Little Bee

“Learning the Queen’s English is like scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toenails, the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had.” 

The “good time” is Little Bee’s brief experience in Britain, before she was deported and “scrubbed” of her hopeful adopted name. The Queen’s English is a kind of mask that she wears as part of that new identity, and it leaves residue just as horrible experience leave residue upon a life. The red varnish that she possesses at her detention center is, just like the Queen’s English, a kind of hidden pleasure and mask that helps her to survive and escape the pain of her own experience and past. 

“Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people from my country agree on. They say, That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong. That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon.” 

Little Bee feels, overwhelmingly, that she “does not belong.” Anywhere that she goes, she struggles to imagine herself fitting in. In Abuja, when she sees the beautiful city in the country she calls her own, she starts to see new faces of old places and imagine that she could have a life in this unfamiliar place that combines her home and the metropolis she only knows in Britain.

“Death, of course, is a refuge. It’s where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It’s where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.” 

Living beings can try different techniques to live through their pain, Sarah suggests, but none of these were available to Andrew in his depression. Because he cannot find “asylum,” he dies. Recognizing the stateless experience as deeply traumatic, Sarah extends the metaphor to make the feeling of refugee status one that applies, painfully, in many scenarios.

“At first, my son moved with a breathless confidence. Batman was undefeated, after all, that spring. He had overcome the Penguin, the Puffin, and Mr. Freeze. It was simply not a possibility in my son’s mind that he might not overcome this new challenge. He screamed in rage and fury.” 

Just after Andrew’s death, Charlie seems completely confident in his Batman uniform. Eventually, Sarah learns that this confidence is, perhaps, incomplete. But his “rage and fury” are part of his mask, not part of his internal experience: this is what makes them confident, instead of despairing.

“‘Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.’” 

Little Bee points out to her reader that knowing horror intimately, rather than experiencing it sometimes, are two different things. People in her home space know horror differently. At the same time, as she comes to see different sides of horror in Andrew’s experience, Little Bee does not see horror as geographically limited: She merely means to call out the difference between choosing horror and being faced with it daily.

“They moved me out of the medical wing. I still screamed in the night, but not every night. I realized that I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope. I realized I had killed myself back to life.” 

Before Little Bee arrives at Andrew and Sarah’s house, she is familiar with finding new ways to live. Finding hope amid horror is a new way for her to find life, a different kind of “killing” that only leads to life. This is the difference between her and those who die by suicide in this text, who cannot find the hope to lead them through.

“‘Uh-uh, Bug, uh-uh. It don’t work like dat. Not for pipple from Jamaica, an not for pipple from Nye-Jirrya neither. Get dis into yore head, darlin: dere is only one place where de proper procedure ends, an dat is de-por-tay-SHUN.’” 

Yevette’s explanation of deportation surprises Little Bee at the beginning of the text. Yet that pragmatic vision is mirrored, later, by Lawrence and the others around her. Different people approach laws and danger differently. Yevette’s influence on Little Bee is manifold, but her sense of action-taking on her own behalf stays with Little Bee as she confronts the strange new country.

“This is the trouble with all happiness—all of it is built on top of something that men want.” 

The idea of “men wanting,” in Little Bee, is constant. Men want sex and are willing to be violent for it; men want oil, and they will kill for it. Happiness, then, is not an ideal end goal, because it also leads to madness and horror. Instead, the text leads its reader to peace. 

“We don’t have a grown-up language for grief. Daytime shows do it much better. I knew I ought to feel devastated, of course. My life had fallen apart. Isn’t that the phrase? But Andrew had been dead nearly a whole week now and here I still was, dry-eyed, with the whole house reeking of gin and lilies.” 

Sarah’s struggle to find language solves itself as she begins to tell stories will Little Bee. This dearth of language is replaced with raw emotion as she slowly relinquishes the masks that protect her from the language and sounds of feeling.

“Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn’t the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn’t deserve my own pity.” 

Sarah feels guilty over Andrew’s death. Her self-pity bothers her; in this sense, Andrew’s death primes her to revisit her experience with Little Bee and begin the questioning process of the next several days.

“We were joined by what had happened on the beach. Getting rid of her would be like losing a part of me. It would be like shedding a finger, or a name. I wasn’t going to let that happen again.” 

Sarah recognizes that she and Little Bee are commingled especially after she recognizes that they experience the same horrific memories of a parallel past experience. Part of living is to stay whole, to not sacrifice parts of bodies or hearts: She wants to hold onto something special to her. As the text moves forward, Sarah starts to discover that she does not necessarily need to hold on to Little Bee—she only needs to hold herself together.

“Imagine how tired I would become, telling my story to the girls from back home. This is the real reason why no one tells us Africans anything.” 

