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Summary
Lilly, the main character of Camilla Gibb's stunning new novel, has anything but a stable childhood. The daughter of English/Irish hippies, she was "born in Yugoslavia, breast-fed in the Ukraine, weaned in Corsica, freed from nappies in Sicily and walking by the time [they] got to the Algarve..." The family's nomadic adventure ends in Tangier when Lilly's parents are killed in a drug deal gone awry. Orphaned at eight, Lilly is left in the care of a Sufi sheikh, who shows her the way of Islam through the Qur'an. When political turmoil erupts, Lilly, now sixteen, is sent to the ancient walled city of Harar, Ethiopia, where she stays in a dirt-floored compound with an impoverished widow named Nouria and her four children. In Harar, Lilly earns her keep by helping with the household chores and teaching local children the Qur'an. Ignoring the cries of "farenji" (foreigner), she slowly begins to put down roots, learning the language and immersing herself in a culture rich in customs and rituals and lush with glittering bright headscarves, the chorus of muezzins and the scent of incense and coffee. She is drawn to an idealistic half-Sudanese doctor named Aziz, and the two begin to meet every Saturday at a social gathering. As they stay behind to talk, Lilly finds her faith tested for the first time in her life: "The desire to remain in his company overwhelmed common sense; I would pick up my good Muslim self on the way home." Just as their love begins to blossom, they are wrenched apart when the aging emperor Haile Selassie is deposed by the brutal Dergue regime. Lilly seeks exile in London, while Aziz stays to pursue his revolutionary passions. In London, Lilly's life as a whiteMuslim is no less complicated. A hospital staff nurse, she befriends a refugee from Ethiopia named Amina, whose daughter she helped to deliver in a back alley. The two women set up a community association to re-unite refugees with lost family members. Their work, however, isn't entirely altruistic. Both women are looking for someone: Amina, her husband, Yusuf, and Lilly, Aziz, who remains firmly, painfully, implanted in her heart. The first-person narrative alternates seamlessly between England (1981-91) and Ethiopia (1970-74), weaving a rich tapestry of one woman's quest to maintain faith and love through revolution, upheaval and the alienation of life in exile. Sweetness in the Belly" was universally praised for the tremendous empathy that Gibb brings to an ambitious story. "Kirkus Reviews writes that the novel "reflect(s) the pain, cultural relocation and uncertainty of tribal, political and religious refugees the world over. Gibb's territory is urgently modern and controversial but she enters it softly, with grace, integrity and a lovely compassionate story. [It is a] poem to belief and to the displaced-humane, resonant, original, impressive." According to the "Literary Review of Canada, Sweetness in the Belly is ..."a novel that is culturally sensitive, consummately researched and deeply compassionate...richly imagined, full of sensuous detail and arresting imagery...Gibb has smuggled Western readers into the centre of lives they might never otherwise come into contact with, let alone understand." "From the Hardcover edition.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With sure-handed, urgent prose, Gibb (The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life) chronicles the remarkable spiritual and geographical journey of a white British Muslim woman who struggles with cultural contradictions to find community and love. Lilly Abdal, orphaned at age eight after the murder of her hippie British parents, grows up at an Islamic shrine in Morocco. The narrative alternates between Harar, Ethiopia, in the 1970s, where she moved in pilgrimage at age 16, and London, England, in the '80s, where she lives in exile from Africa, working as a nurse. Ignoring the cries of "farenji," or foreigner, she starts a religious Muslim school in Harar. Later, in London, along with her friend Amina, Lilly runs a community association for family reunification of Ethiopian refugees. Each month, she reads the list of people who've escaped famine and the brutal Dergue regime, hoping to find Dr. Aziz Abdulnasser, her half-Sudanese lover who chose Africa over their relationship. Despite some predictability of plot, the novel fluently speaks the "languages of religion and exile," depicting both the multifaceted heartbreak of those lucky enough to escape violent regime changes and the beauty of unlikely bonds created by the modern multicultural world. (Mar. 20) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Lilly, a young white Muslim woman, is eight when her British parents are killed in Morocco, and she is placed in the care of a Muslim disciple, who fills her days with the teachings of Islam. She later moves to Ethiopia, where she becomes a nurse, teaches local girls to recite the Qur'an, and falls in love with Aziz, a medical student who supports the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie. Lilly's tenuous ties to the monarchy force her to flee to London when Selassie is deposed, in 1974; there she immerses herself in a refugee support group and waits to be reunited with Aziz. Gibb adroitly flips back and forth between prerevolution Ethiopia, where Lilly, though a foreigner, is admired for her knowledge of Muslim teachings, and London in the 1990s, where she feels stronger ties to Muslim refugees than to the British, who feel increasingly threatened by the refugees' presence. Gibbs' novel is a gripping and provocative addition to the post-9/11 genre of fiction exploring the many facets of Islam. --Deborah Donovan Copyright 2006 Booklist
Guardian Review
