ESC: English Studies in Canada

In a 2005 review of camilla’s gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly for now magazine, Susan G. Cole praises Gibb’s bravery in choosing the topic of the Ethiopian diaspora for her third novel. “What distinguishes Gibb here,” Cole writes, “is her willingness to face the outrage that’s bound to dog a book about a culture and religion that are not her own” (par. 6). The novel tells the story of Lilly, a white woman of British descent who is raised Muslim and comes to identify herself as Ethiopian, first in the walled city of Harar and later as part of the Harari diaspora in Thatcher-era London. As a white Anglo-Canadian of British heritage whose scholarly work as a social anthropologist focuses on Harari culture, Gibb is open to accusations of cultural appropriation, what Graham Huggan calls “the fetishisation of cultural otherness that allows metropolitan readers to exercise fantasies of unrestricted movement and free will” and which “turns the literatures/cultures of the ‘non-Western’ world into saleable exotic objects” (10). Reviews of the novel emphasize themes of authenticity and ethnic difference, describing the novel as a glimpse “into the intimate lives of Muslim women and Ethiopian clan and national politics” (Cheuse par. 6) that “giv[es] readers an inside look at life … in a different culture than most of us experience” (Nesbitt 95). Built into Gibb’s text, however, is a resistance [End Page 95] to the reduction of otherness to a commodity through a theorization of the problems of ethnography and the genre’s handling of identity and culture. Instead of simply presuming the authority to represent otherness, the novel foregrounds Lilly as a hybrid subject whose complex and liminal subject position—in terms of race, nationality, and religion—questions static and consumable constructs of identity. Similarly, the novel’s complex handling of the relation between diasporic space and the homeland problematizes the binary between the home site and the field site. By refusing to construct the homeland, Harar, as a space of cultural authenticity and instead using the structure of the novel to posit a dynamic relationship between Harar and London, Gibb evades the fetishization of the field site. The novel’s thematization of hybridity and diaspora does not simply revisit familiar postcolonial tropes but, rather, approaches them through the framework of Gibb’s anthropological background to address directly the problematic of representing otherness.