Book Review -- Sweetness in the Belly

Sweetness in the Belly
by Camilla Gibb
The Penguin Press, 2006
ISBN 1-59420-084-X

A story about an orphaned British girl growing up in Africa under Islam, this novel examines love, faith, longing, and regret. Lilly, the main character, starts the novel as a nurse in England in the early 1980s. Here, we are introduced to her faith, her traditions, and her hopes and fears. Soon the novel shifts back in time to Harar, Ethiopia in the early 1970s and the end of what Lilly calls a pilgrimage, but what we soon learn is a flight. As these two timelines progress, Lilly's life unfolds with all the trials of a being a foreigner in a fairly closed society and being a girl growing up without family and having to make her own ties to the community.

Ours was a rich and good life in a small and peaceful place, a self-contained universe hooked up to its own generator. But after seven years of devotion – measuring the weight of every word, savoring the hard edges, feeling them dissolve in my mouth as I stood, as I kneeled, as I pressed my forehead to the ground – the insularity of our bubble burst.

When Lilly is fifteen, her life of study ends and the next phase begins. Her life in Harar is difficult when the local sheikh refuses to honor her adopted father's wishes that she be allowed to continue her studies. He sends her into the streets of Harar where she knows no one, not even the language. One of the sheikh's wives takes Lilly to a relative for shelter. Lilly soon finds she must earn her own way and earn the respect of the community, things she has taken for granted her whole life.

The revolution in Ethiopia which deposed Emperor Haile Selassie sends thousands of Ethiopians across the world as refugees, among them Lilly. She leaves behind the man she has fallen in love with and the family she has grown into and returns to England, a place she doesn't remember. She settles in with the other refugees, resisting assimilation for as long as she can, holding out hope that someone she knows will also surface and she can again find that sense of community for which she worked so hard.

To me, Ethiopia has always been that country on the news where people starved to death and the government allowed it. I knew little about the daily life of the people or the war that followed those images on the television. With beautiful prose, Camilla Gibb explores this time and place and lets me peek into what might have been.