Little Bee

by Chris Cleave

  Add into the mix the fact that the story is not told in linear time—the first half of the book is working backward into history, while the second half works forward into the future—and you start to see the complexity of writing like this. The trick is to make it read smoothly. It’s scary how many drafts you go through till you achieve something that reads simply. There are days when you love the work and days when you wish you had almost any other job.

  Lawrence tells Little Bee, “If you understood how serious your situation is, I don’t think you’d smile.” To which she replies, “If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious” (page 186). How were you able to find a balance between humor and gravity in a novel with such serious themes?

  I was able to do it because I have good readers. I can have my characters explore some fairly dark humor—for example, listing methods for a young Nigerian girl to kill herself at a garden party hosted by the Queen of England—while trusting my readers to understand that I am not making light of a serious theme. Rather, I am offering up a dark theme to the light, so that it may be examined. This is the only way I know to tell a serious story about current events without it becoming a lecture. And when I interviewed refugees and asylum seekers while researching this novel, I found that some of them use humor in this way too. These are people with very painful stories to tell. They have learned that in order to survive, they must get people in positions of power to listen to—and believe—their stories. And they have further learned that such people are more likely to listen if they make their stories entertaining, by showing the joy of their lives as well as the tragedy. They are the masters at telling their stories, because if they don’t get that balance right, they die. That’s motivation, right there. As far as storytelling goes, they’re playing in the major leagues. Novelists are rank amateurs by comparison.

  How do you think American readers may approach the story differently from British readers? What might be lost on them? What about the story is universal?

  Nothing’s going to be lost on American readers. This is the story of an African girl coming to the Western world and struggling to be accepted. She encounters racism, hostility and betrayal, but she also finds good people and friendship, and she becomes a strong person—in some ways stronger than both the society she came from and the one she finds herself in. Americans are going to understand this story quicker than a lot of British people will. You have an extraordinary history of immigrants coming to America—either forcibly or voluntarily—and striving to find their place within it. Little Bee’s personal struggle is an allegory of the struggle of every people that has ever hoped for a better life and known that it has something to contribute. This is a story that is written deep in your national identity, and my own country would be better off if we took a page out of your book.

  Little Bee often talks about how she would have to explain things to “the girls back home.” How can looking at our culture through the eyes of a foreigner help clarify things?

  The “girls back home” are the novel’s Greek chorus—they are a foil in whose imagined reaction the cultural dissonance experienced by Little Bee can be made explicit. It’s a good device because it feels more natural than having Little Bee go around talking straight to camera, saying “Wow, I’m freaked out by this. And this. And this.” Much better for us to have Little Bee’s thoughts after she has understood the situation and can explain it to the “girls back home” from a position of superior knowledge. This allows us to appreciate the cultural gulf, while allowing the narrator to be comic rather than tragic.

  So, Little Bee is the foreigner and the “girls back home” are her device. I look at human culture the same way science fiction does, but I look at it through the wrong end of the telescope. In sci-fi an ordinary protagonist discovers an extraordinary world, and the genre is exciting because of the emotional dissonance. But my thing is contemporary realism, so I’m always showing the ordinary world to what is effectively an extraterrestrial protagonist. It’s fun to do. Through this lens the most mundane events—Little Bee drinking a cup of tea in Sarah’s kitchen—acquire an immense significance and a certain beauty. Also, the things in our culture that are sad and ignoble—for example, the fact that we can enjoy our freedom while imprisoning and deporting those who ask to share in it—appear in sharp focus through the eyes of an alien narrator. We have become accustomed to viewing our own immorality in soft focus, but the alien narrator has not yet acquired this cultural immunity. She sees us as we can no longer see ourselves.

  How did Andrew help to characterize those around him? Both Sarah and Andrew are morally flawed. How do you expect readers to react to Andrew’s actions on the Nigerian beach? How might they react to Sarah’s affair with Lawrence?

  I don’t have a preconception of how readers will react to that scene. My aim was to create a scene that was perfectly morally ambiguous, and in which the reader might quite justifiably side with either Andrew or Sarah. Andrew isn’t such a bad guy. What he fails to do on the beach is what most people would probably fail to do, myself included. Once Andrew realizes he’s made the wrong choice, it’s too late for him because the moment has passed and he is condemned to spend the rest of his days regretting that he failed life’s test. Sarah is lucky, really. She’s not inherently more moral than her husband, but just at that one critical moment she happened to do the right thing. This means that she can look back on her actions on the beach without too much guilt or shame. She can move on with the rest of her life while Andrew must enter a terminal decline. It’s ironic because Sarah’s infidelity is the reason the couple find themselves on the beach in the first place. And yet her premeditated affair goes unpunished by life, while Andrew’s momentary failure of courage dooms him forever. Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.

  Is Charlie/Batman based on your own children? What do you hope his presence in the novel will help to elucidate for the reader? How might we benefit from adopting the worldview of a child who sees everything in terms of “goodys” and “baddys”?

  Charlie is based on our oldest boy, who was four years old when I wrote the book. For six months he would only answer to “Batman.” For a whole week I just listened to him and took dictation, which certainly beat going out to work for a living. Charlie’s “goodys/baddys” worldview is endearing, but of course it’s naive and he’s not in the book as an example of an ideal morality. Charlie is in the novel for two reasons. First, because he’s funny and lovable—he gives the novel an emotional center; a reason for the adult protagonists to not simply walk away from the situation and disperse. Second, Charlie is a study in the early formation of identity. Little Bee is a novel about where our individuality lies—which layers of identity are us, and which are mere camouflage. So it’s a deliberate choice to use the metaphor of a child who is engaging in his first experiments with identity—in Charlie’s case by taking on the persona of a superhero.

