pharaoh Akhenaten and his contemporary Moses, Judaism, the heresy of Jesus, and the winding road of the development of Christian dogma, to the current growth of science and secular humanism.