Little Bee by Chris Cleave

I’m sure many reviews have been written about Little Bee, reviews by professionals and by those who don’t get paid to review novels.  Nonetheless, most everything that can be said about this novel probably has been said, so I will only make two points.

The first one is about writing. I prefer novels written in the third person, and the reason is that characters written in the third person don’t think the way they think in novels written in the first person.  What I mean is that third person narrators can think poetically, but when first person narrators do, it comes across as contrived. Little Bee is written in the first person, and Little Bee (meaning the character not the title) is from a village in Nigeria who spends two years in a detention center in England, yet her imagery, analogies, and metaphors reflect someone who is educated in a very western way and who has mastered subtleties of the English language; perhaps she’s a linguistic genius, but it doesn’t work for me.

The second point is about the issue of immigration.

“It doesn’t matter how you talk, does it?” she [female police officer] said.  “You’re a drain on resources.  The point is you don’t belong here.”

“But please, what does it mean?”  I said.  “What does it mean, to belong here?”

“Well, you’ve got to be British, haven’t you?  You’ve got to share our values.”

Of course, the officer has no idea how ironic being a “drain on resources” is because she isn’t thinking about how Europeans are draining the resources in Nigeria, but she’s emphasizing belong, and to an American ear, the exchange above sounds very strange though Little Bee’s question is excellent.  Perhaps substituting British and American will reveal why the exchange is awkward from an American perspective:

“Well, you’ve got to be American, haven’t you?  You’ve got to share our values.”

I have no idea what it really means to be American, and I have no idea what American values are.  To belong in the United States doesn’t require us to be anything in particular. To belong to many Americans would probably mean to be here legally. But what about people who are here illegally?  How do they belong?  They belong because they’re human beings. (This is stated in Little Bee several times.)  We are citizens of the world, and as the 21st Century progresses we will understand that countries' borders are obsolete, and the British officer’s reply will be enigmatic and more than a little confusing.