Interview with author Camilla Gibb

Our May Book Club pick is Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb, the story of an English girl brought up by African Muslims and trying to find her place in the world. We chatted with the author about Ethiopia, 9/11, and why she waited to write this story.

Canadian Living: You spent a year in Ethiopia during your PhD. What sparked your initial interest in the country?

Camilla Gibb: It started with a friendship. When I was an undergraduate, I met and became very good friends with a young Ethiopian woman who had just arrived in Toronto by way of a refugee camp in Kenya.

The friendship was important and enlightening, opening my eyes to a part of the world I'd had no contact with before. For most of us, our introduction to Ethiopia is through pictures of famine victims in the media. This friendship opened the door to the complexities of a world beyond those pictures.

CL: Why did you wait so long after your time in Ethiopia to write this book?

CG: My thesis depressed me because I felt all the humanity had been expunged in the name of bigger theoretical statements. All the colour and texture and flavour of the place were missing. As were the people and their stories -- the things that moved me while I lived there for a year with a local family.

I knew I wanted to "revisit" Ethiopia, but I didn't know the form this would take. I could have adopted a child from Ethiopia, or started an NGO, but being a fiction writer, I suppose I did the thing that was most natural to me and wrote a novel.

It took time though, to forget some of the “facts” and learn a new way, a nonacademic way of telling stories. I had to write two novels first and figure out who I was as a writer before I was ready to take on something this big and complex.

CL: How hard was it to separate yourself from your thesis enough to write a fictional story, but not enough to hinder telling a realistic story?

CG: I had to really work against the impulse to “explain” everything and figure out how to convey information (historical, ethnographic) through the lived experiences of the characters. It was as simple (and as difficult) as asking myself: how can I "show” rather than “tell” this?

CL: How did September 11, 2001, affect the way you wanted the reader to understand Islam?

CG: I started this book in 2000, and I would have been writing about Islam and Muslims, regardless of September 11th. As I was writing and the events of the world unfolded, I began to think that what I was writing was so much “softer” and loving and more colourful and complex than any depiction of Islam I was seeing in the media. Islam, like any religion, is a moral code, a set of guidelines for being good in the world, a shared set of values and beliefs for living in groups. The Muslim world is immensely diverse, and I have simply tried to illustrate some of that diversity by describing how it is practiced and understood in one place in a particular time. One's relationship to faith also changes over time, and over geography, particularly when one is forced into a non-Muslim environment. So I explore how several characters have to renegotiate that relationship in exile.

CL: The original story was written from a child's perspective. What was lost and/or gained by making Lilly older?

CG: A child doesn't have to have opinions, be knowledgeable or informed, or make decisions. I was avoiding making comment on serious issues by keeping Lilly as a child. Forcing her to grow up forced me to grow up as a writer and, I think, as a person. Up until that point I had always retreated with the defence “but I'm just an artist” -- meaning not a spokesperson, but a neutral filter. But that was a cop-out. Art is often a comment on the world. My characters are not spokespeople for me -- they have varied opinions, not all of which I agree with -- but they are engaged in important debates.

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