Sweetness in the Belly Quotes

“It is his absence that is part of me and has been for years. This is who I am, perhaps who we all are, keepers of the absent and the dead. It is the blessing and burden of being alive.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“She kisses the children goodnight, leaving lipstick on their foreheads and a trail of Chanel No.5.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“How is it that disappointment arrives as soon as what you have desired for so long steps over the threshold? It’s like finding the end of your wedding train dragging behind in the mud.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“It is harder in many ways to live in the middle than at the edges. Much harder to interpret as you see fit, because then you have no assurance you are doing right in the eyes of God, no confidence you will be rewarded in the afterlife”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“The velvet darkness of his face”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“The reality of this wide-eyed caramel-coloured wonder was arresting. This was the future, alive and kicking in my arms.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“He wrote the future onto my face with his lips.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“Why didn’t they go back to India?” “Oh, you know how it is. Once you are outside a place you can never go back. Not really.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“They need to believe in something closer than God, because God often feels too distant.” He was right: the saints offer us a ladder to reach Him more easily. “And they bring people together,” I contributed. He nodded. “They do. Or at least belief in them does.” “One and the same,” I said, sounding much more certain than I felt.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“Ethiopians as a whole did not leave their country. A few students had made their way west to pursue further education, which they planned to put to use back in their own country, but there was no emigration, there was no such thing as a diaspora; the words for these things would not even come into existence until sometime later in history.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“Amina has boundless empathy for everyone but her husband, it seems. How is it that disappointment arrives as soon as what you have desired for so long steps over the threshold? It’s like finding the end of your wedding train dragging behind in the mud.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“It felt like betrayal, but in truth it was simply Muhammed Bruce’s lament for the passing of an era. A time when Europeans had roamed the earth in pursuit of adventure, largely oblivious to the lives and laws of the people in the countries they picked through like cherries. Spitting out the pits. Just like my parents. They had stomped on the world like the Burtons of their era, only worse somehow because they did not think that their shoes left marks.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops, a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“We know plenty of Ethiopians in London who do not even furnish their flats. What possessions they acquire sit in their cardboard boxes ready for transport. The tower of boxes holding televisions, toaster ovens, microwaves, electric heaters teeters to the left of the door, ready to be shipped at a moment’s notice. They commit to nothing. They float on the myth of return.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“The sound of communal prayer—its growling honesty, its rhythm as relentless and essential as heartbeats—moves me with its direction and makes me believe that distance can be overcome. It is the only thing that offers me hope that where borders and wars and revolutions divide and scatter us, something singular and true unites us. It tames this English soil.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“Every evening for weeks, Amina and the several other Ethiopians who lived in the building by then crowded into my flat to watch in horror as a parade of bodies on the verge of crumbling into dust crawled across the screen. We were sickened with ourselves for being riveted by the spectacle of this death march. We were ashes to ashes fascinated by this movement, heaven bound invariably, for there is no hell anymore when it has arrived here on earth.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“The best we can do is knot these threads at the ends so they won’t unravel any further.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“Okay, so yours is not a map of blood. But can't you see? This is a map of love.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“Believing that all has been ordained by God can lead to fatalism, but fatalism is not the same thing as belief. It's a cheat: an abdication of responsibility.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“My body is a whisper where hers is a shout.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“I've tried to read, but I can't make it through more than a paragraph at a time. The floor is littered with abandoned newspapers and yogurt pots.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“Ethiopia doesn't matter to the West," I say, stating the obvious. "We offer them nothing they can exploit.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“Girls are not passive by nature. They are only so because the culture demands they be.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“You would fancy any man who gave you baklava," I tease.
"You think I am some kind of sharmuta for sweets?”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly

“We were ashes to ashes fascinated by this movement, heaven bound invariably, for there is no hell anymore when it has arrived here on earth.”
― Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly