Born in London, England, Camilla Gibb grew up in Toronto. She earned degrees in anthropology and Middle Eastern studies from the University of Toronto, followed by an Oxford PhD in social anthropology. Gibb pursued her fieldwork in Ethiopia, which proved fertile ground for her latest novel, the Giller Prize short-listed Sweetness in the Belly. Gibb's debut novel, Mouthing the Words, won the 2000 City of Toronto Book Award, and her short story, "Between Wars", won a 2001 CBC Canadian Literary Award. Her next novel was the well-received The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life. Gibb's work has been translated into fourteen languages; she appears on the Orange Futures lists as one of twenty-one young writers to watch in the new century.

Nancy Wigston: From the get-go, it seems, you've experienced astonishing success with your writing career. Now, not yet forty, with three novels and major awards to your credit, you're an importance presence both here in Canada and internationally. Were you always interested in stories and writing? In a related question, I noticed Emma, in The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life, is a Nancy Drew reader, is that the sort of thing you liked to read?

Camilla Gibb: It's deceptive. My first novel was published in 1999, but a lifetime of reading and writing preceded it. I was an avid reader, as all writers are as children. I used to stand in front of my mother's bookshelf and ask: "Mum, what's suitable for children?" I worked my way through the suitables and when I'd finished all those, why then, I started on the unsuitables. There were no Nancy Drews on those shelves. I wrote as soon as I could read, mostly poetry and short stories, and started my first novel at age 7-a story about a girl who lives on her parents' roof and communes with squirrels. It was called Yes I Do Live on the Roof. Surprisingly, it remains unpublished to this day, as does all the angst-ridden poetry of my adolescence, and another 'novel' I wrote at the end of high school. When I told my Grade 13 English teacher I wanted to be a writer, he suggested I go and have a life first. Go to university, study something, something that will teach you about the world, he said. I thought it was patronizing at the time, but ultimately I think the time spent doing other things gave me more to bring to the page.

NW: To get what must be the most frequently asked question out of the way, what lead you into, and then, out of, a promising academic career?

CG: I wanted to know more about the world and I was drawn to anthropology-to exploring the myriad and diverse ways we live and create meaning and relationships in our lives. Ultimately I did field research in Ethiopia and wrote a thesis based on that research. But the thesis left me feeling hollow. And guilty. The objective analytic text doesn't speak to the emotion and sense of being in a place, being among people. And academic language by definition excludes-it excluded both the people about whom I was writing and the possibility of a wider audience who might be curious to know something about a world very different from their own.
I wanted a different language, one that was visceral and emotional. And so I (re)turned to fiction in my twenties, indulging secretly at first, but eventually finding the fiction overtaking everything-my job as an anthropologist, me. It was utterly liberating-in scope and possibility.

NW: You have a particular gift for rendering the often-brutal reality of childhood in your novels. What draws you in that direction?

CG: Our experiences as children obviously determine so much of who we are as adults and I wanted to explore that in my fiction. My first two novels were about just that. I threw a mountain of shit at my characters and let them work their way out of it. Children are not born blank; they possess hidden resources and tremendous resilience. I wanted to explore what children were capable of.

NW: Before we get to Sweetness in the Belly, which, incidentally, blew me away, I want to ask you about a line attributed to Nina, Emma's lover, in The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life: "[Nina] says you can't rely on the past for the havoc you wreak in the present." This reminds me of William Faulkner's famous line, "The past isn't over, it isn't even past." Faulkner's opinion seems truer in your fiction than does Nina's (who, in contrast to most of your young men and women, appears remarkably unscathed). Would it be fair to say that your writing challenges your characters-and by extension your readers-to get out from under the hold of the past?

CG: It's true that in each of my books the struggle to free oneself from the past is a critical one for the characters, but I don't think it's me issuing the challenge, it's life. I really believe that line of Nina's. There's a point at which you simply have to take responsibility. But whether it's possible? Whether it's ever truly past? That depends on the character and their circumstances.
In Sweetness in the Belly, Lilly's central struggle is one of trying to let go of the life, the love, the home she lost in Ethiopia and embrace her new life of exile in England. There's a line in the novel where Lilly is saying to another refugee: it will get easier, it does. But then she thinks to herself: I don't know if I actually believe it. It's more that the emphasis eventually shifts.
Perhaps that's more accurate than "letting go" or "getting out of the hold" or any of the clichTd or therapeutic ways we talk about our relationship to the past.

NW: A major wellspring of trouble in your first two books and, initially, in your third, is terrifically shoddy parenting during the 60s and 70s. (Thelma for instance, in Mouthing the Words, tells us that among her favourite hobbies is "being anywhere but home.") What has readers' response been to these parents who abuse, ignore, and abandon their children with such consistency?

CG: People seem to be able to identify with some aspect of the abuse or neglect my characters have endured, regardless of the particulars of their own upbringing. That suggests to me there is something fundamental in, if not our parenting, at least our perception as children of how we were parented. Children are dependent and needy. That's their job. Even the best parents are bound to fail their children.

