My life in books

Sweetness in the Belly, Camilla Gibb

Camilla Gibb spent a year and a half living in Harar, Ethiopia while working on her PhD in social anthropology. Out of that experience, she has woven a truly remarkable novel.

Lilly is a white Muslim woman, born in North Africa to European parents of a distinct countercultural persuasion. she is raised after their deaths by a Muslim cleric and in time comes to live in Harar just before the collapse of the government of Haile Selassie. Narrowly escaping civil war and chaos, she settles in London, where she maintains her Muslim identity among the Ethiopian refugee community and holds on until the end to her hope that her lover has also survived and that she will someday find him again.

The book is beautifully written, compelling, and thought-provoking. It works well on multiple levels – it’s a strong story, with characters that are fully realised and easy to identify with. It addresses universal themes of identity, love, survival, facing catastrophe and finding balance and joy. It examines the increasingly common experiences of living in dangerous times, of losing one’s home and way of life, of becoming a refugee trying to find a life in a new world while holding on to some part of one’s culture and life of origin.

This is a woman-centred book. Its primary characters are women, the story focuses on them and how they deal with life – including the men around them, some of whom are fathers, brothers, husbands and lovers. The great gift of the book is that the lives of the North African Muslim women presented here are not exoticised, or crafted to support any of the current political stereotypes. They simply are who they are, and live as best as they can, through hardship and happiness, terror and joy.