“Not Quite Ethiopian, But Not At All English”: Ethnography, Hybridity, and Diaspora in Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly

Abstract

In a 2005 review of Camilla's gibb's Sweetness in Belly for now magazine, Susan G. Cole praises Gibb's bravery in choosing topic of Ethiopian diaspora for her third novel. What distinguishes Gibb here, Cole writes, her willingness to face outrage that's bound to dog a book about a culture and religion that are not her own (par. 6). The novel tells story of Lilly, a white woman of British descent who is raised Muslim and comes to identify herself Ethiopian, first in walled city of Harar and later part of Harari diaspora in Thatcher-era London. As a white Anglo-Canadian of British heritage whose scholarly work 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 literatures/cultures of 'non-Western' world saleable exotic objects (10). Reviews of novel emphasize themes of authenticity and ethnic difference, describing novel a glimpse into 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 Gibb's text, however, is a resistance to reduction of otherness to a commodity through a theorization of problems of ethnography and genre's handling of and culture. Instead of simply presuming authority to represent otherness, novel foregrounds Lilly a hybrid subject whose complex and liminal subject position--in terms of race, nationality, and religion--questions static and consumable constructs of identity. Similarly, novel's complex handling of relation between diasporic space and homeland problematizes binary between home site and field site. By refusing to construct homeland, Harar, a space of cultural authenticity and instead using structure of novel to posit a dynamic relationship between Harar and London, Gibb evades fetishization of field site. The novel's thematization of hybridity and diaspora does not simply revisit familiar postcolonial tropes but, rather, approaches them through framework of Gibb's anthropological background to address directly problematic of representing otherness. From Translation to Commodification: Representing Other Alongside Gibb's background a social anthropologist, it is crucial to consider her understanding of disjunctions and similarities between and fiction. Anthropology has gained a reputation among many contemporary cultural theorists for promoting static, essentialized categories of ethnicity and cultural that reify difference, based on ideas about ethnicity that focus on aggregates of people who share common static classifiable and unchanging characteristics and who are distinct from each other (Khan 1). In contrast, theorists like Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak have argued for understanding and expressions of ethnicity that move away from notions of static, authentic, and original culture and identity (1). Anthropology, however, has long been troubled by, and intent on troubling, notions of culture. Clifford Geertz describes struggles to define word culture within discipline--and it is, he emphasizes, a mot and not a chose (12). He concludes that culture in world must be understood as a conglomerate of differences, deep, radical, and resistant to summary (223-24). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri also contrast classical and its paradigmatic figure of otherness, primitive and modern and its paradigmatic figure of peasant with a global anthropology capable of abandoning] traditional structure of otherness altogether and discovering] instead a concept of cultural difference based on a notion of singularity . …