Forty years ago my parents made an alphabetical list of countries that were part of the Commonwealth. I can picture them even though I wasn’t in the room – I was asleep upstairs under the thatched roof of our English cottage next to the crib with the new baby – on the verge of making a decision that would soon change all of our lives.

The rain is lashing against the walls of the cottage, the meat is browning in the oven. She is leaning against the bricks surrounding the old bread oven in the sitting room, an elegant arm crawling up the wall, hair like molasses pouring over her left shoulder, staring at the feet of the man parked in the blue armchair who appears hypnotised by the swirl of the remaining half inch of gin in the bottom of his glass.

It’s a still life of village England circa 1970: a portrait of despair. She reaches across the expanse of the Persian rug that separates them and hands him paper and pen. They are united in their desire to flee.

Once their list was compiled, they immediately crossed out Australia because of its distance and a slight penal twinge. Next on the list was Canada. So in 1971, my father left England for Montreal in search of a job. And a year later, my mother, brother and I boarded a plane to Toronto. But I didn’t recognise the man who picked us up at the airport. Worse than that, I recoiled and burst into tears.

“It’s your father,” my mother said, but the simple fact of this man being my father did not fall simply into place. “She’s tired,” she tried to assuage him.
That lack of recognition says much. An immigrant life wherever it begins and ends is one of just such alien encounters. Of reunions with family who are strangers. Of ties pulled elastic over water until they snap. Of new geographies that have no historical resonance, except in so far as you pioneer your way through them in the course of your own lifetime.
There is no inheritance. There is only here. Only now. There is nothing tangible that might situate you, locate you, attach you to humanity or history, there is only a mythology that lives elsewhere. Or the one that you create anew, through developing new ties and associations.

As it happens, we moved to a city that would shortly boast the highest percentage of foreign-born residents of any in the world. Toronto is an intensely multicultural place because, apart from the Aboriginal population, everyone comes or came within recent memory from somewhere else.
On the ordinary street in the middle of Toronto where I grew up we had neighbours who were Italian and Chinese and Greek and Jamaican and others whose identities did not fit as neatly into the boxes who might check on a census form. My friend Cathy, for instance, was Croatian. My friend Faz was Armenian and my friend Serena came from Palestine. “What’s that?” I remember asking her. “Well,” she said wisely, all of eight years old, “it’s like a country.”

I was fascinated by this idea, and increasingly, as I grew up, by the Middle East as a whole. It seemed like an intensely romantic place – the birthplace of great civilizations along mighty rivers like the Tigris, Euphrates and the Nile, the place where Judaism, Christianity and Islam all came into being – It had such history in contrast to the short story of our pioneering life in North America.

When I was an undergraduate student in anthropology I had the opportunity to spend a year studying Arabic in Cairo. Nothing kills romance like a good dose of reality. Egypt is not all pyramids and King Tut and Omar Sharif. Cairo is a tough, heaving, hot, dusty massive sprawling city and there I was trying to navigate my way through it alone, all of 21 years of age. I was utterly overwhelmed and had never felt quite so lost or small.

I found comfort in the most unlikely of places. Even though I’m not a Muslim, I responded to the call to prayer, the call of the muezzin five times a day. In the chaos of Cairo, I began to hear and then see an order to the place that would cultivate in me a wider and lifelong fascination with the Muslim world.

While in Harar, I lived with a Harari family for a year in their walled compound in the heart of the city. The mother, daughters and I slept on raised red earth platforms in a one-room building, and the father and his sons in another building on the other side of the courtyard. I dressed very modestly, like the women around me, wearing a veil and trousers under my skirts and lived according to the local laws of conduct.
The family I lived with knew I was not a Muslim but simply asked if I could please try. What did that involve? I asked. Keeping an open heart and an open mind, they said, and that, I certainly could do. Anytime I got sick though, the women wagged their fingers, laughed and reprimanded me. It’s because you are not Muslim enough, they said, and pointed me in the direction of Mecca.

I would never become Muslim enough but they remained ever hopeful and included me in their lives. Every morning we rose with the call to prayer and passed a water jug between us in order to bathe. Every day, three times a day, we ate the same watery stew out of the same bowl with our hands. We battled intestinal parasites together and after the first month there was suddenly no meat in the stew any longer and I had to fight like anyone else for whose turn it was to suck the marrow out of the one bone floating there. My status as a guest had elapsed.
At night, women from the neighbourhood would all gather together in someone’s living room to mend clothes, embroider pillowcases, weave baskets and gossip away. I sat among them, working on a dictionary of their unwritten language and helping the children with their English homework. It was an immense privilege for me to be made welcome in this domestic universe full of conversations and shared experiences that I will never forget.

We did not live in isolation though from the politics of the time. In the months leading up to the Ethiopia’s first democratic elections in the 1990s, factional disputes arose, rivals threw bombs and we had a curfew after dark. We did not live isolated from the realities of the wider world either. I will never forget the shock of seeing a woman wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of the CN Tower – an iconic symbol in Toronto’s landscape. I asked her about the T-shirt and she told me her brother had sent it. He lived in Toronto, as did her sister. Virtually everyone in Harar would turn out to have a relative in Toronto. Harar was not the ancient and remote African locale I had once imagined. It was intimately connected to the very modern city I call home.

The fact is, we live in a world in flux and at no time in history have we seen so much movement, whether lured by the prospect of better opportunities elsewhere or pushed by limitations in our countries of origin. In this sense we all have an immigrant story, whether our own, or that of someone we love. And those stories matter because they embody the present realities of our world and inform our futures.

Eventually, I would find myself turning to fiction as a way of telling stories about this very common aspect of human experience. Fiction is one very accessible means of travelling to worlds that might be very different from the ones we inhabit. It can offer powerfully resonant portraits of ourselves and others in our midst. It can allow us to walk in the shoes of another, to care for that other, and to recognise our common humanity. Wherever we might find ourselves in the world we share in common the struggle to find a sense of belonging and a place we can call home.

Camilla Gibb’s works have been translated into 15 languages. Her latest novel, Sweetness in the Belly, is an international bestseller and has been optioned for film. Camilla divides her time between Toronto and London.

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