Sweetness in the Belly
by Camilla Gibb

List Price: $14.00
Pages: 368
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0143038729
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (March 27, 2007)

Camilla Gibb was born in London, England, and grew up in Toronto. The first person in her family to earn a university degree, she holds a B.A. in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford. While researching her thesis, she spent a year living with a family in the ancient walled city of Harar, Ethiopia.

After returning to Canada, Gibb spent two years at the University of Toronto as a post-doctoral research fellow. She probably would have continued in academia were it not for a chance encounter that enabled her to pursue her longtime dream of writing fiction. One day, a friend of a colleague caught her moping on a bench. After hearing about her frustrated desire to be a full-time writer, the man asked how much she needed to support herself while working on her first novel. The next week he showed up with the amount she had quoted: $6000. At first she refused, but he convinced her that it was just another form of scholarship, no strings attached. Gibb’s brother lent her his trailer, where she wrote on a laptop plugged into a small stove. Mouthing the Words, which poured out of her in just eight weeks, sold internationally and won the City of Toronto Book Award in 2000. Her second novel, The Petty Details of So-and-So’s Life, was also published to great acclaim around the world and was selected by The Globe and Mail as one of the Best Books of the Year. In 2002, Gibb was named by the jury of the prestigious Orange Prize as one of 21 writers to watch in the new century.

Gibb’s third best-selling novel, Sweetness in the Belly, was shortlisted for the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Gibb explains that she experienced two major challenges in writing this story. For one, she had to move beyond her thesis, which she describes in a Toronto Star interview as “this dry, boring thing with all the blood and the life sucked out of it.” She adds: “Everything that had moved me had been expunged – all the intimacies and the relationships that I longed to write about.” She was also forced do a major rewrite when she turned the main character from a child into an adult. Of the 400 pages she originally submitted to her editor only five made the final cut. “I was relying on the charm and naïveté of a child,” she said in an interview with The Ottawa Citizen. “But at some stage I knew I had to grow up as a writer, and my characters have to grow up too. Added to that was more responsibility – I had to take a stance, have an opinion, be informed.”

Camilla Gibb lives in Toronto, where she serves as Vice President of PEN Canada and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto. She is currently working on a new novel about a community bound and defined by an unnamed illness that is stigmatized, feared, and misunderstood, and how the outside world responds to the perceived threat of an epidemic of unknown origin

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Q: Can you tell us how you became a writer?

CG:When I was in high school I told my English teacher I wanted to be a writer. Now I didn’t really have a lot to back up such a bold declaration – I had a notebook full of angst-ridden adolescent poetry, a couple of poems from which had been published in a Toronto Board of Education anthology, and I’d also been writing short stories.

And his reply was: well, you’re 18, what are you going to write about? Go and have a life first, go to university and study something, anything that will teach you something about the world.

At the time, I thought he was being a bit patronizing, I mean, I had things to say, didn’t I? Except when I look back at that writing I was doing then, I can see his point. I certainly had plenty to say – but virtually all of it was about being a self absorbed, angst-ridden teenager.

So I went to university to learn something about the world. I was drawn to anthropology because I was fascinated by other cultures, by how other people live in the world, by the fact that the western way isn’t the only way. Later, when I became a writer, I realized that in choosing anthropology I really hadn’t strayed all that far away from fiction – anthropology is about people’s stories, their experiences of being in the world, their relationships and the myriad and diverse ways we create meaning in our lives. I pursued anthropology to the point of getting a Ph.D. and it was once my thesis was done that I started writing stories again. But I did it in secret: now I was expected to have a proper grown-up job as an anthropologist, when the truth was, all I wanted to do, all I have ever really wanted to do was write fiction.

I couldn’t stop myself once I started. I found it so enormously liberating, almost rebellious, such a contrast to what I did by day, and it was in this way that I began to find my own voice – a voice that started to take over and pollute my days. After my first novel was published it became clear I was going to have to make a choice; a commitment to the academic work or the fiction. Naturally, I took the crazier option.
Q: What inspired you to write this particular book? Is there a story about the writing of this novel that begs to be told?

CG:I started unconsciously gathering the material that informs this book over 16 years ago when I became friends at university with a young Ethiopian woman who arrived in Toronto as a refugee student sponsored by WUSC – World University Services Canada. I was an anthropology student, very interested in the Middle East and East Africa, and I had just returned from a very disorienting year in Cairo. I was feeling oddly displaced when I returned home, and I gravitated toward this young woman who looked as displaced as I felt.

I remember the exhilaration of that new friendship and of learning so much from her. We shared a part-time job, shopped for secondhand clothes, cooked Ethiopian food in her residence room and talked of her country and her people. Years later I was recounting something about the early days of our friendship, and she asked me: do you know what I remember of that year? Her answer? Nothing. I felt like a ghost. I didn’t even feel like I had a body.

I felt so naïve and so selfish in that moment. I wanted to understand what she meant by that, what that must feel like. And so in some ways, this book is my attempt to understand.

