Judging Chris Cleave’s Little Bee by its cover is a
surprisingly useful exercise. Against an orange background, an African
girl’s face is silhouetted in profile; where her eye should be is a
white woman’s head, also in profile. And the jacket copy: “We don’t
want to tell you WHAT HAPPENS in this book. It is a truly SPECIAL STORY
and we don’t want to spoil it.” The cover insists that Little
Bee has an important story to tell, but coyly promises that it will
be an accessible, relatable one. Were the cover to actually summarize
the book’s contents, it would run the risk of being dismissed out of
the very indifference Little Bee aims to combat: the general
unwillingness of rich white people to care about the suffering of poor
brown people.
Little Bee is, in essence, a white author’s attempt to
humanize the plight of Britain’s African immigrants. Little Bee also happens to be about a white writer attempting to humanize
the plight of Britain’s African immigrants.
The narrative’s white writer is a magazine editor, Sarah, who runs a
women’s magazine where she must make hard (but symbolically loaded!)
decisions about whether to run stories about female refugees or female
orgasms. Four years before the novel picks up, Sarah and her husband
vacationed in Nigeria, where they had a charged encounter with a young
girl, Little Bee, who was fleeing violence in her home village. Little
Bee escaped Nigeria only to spend two years imprisoned in a British
detention center—upon her release, the only name she knows is
that of Sarah’s husband, Andrew. She arrives on Sarah’s doorstep days
after Andrew has committed suicide; in first-person chapters
alternating between Sarah and Little Bee’s perspective, Cleave unravels
how the two women arrived at this strange juncture.
For all Cleave’s obvious earnestness in shedding light on the plight
of African immigrants, the novel as a whole feels over-planned and
manipulative. Much the way that Sarah wants readers of her magazine to
care about the plight of refugees, Little Bee conspires to
humanize the “immigration problem,” in order that desensitized readers
might learn to care about a poor immigrant girl, and by extension all
suffering immigrants. An admirable goal, but too transparently executed
to succeed.