"I am a white Muslim woman raised in Africa, now employed by the National Health Service," declares Lily, the protagonist of Camilla Gibb's third novel, which shifts between a concrete council estate in Thatcher's London and the ancient city of Harar in Haile Selaisse's Ethiopia during the 1970s. Lily's early childhood is spent travelling on an extended pan- European holiday with her nomadic hippy parents. When this Anglo- Irish couple relocates to Morocco, she is left to play in the streets of Tangier while they lie stoned out of their minds in a crumbling hotel. The family then travels to a Sufi shrine in Bilal al Habash, near the Sahara, where her parents are mysteriously murdered in an alleyway. In the absence of close family to claim her, fellow Englishman and Islamic convert Mohammed Bruce assumes guardianship, and arranges for the eight-year-old Lily to be brought up in the Sufi shrine itself, under the aegis of the spiritual guide Great Abdal. Lily spends the rest of her childhood studying the Qur'an, and little else. So far, so extraordinary. Aged 16, Lily undertakes a gruelling overland spiritual pilgrimage from Morocco to Ethiopia, where she boards with a poor family, earning her keep through teaching the Qur'an to local children. Over many years, Lily, the white outsider, the devout Muslim, the foreigner who sticks out like a sore thumb, immerses herself in the superstitious, conformist community she has joined and begins to find accep tance. She falls in love with a local doctor, Aziz, himself an outsider because of his very dark skin. The simmering, unspoken nature of their passion is a sensuously written undercurrent running through the novel. Fast forward 10 years and Lily is in exile in Britain, having had no news from Aziz during this time. She is now a nurse and refugee worker living with her Ethiopian friend Amina and other immigrants in a run-down council estate. She still holds a torch for Aziz - a flame which keeps her resolutely celibate and longing for a reunion. There is nothing mundane about this very accomplished novel, even when it lingers on the domestic as a device to get into the heart of daily life in Ethiopia, where Gibb's astonishing use of sensory detail is vibrant and palpable. Likewise on the council estate in London, which is suffused with incense burning over coals, coffee beans roasting in tin plates and spiced with cardamon. However, for all its undoubted strengths, the narrative suspense is in danger of disappearing during some fascinating but lengthy descriptions of Ethiopian culture: the research is sometimes not quite assimilated. Here Gibb's cerebral and informative prose style is more suited to academia than fiction. And although the narrative is relayed in Lily's voice, she never emerges with quite enough personality to come off the page. This is a profound novel, exploring themes of female circumcision, politics, war, tribalism, yet it is also an exquisite homage to Islam. Some of the most beautiful passages are about Lily's faith. Islam is her guiding force, as she seeks to discover the true meaning of jihad, "The holy war we have within ourselves . . . Our internal struggle for purity." Bernardine Evaristo's Soul Tourists is published by Hamish Hamilton. To order Sweetness in the Belly for pounds 11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-fiction3.1 [Lily]'s early childhood is spent travelling on an extended pan- European holiday with her nomadic hippy parents. When this Anglo- Irish couple relocates to Morocco, she is left to play in the streets of Tangier while they lie stoned out of their minds in a crumbling hotel. The family then travels to a Sufi shrine in Bilal al Habash, near the Sahara, where her parents are mysteriously murdered in an alleyway. In the absence of close family to claim her, fellow Englishman and Islamic convert Mohammed Bruce assumes guardianship, and arranges for the eight-year-old Lily to be brought up in the Sufi shrine itself, under the aegis of the spiritual guide Great Abdal. Lily spends the rest of her childhood studying the Qur'an, and little else. So far, so extraordinary. - Bernardine Evaristo.
Kirkus Review
A white Muslim woman's affecting spiritual and emotional quests, as a misfit in two cultures. Gibb (Mouthing the Words, 2001, etc.) immerses herself completely in her gravely empathetic narration of the unusual life of Lilly, daughter of hippies murdered in Morocco, leaving her orphaned, aged eight, in the care of distinguished Muslim guardians who later send her for safety to Ethiopia. Lilly's unique cross-cultural perspective is Gibb's means of access to a belief and a country rarely tackled by contemporary Western writers. Moving from the walled city of Harar in the 1970s to a run-down London borough in the '80s, Lilly switches between differently impoverished locations where her identity is tested and modified by varying degrees of oppression and incomprehension. Hers is a story of female communities where women not only work, cook, give birth and apply makeup, but also circumcise their daughters, select husbands and fight for legitimacy. In Harar, Lilly's white skin defines her as a farenji (foreigner), and her education in the Qur'an isolates her further, but she earns her acceptance by teaching poor children, thereby also gaining the admiration of a progressive doctor, Aziz, whom she learns to love. When famine strikes Ethiopia and the political climate shifts from relative tolerance to dictatorship, Lilly flees to England, where she will spend agonized years speculating on Aziz's fate. In London, she not only becomes a nurse but also, with Ethiopian friend Amina, sets up an agency to re-connect refugee Ethiopians, which is how Amina rediscovers her husband Yusuf, damaged by torture and incarceration. Scarred Yusuf, increasingly Westernized Amina, grieving Lilly--now wooed by a Hindu doctor--reflect the pain, cultural relocation and uncertainty of tribal, political and religious refugees the world over. Gibb's territory is urgently modern and controversial but she enters it softly, with grace, integrity and a lovely, compassionate story. A poem to belief and to the displaced--humane, resonant, original, impressive. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Dumped at a Sufi shrine in Morocco by her hippie parents, who promptly get themselves killed, Lilly grows up studying the Qur'an. As an adult, she finds herself a despised foreigner on pilgrimage to Ethiopia but an outsider in London. Gibb here follows up fieldwork in Ethiopia for her Oxford Ph.D., plus a few award--winning novels in Canada. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.