Little Bee

Little Bee, a 2010 novel by Chris Cleave, follows a teenage Nigerian refugee as her life intertwines with Sarah Summers, Andrew O’Rourke, and Charlie O’Rourke. Cleave imagines a singular scene on a beach in Nigeria that unites Little Bee to the O’Rourke-Summers family. As both Little Bee and Sarah slowly tell and retell their stories of that event and those before and after it, their voices slowly unite. Bridging across countries and blending into a single set of metaphors, the women’s stories intermingle into one.

The story begins in an immigrant detention center outside of London, on the day when Little Bee is to be released. Yevette, a spirited Jamaican girl, bribes a guard with her body, and he releases her, Little Bee, and two other girls into the countryside with no further assistance. The four wander to a farm where one, traumatized by her memories, hangs herself. Little Bee begins to explain the horror of the refugee to her Western audience: she knows that “horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it” (45), but for her and her fellow-refugees, horror is something they live with every day.

After Little Bee shows up at Sarah and Andrew’s house on the day of his funeral, with his driver’s license in hand, Little Bee and Sarah slowly unravel the events that have brought them together. Years before, after Sarah began an affair with Lawrence Osborn, she and Andrew took a holiday to Nigeria, paid for by a sponsor of the magazine that Sarah edits. There, Little Bee and her sister, fleeing an oil war in their village, ask the couple to help them escape the men who want to kill them. Andrew refuses to cut off his finger to appease the soldiers, and so Sarah does, thus saving Little Bee, but not her sister. Both Sarah and Andrew assume that both girls die. Sarah and Little Bee tell these stories, from their perspectives, back to one another in Sarah’s home. They use storytelling to work through their grief and haunting; they work to “save” one another.

Little Bee admits to Lawrence, who is still Sarah’s lover, that she saw Andrew before he died. Lawrence wants Little Bee to call the police, but he does not want to risk his relationship with Sarah. Although the two work to hide their conflict from Charlie, the young boy still reeling from his father’s death, they are distracted from him on a day trip, in which Charlie runs away. Sarah, whose life has been deeply challenged by Little Bee, panics: She realizes that she has valued the wrong things by placing mindless work ahead of her son. Sarah and Lawrence find the boy, but only after Little Bee has called the police. The police suspect her as culpable and deport her back to Nigeria within days.

Sarah, who has discovered a dossier of materials about Nigerian oil wars that the haunted Andrew left behind after his suicide, is inspired to write about the conflict. She follows Little Bee to Nigeria, with Charlie in tow, and works to empower her to tell the stories of her home country. Believing that “if we can show what happened to [Little Bee’s] village happened to a hundred villages, then the power is on our side” (253), Sarah pulls Little Bee into her writing project. One day, Little Bee convinces Sarah to return to the beach where they met so that she can let go of her sister and her past. The trip is restful, until soldiers appear on the beach to chase Little Bee. After Sarah tells Little Bee to hide, the soldiers threaten her; when Charlie runs, they shoot at him. Little Bee runs out to save the boy: She tells him her name, Udo, convincing him to take off his beloved Batman suit and play freely in the water. Although the soldiers chase her, Little Bee laughs with pleasure seeing him play freely and peacefully with the other Nigerian children.