I could not have written this book if I hadn’t gone to Ethiopia. I went in 1994/5 to do research there for my Ph.D. in social anthropology. I spent a remarkable year in a walled Muslim city called Harar, during which I lived with a local family with nine children in their household compound.

The mother, daughters and I slept on raised red earth platforms in one building and the men and sons in another structure on the other side of the courtyard. I dressed very modestly like the women around me, wearing a veil and trousers under my skirts. Every morning we rose with the call to prayer and passed a water jug between us in order to bathe. Every day, three times a day, we ate the same watery stew out of the same bowl with our hands. After the first month there suddenly was no meat in the stew any longer, and I had to fight like anyone else for my turn to suck the marrow out of the one bone floating there. Every day was a battle against rats and cockroaches and intestinal parasites.

Most mornings I wandered about town with a notebook visiting religious sites, being interested in women’s religious practices. Most afternoons I sat chewing qat (a mild narcotic leaf) with my friends. At five o’clock it was the visiting hour, when people would wander through the streets in their semi-drugged haze and visit friends and neighbours. I’d usually go and visit this very poor little girl for whom I’d developed a particular affection – a girl named Biscutti (thanks to a brief Italian occupation in the 1940s), or go and see my neighbour who was sick with something called “ground disease,” which I only later learned, after he died, was actually AIDS: a disease no one would name.

At night, women from the neighbourhood would sit together and gossip and share news and embroider and shell peanuts. I worked on a dictionary of the language and helped the kids with their English homework and participated in the chatter. And sometimes the news was worrying – occasionally people were attacked by hyenas, and in the spring of 1995, bombs started going off the month before the first elections were scheduled to happen in the country. Suddenly we had a curfew of six o’clock.

This was the stuff of life, everyday life, and somehow very little of it made its way into my Ph.D. thesis. It took me almost a decade to find a way of writing a novel about this place and its people. You see, I had to forget a lot of the facts I knew in order to create fiction. And I had to become a writer first. And so I became a writer.
Q: What is it that you’re exploring in this book?

CG: I wanted to tell a story about the intimate lives of a people from a complex and troubled country we know so little about, beyond the stereotypical images of famine and poverty we see in the media.

I wanted to tell a story about Muslims who practice Islam in gentle and loving ways, ways I was introduced to when I lived with a Muslim family in Ethiopia. I wanted to complicate our understanding of Islam by showing how there is a great deal of diversity under this one big umbrella. I wanted to explore the notion that jihad – holy war, is just as often interpreted as a personal struggle to do good – a battle against ones own demons.

And I wanted to tell a story about what it is to be forced from a place – wrenched from your homeland to become a refugee in an alien and hostile land, to struggle with language and a whole new set of cultural expectations and references, meanwhile being disconnected from your loved ones, some of whom you might have lost along the way.

This, to me, is what life looks like for so many people living in the world today, and certainly so for many new Canadians.
Q: Who is your favourite character in this book, and why?

CG:Amina’s husband Yusuf. When they are finally reunited he is just a fraction of himself. He has been through so much and he needs time to find his way back to the land of the living. He breaks my heart.
Q: Are there any tips you would give a book club to better navigate their discussion of your book?

CG:I think readers should have their own experience of a book and draw their own conclusions. To really engage with a book we personalize it in some way – relate to it the things that we know or see it through the lens of our own experience. In this way I think every reader can read something different into a book. And that’s what makes it interesting.
Q: Do you have a favourite story to tell about being interviewed about your book?

CG:There was the Breakfast Television interview where someone who hadn’t read the book asked me what it was about while a woman belly danced behind me and a man carved a gravestone out of Styrofoam.
Q: What question are you never asked in interviews but wish you were?

CG:Why do you think fiction matters?

My answer? Because it offers us intimate insight into the heads of others, allows us to feel a certain empathy, allows us to recognize the parallels in our very basic human struggles to create meaning and attachment in our lives. In this way I think fiction can contribute so much to our understanding of others and ourselves.
Q: Has a review or profile ever changed your perspective on your work?

CG:No. It might have changed my mood for half an hour, but not my perspective on the work. I view it from the inside, the reviewer or journalist views it from the outside. It’s just a totally different relationship to the text.
Q: Which authors have been most influential to your own writing?

CG:When I was starting out I did look to the work of people who I thought had a similar sensibility. They were all young British women. Kate Atkinson, Emma Freud and Jeanette Winterson. I don’t read in that way now–I’m much more interested in voices that are very different from mine and how they can get me to see the world differently.
Q: If you weren't writing, what would you want to be doing for a living? What are some of your other passions in life?

CG:I would have been an anthropologist and carried on teaching, doing research and writing academic articles.
Q: If you could have written one book in history, what book would that be?

CG:The Origin of the Species.



© Copyright 2012 by Camilla Gibb. Reprinted with permission by Penguin (Non-Classics) (March 27, 2007). All rights reserved.

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