Books can be a passport for understanding other people, places and cultures

I’m sure my teachers cringed every time they saw my hand go up in class because I’m the kind of person who has never been able to be quiet when I have a question.

But as I learned in the 1970s while grappling for the first time with my own racism, it is neither welcome nor appropriate to pepper one’s classmates, teammates, friends and colleagues from other cultures with questions about food, hair, family, fashion, language, religion, love, or politics. Even when the quest for knowledge is sincere.

I was firmly informed by more than a few of my dearest friends, that it was up to me to educate myself about their cultures - and not to pester them with my politically incorrect questions while I was learning.

Luckily, I am an avid reader. And as I learned, a good book can be like a passport to a new country, allowing me to get to know people, places and cultures that I might not otherwise have been able to explore.

Recently a friend who travels and teaches in Ethiopia loaned me her copy of Camilla Gibb’s 2005 novel “Sweetness in the Belly.” This story answered questions that I did not know I had about Islam, Muslim women and the exile of Ethiopian immigrants and refugees.

It is one thing to keep up on the latest news from CNN or the National Immigrant Solidarity Network. Quite another to spend hours absorbed in what the San Francisco Chronicle Review called “the intimate lives of Muslim women and Ethiopian life and clan and national politics” through the fictitious experiences of “an English-born nurse who, after the death of her hippie parents in North Africa, is raised by a Moroccan Sufi scholar and then emigrates to Harar, Ethiopia.”

Author Camilla Gibb is a social anthropologist who conducted fieldwork in Ethiopia.  Her story about Lily so intrigued me that I devoured the book in just two sittings.

The Review goes on “Lily’s voice is so believable that her story ... might be an actual ethnographic manuscript rather than fiction. A novel that takes you so far from yourself that you may wonder, from time to time, whether you are every coming back.”

There have been quite a large number of memorable moments in my life that have to do with holding a book in my hands and discovering a whole new world. Reading “Sweetness in the Belly” was certainly one of these.

And now a few questions for the readers out there: What books have recently opened your eyes to new worlds? Which do you recommend to people needing and wanting more information about immigrant cultures? If you could hand someone a book about your culture, which book would that be?

Tags: Camilla Gibb, Sweetness in the Belly
Topics: Arts, Education, Ending Racism, Immigrants, Religion, Storytelling