Sweetness in the Belly

Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb is an atmospheric, historical romance novel published in 2005. The book tells the story of Lily, the daughter of two Irish immigrants living in Morocco who is raised by Moroccan and Ethiopian locals when her parents are murdered in an alley near the Sufi shrine in Bilal al Habash. The novel tells the life story of Lily, who is raised a devout Muslim, falls in love with a fellow outcast and dark-skinned revolutionary named Aziz, and finally lives her life in exile back in England, living in public housing.
 
Camilla Gibb is the author of four novels and a memoir. Her first book, Mouthing the Words, won the City of Toronto Book prize. Sweetness in the Belly is her most critically acclaimed novel. After its publication in 2005, the book was nominated and shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC award, and in 2006 received the Trillium Award for the best book in Ontario. Gibb was born in London, studied at the American University in Cairo, and now lives in Toronto, Canada. She has a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, and her academic work strongly influences the historical research in many of her novels.
 
Sweetness in the Belly begins with main character Lily declaring her status as a white Muslim living in public housing in London. The novel splits its time equally between Lily's life now, living with a friend from Ethiopia named Amina and other immigrants in an apartment and working as a nurse for the National Health service, and her past in the walled city of Harar.
 
Lily had a surreal childhood. Her parents were hippies and nomads, and relocated to Morocco from Dublin with Lily when she was very young. Lily plays with the other children on the streets of Tangier, as her parents do drugs and lounge in seedy hotels, paying little attention to their daughter. Eventually her parents decide to visit a Sufi shrine on the edge of the Sahara Desert, and bring Lily along with them. In the small town of Bilal al Habash, Lily's parents are murdered in an alleyway under mysterious circumstances, and Lily is left alone in a foreign country, unable to fend for herself.
 
Because she has no close relatives to care for her, a friend of the family named Mohammed Bruce takes charge of Lily's care. Mohammed Bruce is a fellow Englishman in exile, and had recently converted to Islam – he arranges for Lily, now eight years old, to be raised in the Sufi shrine itself by the spiritual guide the Great Abdal. Lily lives for eight years under the guidance of this spiritual leader, studying the Qur'an almost exclusively and becoming devout and learned in her faith.
 
At age sixteen, Lily travels from Morocco to Ethopia on a spiritual pilgrimage. She lives with a poor family and earns her keep by teaching local children the Qur'an. While in Ethiopia, Lily learns much about Ethiopian culture and politics, and becomes entrenched in the Ethiopian revolution of the 1970s through a romance with a young, dark-skinned doctor named Aziz. Like Lily, Aziz is an outsider because of his skin color, though hers is light and his is dark. The pair fall in love, and Lily's passion for Aziz continues into her present-day life in London, ten years after she is forced to leave Ethiopia.
 
For ten years, Lily lives in London, completely celibate and longing for her romance with Aziz. She has not heard from the young doctor since she left Ethiopia, but maintains her love for him regardless. Lily feels at home working as a nurse and refugee worker in her rundown counsel housing with her immigrant friends, who understand the complexity of her worldview and her culture. While in London, Lily continues to explore her faith and her life as someone in-between nations and cultures, and her narrative voice comes through most when she is talking about Islam and Ethiopian culture.
 
The backdrop of Gibb's novel is the Ethiopian revolution, in which native Ethiopians rebelled against the monarchy and began a Marxist-Leninist coup that overtook the Ethiopian government. A number of political factions broke off from this split, and began to fight for control of the government. This resulted in a bloody war in the mid-1970s that left more than one million people dead. The war lasted for more than fifteen years, and only ended when the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, a coalition of rebel groups, banded together to defeat the new government in 1991.
 
Gibb's work as a scholar and an academic, and her experience living in North Africa, inspired her to write this novel, which explores the life of one woman on the outskirts of society on the backdrop of a major political upheaval. The Ethiopian revolution is little discussed in the western world, as is the study of Islam, and Gibb brings both to the forefront in this novel.