Little Bee imagines the exhaustion of telling her friends at home about Britain to entertain herself and explain to her audience the differences between two cultures. At the same time, storytelling is a pleasure for Little Bee—it is the way that she and Sarah can come together. For this reason, it striking that she points out that no one seems to tell “us Africans anything.”

“I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.” 

Little Bee acknowledges the power of storytelling, and the power of stories to take hold of their tellers, even before she and Sarah begin their project. These statements on the power of a story to emerge and to change a person, not vice versa, carry throughout the text to give purpose to storytelling in a world in which it might seem ineffective or not logical enough to make readers (of The Times, of Nixie) want to read on. 

“‘We are all trying to be happy in this world. I am happy because I do not think the men will come to kill me today. You are happy because you can make your own choices. And Lawrence is your choice, right?’” 

Happiness, though not necessarily a good goal in Little Bee’s eyes, is a common quest for the women of the world. Happiness is also, she says, measured in different ways. Sarah feels some guilt about the differences in their experiences. But for Little Bee, it is simple that Sarah would want to be happy with Lawrence in the same way that she wants to be happy because she is safe.

“Happiness for Sarah was a long future where she could live the life of her choice. A dog must be a dog and a wolf must be a wolf and a bee must be a bee.” 

Little Bee realizes that all people need to be who they are, even before she is ready to relinquish the name that she uses to cover up who she is. All people, she believes, must tend and reach toward the most authentic experience of who they are in order to be happy—this is the overall motion of the book.

“‘But whatever’s going to happen to you is going to happen eventually, whether I do anything or not. This isn’t your country. They’ll come for you, I promise you they will. They come for all of you in the end.’” 

Lawrence’s pessimism and xenophobia makes a profound influence on Little Bee. Throughout the text, she holds onto her name because some of her is swayed by this perspective: She knows that she is not safe to be herself. She also fears that men with guns will find her, and Lawrence’s words verbalize that anxiety that already plagues her. Men seem to represent and assure a reason for those fears more palpably than anything else. 

“‘The person I am is the person you saw on that beach. He knows where the commas go, but he wouldn’t cut off one finger to save you.’” 

Andrew, just before he dies by suicide, tells Little Bee that he is this person. His vision of himself recognizes, in a painful and anxious manner, that he holds too tightly to specific and official details but does not have perspective to make positive, moral moves in the world. Readers know that this comparison with his wife, who seems to have a better moral compass, is incomplete, for both have different flaws and different horrors in the wake of and surrounding that event on the beach. 

“Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee’s age, and you realize that some of the world’s badness is inside you, that maybe you’re a part of it. And then you get a little bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you’ve seen in yourself is really all that bad at all.” 

Sarah sees herself differently across the text. With Lawrence, she shares her fear that as people lose innocence, like they have at Charlie’s age, they lose their sense of clear cut good and bad that the child seems, so often, to imagine.

“You live in a world of machines and you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.” 

By using parallel language, Little Bee shows that the extreme opposite experiences mirror one another and interrelate across differently developed nations. Just like the jeep in the jungle, the machine and the organic experiences of life come together in conflict and travel to create a new kind of experience in the modern world.

“And I thought to myself: that is it. My troubles will find me very easily in this town of stone and iron if I keep my foolish name that I chose at the edge of the jungle. So I will take a name that suits this city instead.” 

In London, Little Bee is repeatedly tempted to take on a new name. She wants to escape to meld into her environment, though voices around her constantly interrupt these efforts to fit into that space. Ultimately, a name is not enough to find belonging or escape.

“To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well—here is the truth—you have to talk yourself out of it.” 

Little Bee’s growth across the novel comes from her ability to use talk and communication as her greatest strategy. It is not the Queen’s English but her ability to tell her story, to reach its end, that helps her to find a good (but not necessarily a safe) ending.

“Why had I never run to Charlie? I screamed at myself. My son, my beautiful boy. Gone, gone. He had disappeared as he had lived, while I was looking the other way. I looked at the empty days before me, and there was no end to them.” 

Sarah’s ultimate revelation is not that she does not need her job or did not love her husband well but that she abandoned her son. Little Bee leads her back to Charlie, without whom her life would be “empty.” The elemental hope of childhood is an idea that unifies both women to face the future together.

“‘If we can show that what happened to your village happened to a hundred villages, then the power is on our side. We need to collect the stories of people who’ve been through the same things as you.’” 

Like Little Bee, Sarah recognizes the power in stories. Beyond just the personal use of storytelling, Sarah encourages Little Bee to see the broader use of storytelling and to believe in the project of writing. Although Little Bee is skeptical, aware of the fear that seems to overwhelm any possibility of truth-telling, she slowly sees that community makes stories shared. They transform when told.