[170] Little Bee: A Novel – Chris Cleave

“This is the moment. Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. 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.” [220]

Little Bee is exactly what Sarah Summers is not. Little Bee flees from Nigeria where an oil war annihilates her village and takes the life of her family. Sarah is a London editor who strives to maintain a balance between the glossy magazine job and suburbia parenting amidst a marriage awash in a storm. Little Bee suffers a wounded psyche while Sarah fights with her husband over building a glasshouse in the garden. Yet as the book (note I say book, not story) unfolds, when their narratives communicate, they have more in common than just the color of skin, the flag of the country, the Queen’s English they speak, and the station in life which they find themselves would them to believe.

The subtexts eventually conveys the truth that both women are refugees who desperately seek a different kind of shelter: Little Bee a place in the world where she can undress her protective guise and live like a human being. Sarah a second chance to amend her marriage that her affair has marauded. The circuitous circumstances that lead to their fateful meeting at the African beach can’t better demonstrate that human beings, stripped of the socioeconomic nutshell, are just helpless creatures as the mercy of mother nature, deprived of any great effort upon the vast warm wind of events that are greater than them.

But the book doesn’t begin with the horrific scene, which is really the heart of the matter. Instead Chris Cleave plunges into the aftermaths that afford the complicated terrains of these women’s emotions and trickle their way back to the central event. The result is a style, almost like synecdoche, of a dramatic caliber befitting the nature of this special story. Maybe it is indeed a synecdoche, since the book is released in the British Commonwealths under the title The Other Hand. The hand and finger play a crucial role in the story. Who wouldn’t be drawn into the story of a sixteen-year-old Nigerian girl whose two-year custody at the immigration detention center exemplifies political cruelty of the West? The mandates to survive—conforming to the dress code and speech—paradoxically dehumanizes her. Is it dignity for liberty? For Sarah, the dream vacation that was to save her marriage freeloads her life to a disaster. For years after the beach incident memories swirl in her mind—inchoate, senseless and miserable. Faith stymied, she escapes to something that disquiets her conscience. Little does she know that the Nigerian refugee is the keeper of a truth that will ease her scruple.

Little Bee is a novel that reminds us of humanity, humanity at its best and most invincible, in the face of horror and sorrow. The manner with which their disparate lives intersect is serendipitous, and how this story unfolds is magic. The book is both heartwarming and heartbreaking, nudging the terrains of delicate emotions. The voice of the Nigerian girl is sardonic and vulnerable, reminiscing the sarcastic tone of the narrator in The White Tiger. [Read/Skim/Toss]