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ABOUT SWEETNESS IN THE BELLY
Sweetness in the Belly is a richly detailed portrayal of one woman’s search for love and belonging. Set in Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia and the racially charged world of Thatcher’s London, it is a deeply imagined immersion into the lives of people for whom war, poverty, marginalization and exile are commonplace.
Told by Lilly, a compellingly young white Muslim woman, whose nomadic parents left her with a legacy of intense and varied cultural bonds, the novel addresses the pain of immigration, the beauty of sharing unfamiliar customs and the horror of seeing one's home country in tatters. Sweetness in the Belly is also a beautiful and poetic love story.
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.”We hope you will come on the journey with us.
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Author BioCamilla GibbAuthor
Camilla Gibb is the author of four internationally acclaimed novels: Mouthing the Words, The Petty Details of So-and-so's Life, Sweetness in the Belly and The Beauty of Humanity Movement, and most recently a memoir, This Is Happy. She has been the recipient of the Trillium Book Award, the City of Toronto Book Award and the CBC Canadian Literary Award and has been shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2016 RBC Taylor Prize.
Camilla has a Ph.D. in social
anthropology from Oxford University and has been writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto, the University of Alberta and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is an adjunct faculty member of the graduate creative writing programs at the University of Guelph-Humber, the University of Toronto and the Humber School for Writers and is currently the June Callwood Professor in Social Justice at Victoria College, University of Toronto.
Photo: Brock Weir
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IF YOU LIKED...If you liked Sweetness in the Belly, you may like the following:
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UPCOMING EVENTSPlease check back in the Spring for OBOA event listings.
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GET A COPY OF THE BOOK
Look for copies of Sweetness in the Belly in our little lending libraries around Town this summer. Enjoy the book, but please return it so that others might read it as well.
And of course, print copies are available to borrow from Aurora Public Library and online through OverDrive and cloudLibrary.
We hope you enjoy the book and look forward to seeing you at the events.
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BOOK CLUBSSweetness in the BellyBook Club Discussion Questions
- Discuss Lilly’s role as an outsider and her struggle for acceptance both as a farenji in Harar and as a white Muslim in London. Who else in the novel could be considered an outsider?
- What do the words “family” and “home” mean to Lilly? How does her view of herself as an orphan evolve over the course of the novel?
- “Faith has accompanied me over time and geography and upheaval,” says Lilly. For her, love and Islam “have always been one.” Did Sweetness in the Belly in any way alter or broaden your understanding of Islam? Consider, for instance, the notion of jihad or holy war.
- Sweetness in the Belly alternates between Harar, Ethiopia, in the 70s, and London, England, in the 80s and early 90s. What qualities does this crosscutting of time and place impart to the narrative?
- In the chapter entitled “Exile,” Lilly observes that “the smell of coffee draws women together, an olfactory call throughout a neighbourhood luring women from their homes to gather…” Later in the chapter, the act of twisting a mortar over coffee beans and cardamom triggers in her a surge of nightmarish images from the Red Terror. Of the many lush sensory details in the novel – both fair and foul – which affected you the most?
- While living in Ethiopia, Camilla Gibb witnessed a female circumcision. A doctoral student in social anthropology at the time, she says she had to “understand it in the context of the community in which it was taking place, and not judge.” When Nouria’s daughters are circumcised in Sweetness in the Belly, how does Lilly react as the only Western-born character in the scene? How did you react as a reader?
- Based on your reading of Sweetness in the Belly, what feelings and psychological states are associated with the experience of exile? How do Amina and Yusuf, for example, cope with their respective traumas?
- In Harar, Aziz is called a “black savage, African slave, barbarian, pagan.” In London, Lilly is called a “white fu’in Paki.” Discuss the notion of “otherness” in the novel. How do artificial divisions manifest themselves based on ethnicity, class, race, religion and gender?
- Discuss the ways in which the female characters ensure their survival and empower themselves despite the gender divisions within their communities.
- What does Lilly mean when she says that Aziz “unveiled” her? How does she reconcile her love for him with her love of Islam?
- There can be criticism about tackling a culture different from one’s own, but Camilla Gibb was never been accused of cultural appropriation. Do you think this is because of her background as an academic social anthropologist?