NW: Sweetness in the Belly widens the domestic, western worlds you've previously explored to include a strange and frankly exotic city, Harar, which is contrasted with the cityscape of 1980s London; the result is a magical, seemingly effortless linking of two cultures that is rare in fiction. Was this book an enormous challenge to write?

NW: It was challenging on many different levels. I originally wrote it from the perspective of a child, because that's what I was used to and comfortable doing. But I came to see that there were big issues that demanded addressing, and that I was hiding from them in a way. A child doesn't necessarily have to "see" what's going on around them or have an opinion about it or take a stand. I suppose I felt that in order to be responsible to material that addressed revolution, war, famine and refugee experience I had to offer adult perspectives. This was new for me and the biggest challenge.
The challenge of writing two worlds is a more practical one-one of balance and continuity. How could I balance the colour and texture and dynamism of the more foreign world-Harar-with the grey world, where I was born, and where I lived throughout the nineties, that was England to me? The balance came through exploring and building the greys of England while toning down the colours and using restraint in the Ethiopian sections.
Continuity comes through addressing the same issues in both contexts-identity, belongingness, love, faith, community, and offering a missing link between the two in the form of the question: what has happened to Lilly's lover, Aziz?

NW: I see. One thing that struck me about Sweetness in the Belly was the way you interweave Sufi magic and modern political realities, all mingled with the sensuous odour of coffee, the idioms like rrata (it means meat caught between the teeth, Lilly's name for her connection with her lover), or the flash of incense crystals. The shocks you deliver here-like in the description of the abusma (the ceremony of a young girl's genital mutilation)-are tangible, visceral. What reaction has your depiction of the real world of Islam provoked in critics and readers?

CG: I wanted the "foreign" to be experienced, rather than explained or judged. The reader is being introduced to this culture along with Lilly-and this is the way the circumcision scene you referred to, for instance, is approached. But I want to be clear here-although my characters are Muslim, female circumcision is not Islamic; its basis is cultural, not religious.
I started this book in 2000, and I would have been writing about Islam whether or not the events of September 11th had happened. I've been interested in Islam since studying Arabic as an undergraduate and living in Cairo for a year when I was 21.
As I was writing and the events of the world unfolded, I began to think that what I was writing was so much "softer" and loving and more colourful and complex than any depiction of Islam I was seeing in the media. Islam, like any religion, is a moral code, a set of guidelines for being good in the world, a shared set of values and beliefs for living in groups. The Muslim world is immensely diverse, and I have simply tried to illustrate some of that diversity by describing how it is practiced and understood in one place in a particular time. One's relationship to faith also changes over time, and over geography, particularly when one is forced into a non-Muslim environment. So I explore how several characters have to renegotiate that relationship in exile.
I think there is a very healthy and genuine curiosity about Muslim lives at the moment, which is reflected in the kind of feedback I get.
But more important has been the feedback from Muslim readers who have written to me. Balanced and fair is what they have said.

NW: Is it also fair to say Lilly, the central figure in Sweetness in the Belly, a young woman who is recognisably related to, say, Emma, with her confusing or absent parents, takes the idea of vulnerable kids to a completely new level, one that incorporates not only a religious culture mostly unknown in the west, but also western traditions-rather like the abandoned orphans in our folklore or the child-figures in Dickensian fiction?

CG: I think of Lilly as the ultimate outsider, but in some ways her life is representative of a contemporary political reality where so many people, certainly so many Canadians, are living as refugees, in exile, as part of new diasporas, and struggling to rebuild their lives and their communities, now scattered across the globe.

NW: Has your subject matter lead you to become involved in specific political issues?

CG: My work as an anthropologist has probably both informed my fiction and led me to becoming involved in specific political issues. I'm the vice-president of PEN. I care deeply about the right to freedom of expression: the right to represent your reality, real or imagined, the right to see your experience represented and have the literacy and the freedom to read.

NW: What writers have interested and influenced you along the way?

CG: It's ever-changing. Before I wrote Mouthing the Words I very much had Jeanette Winterson, Kate Atkinson and Esther Freud-young British women whose experience spoke to my own and whose use of language impressed me. I was also drawn to the sparseness of a number of Japanese writers: Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, in particular. I hadn't read much Canadian literature at that point; I didn't really identify with much of it, but I found a commonality with Barbara Gowdy and Catherine Bush that excited me. I've become more interested in storytelling as my own writing has developed, and I'm impressed by William Boyd, Oscar Hijuelos, Louis de BerniFres and M.G. Vassanji. The people who have impressed me most recently, with regard to language/structure and experimentation have been Colin McAdam and Nicola Barker.

NW: And what are you working on now?

CG: I am working on a new novel now. It's about illness and exile. But I'm also thinking about non-fiction and teaching a workshop as writer in residence at the University of Toronto.

NW: Thanks very much.

CG: My pleasure. Thank you for your thoughtful questions.