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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Between cultures, July 19, 2007
Sweetness in the Belly is the moving and heart-warming story of Lilly Abdal. Told in her own words, it adds to it a special liveliness, directness and authenticity. Camilla Gibb has succeeded in creating a rich and detailed account of the life of a young woman caught between cultures and identities. It is also a love story at different levels. Her narrative alternates between periods during the four dramatic years in Ethiopia and those during ten years in London, after leaving Ethiopia in 1974, at the end of Emperor Haile Selassi's reign. Gibb's novel is fast moving and particularly compelling in its portrayal of Lilly's life in the holy city of Harar. At the same time, she is conveying in-depth insights into the respective realities there and in England and establishes the religious and cultural context that surround the heroine with great subtlety and credibility.
Lilly, born in England but, after the murder of her peripatetic parents in Morocco, remains there and is raised at a Muslim shrine by the Great Abdal, a Sufi teacher, to become a devout Muslim. She is eight years old. When forced to leave Morocco at the age of sixteen due to political upheavals, she embarks on a pilgrimage across the Sahara desert to the ancient holy city of Harar in Ethiopia. Not being accepted as a white girl in the household of the local sheikh, she is sent off to live with a poor cousin of one of his wives. Nouria, single mother of four, subsists in a shack in a deprived part of town. Gibb evokes the sounds and smells of the place, creating an authentic portrait of the harsh life of its inhabitants. Nouria and the neighbours start off being hostile of this "farenji" who knows the Qur'an better than they do. It takes Lilly considerable time and effort to be accepted. Seeking to belong where she can feel emotionally an physically safe, she immerses herself completely in their world and accepts the customs of her surroundings. Through Lilly's eyes the reader is introduced to a culture, rich in tradition and rituals. Not all of them are acceptable to Lilly, given her Sufi upbringing and she argues against them. Political developments in Ethiopia and a new circle of friends also challenge her traditional beliefs and behaviour. When she develops romantic feelings for the young attractive doctor she has to chart out her own way.
Alternating with accounts of her time in Harar, as she grows into an adult (1970-1974), Lilly narrates her life in London, beginning fifteen years after leaving Ethiopia. Now working as a nurse and living in a poor housing estate, she remains an outsider who does not fit into British reality. Committed to preserve her religion and her Ethiopian culture, she befriends Amina, her Ethiopian refugee neighbour and creates an oasis of "home" around them. While Amina and her family adjust more and more to the western lifestyle, Lilly clings to the memories of her previous life and the people in it. But developments force her to reassess and look into the future rather than hanging on to the past. Will she be able to do it?
Gibb's rendering of the East African refugee scene is as realistic as her portrayal of conditions in Harar. Her novel is grounded and enriched by her thorough research and personal experiences with the cultures and the places she evokes. Ethiopians went through famine and deprivations during the early 1907s, a time that ended in the uprising against and eventual removal of the Emperor. Gibb brings this context into the novel without overburdening the reader. She finds a convincing balance between the personal and the general keeping the book a page turner from beginning to end. [Friederike Knabe]
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sweetness, famine, faith, June 7, 2007
On one level, this beautiful book is a love story. But it is set against a terrible history of conflict, persecution, genocide, and famine. The unlikely friendships that spring up between people of different backgrounds do not come easily, nor does love always promise a storybook ending. For although much of the book takes place in London in the 1980s, its emotional core is rooted in the years leading up to the terrible events surrounding the deposition of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia in 1974. [The details of this political upheaval are by no means clear from the book, and they are not easy to understand by looking up "Ethiopia" on Wikipedia either -- though I urge interested readers to try.]
Camilla Gibb, an Englishwoman who has worked in Ethiopia as a social anthropologist, has chosen an unlikely but apt perspective for her protagonist, Lilly. Born of hippie parents, an English father and Irish mother, Lilly was taken from country to country, and was still a young child when her parents were murdered in Morocco. There, she was taken in by a Sufi scholar and trained in the Qur'an (with an additional diet of English literature supplied by an expatriate acquaintance). The upshot is that she arrives in the ancient city of Harar in Ethiopia on a pilgrimage while still in her teens, and stays there, living in relative poverty and eking out a living as a teacher, a "farenji" or foreigner in appearance, but a more knowledgeable devotee of Islam than most of the people around her. When civil war breaks out, she is forced to flee, only one of numerous Ethiopians to be torn from family and loved ones.
The book opens a decade after these events, which are established in outline within the first few pages. Lilly is living in London, working as a nurse, and (with a fellow Ethiopian refugee) running the local branch of an agency to reunite family members with one another. These sections of the novel, which alternate smoothly with African flashbacks, are similar to numerous other books about immigrant assimilation by writers such as Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Monica Ali, though Gibb has her own voice of tender sorrow. The paradox is that English-born Lilly is more reluctant to assimilate than her Ethiopian friend Amina. But all the characters have their own traumas, and they each find healing in different ways.
I was not sure that I would like this book at first. It starts with a rather over-written introduction, then plunges into a description of an emergency childbirth scene that is hard to get into focus. Gibb tends to do this -- throwing a scene at you so suddenly that you wonder if you have missed some essential preparation -- but each episode supports the others, and she creates an amazing feeling of immediacy and authenticity. The same with her use of language: she is free with her use of foreign words, often without translation; the effect is like learning a language by the immersion method. While other writers throw in foreign words merely for local color, keeping the reader essentially on the outside looking in, Gibb makes you feel on the inside looking out. Her success in convincing me of the texture of daily life among women in a Islamic country is even greater than the best passages in Khaled Hosseini's A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS. For a sensitive inner look at how it feels to be a devout Muslim woman in the western world, I can only compare this to Leila Aboulela's fine but simpler novel THE TRANSLATOR, which I recommend to anybody who has enjoyed this book.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Illuminating and Inspiring, January 26, 2007
This beautifully written and impeccably researched tale contains a wealth of information about the battered country of Ethiopia and the strength and resilience of its people. It is obvious that Camilla Gibb had first-hand experience in the field and has the highest regard for those who went through the terrible years of war, famine, upheaval and dictatorship.
Sweetness in the Belly personalizes this unthinkable social and political tragedy so that we have an inside view into the life of Lilly, a privileged Muslim woman with an ill-fated attraction for Aziz, a doctor and a man of another class.
The book goes back and forth between Ethiopia and England as Lilly reflects back on early years in her homeland before she was forced to flee. It is a testament to human nature that anyone can survive the atrocities that were perpetrated on these blameless souls, and can emerge with any kindness, decency and dreams for the future. That makes this a book of hope with a wealth of fascinating information, although at heart, it's also just a great story.
I'll be looking for more books by Gibb, after I've watched some lightweight comedies on DVD that will serve as a buffer from reading about so much pain.
Sigrid Macdonald
Ottawa, Ontario
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