  In a video on your website you mention that the book is, in some way, about “the horror of being alive in a world where atrocities happen.” Are there particular human rights issues you’d like to take this opportunity to call attention to? In the face of such monumental tragedy as is exposed in Little Bee , how can one person make a difference?

  Well, that’s a big question. I’m more qualified to answer technical questions about my writing but I’ll try to answer this, so long as we both agree that my answer has no more weight than anyone else’s. I guess I hardly need call anyone’s attention to the reality that there is more horror than happiness in the world. A billion people are hungry, hundreds of conflicts and wars are ongoing, tens of millions suffer from eradicable diseases, there is always at least one genocide under way somewhere on the planet, more people still live under dictatorships or oppressive regimes than live in free societies, and arms dealers still make more money than farmers. Of course individuals can make a diffe
rence, but the fact is that evil has had the whip hand in this world ever since Cain. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to be good, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves, either. Evil is not going to be vanquished. Our job is to resist it, and to plant the seeds of further resistance so that goodness never entirely vanishes from the universe. There are degrees of resistance. It starts when you give a dollar to a homeless person and it escalates to the point where people give their lives, as Gandhi did, or Martin Luther King, Jr. One person can make a difference by traveling as far along that continuum as they feel able.

  In doing research for the book, did you come across any facts or stories of particular importance to you that did not make it into the final draft? Would you share some with us?

  Yes, here’s the true story that inspired me to write Little Bee. In 2001, an Angolan man named Manuel Bravo fled to England and claimed asylum on the grounds that he and his family would be persecuted and killed if they were returned to Angola. He lived in a state of uncertainty for four years pending a decision on his application. Then, without warning, in September 2005 Manuel Bravo and his thirteen-year-old son were seized in a dawn raid and interned at an Immigration Removal Centre in southern England. They were told that they would be forcibly deported to Angola the next morning. That night, Manuel Bravo took his own life by hanging himself in a stairwell. His son was awakened in his cell and told the news. What had happened was that Manuel Bravo, aware of a rule under which unaccompanied minors cannot be deported from the UK, had taken his own life in order to save the life of his son. His last words to his child were: “Be brave. Work hard. Do well at school.”

  What can we expect next from you? Are you working on anything new right now?

  Yes, I’m working very hard—2008 was all about publishing and promoting Little Bee (or The Other Hand, as it’s called elsewhere), so 2009 is all about getting back to writing. I’m halfway through a third novel, which is about war. I’m also writing a comic novel and a crime screenplay, so it’s going to be a big year for work.

  Book Club Readers Ask Chris Cleave their Questions

  1. Leslie M., Saint Jacob, IL

  I definitely have a question. When our book club discussed this book, we all had different views on what happened to Little Bee in the end. There was much discussion over the ending. Does Little Bee die? Does she take her own life? Or, did “the men” take it? Or, as one reader felt, does Sarah have enough sway to save Little Bee in the end? There were some strong opinions. I didn’t realize how ambiguous the outcome actually was until we spoke about it and I reread the last two pages. So, Chris Cleave, please give us some insight into just what did happen to our Little Bee.

  Thank you for discussing the novel in your book club, Leslie. I feel very honored that you would take the time to think about my story so carefully. In answer to your question about the ending, I’m afraid I can’t say whether Little Bee lives or dies. That’s not me being stubborn-it’s just because I honestly don’t know. I think both outcomes are equally plausible. I wanted to leave the story open-ended. When I write a novel I like to do a lot of research and use that to open a door into a world that the reader might enjoy visiting. I don’t necessarily want to close that door again and say: “Move along now please, the action’s over, there’s nothing else to see here.” I’m always working to write a story where the characters are big enough to stay with me-and hopefully to stay with the reader-after the scenes of the book have finished. This is the transcendent moment I’m aiming for-and I don’t know if I ever achieve it-where the character passes from my mind to the reader’s mind, and the reader can negotiate with the character concerning what happens next. I was talking with a reader once who said that my novels tended to leave her with “a stone in [her] shoe,” and I suppose that might be the effect I’m aiming for. Not that I want the stone to be uncomfortable for you, mind. Just that I want the character to stay with you, and I don’t think that happens by tying off the ending neatly.

  2. Lei Lani De Santiago, Austin, TX

  I would like to ask Mr. Cleave why he felt it was important for the characters to be so different from each other to reflect the key message of his story. Wouldn’t it have been possible for Little Bee to find comfort and help from a fellow detainee rather than seek help from Sarah? Why the focus on the differences of the two?

  I agree with you, Lei Lani, that it would have been a good way to tell the story, to follow Little Bee’s friendship with a fellow detainee. Indeed, as you can probably tell from the first few chapters of the novel, I was very interested in her relationship with Yevette, a refugee from Jamaica. As I went through successive drafts of the novel, though, I began to realize that if I wanted to tell the story of a refugee, then that would actually be two stories: that of the refugee herself, and that of the culture in which she seeks sanctuary. I realized that I needed an insider’s voice to tell each of those stories; hence the decision to make Sarah a major character and Yevette a minor one in the final balance of the novel. Also, I wanted to explore how much Sarah and Little Bee had in common, and this was a more interesting and counter-intuitive discovery when the two characters, on the face of it, shared very little. I liked the contrast between them, which I think might be best illustrated by the passage where Little Bee says: “Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator.” And then I liked the way that these two very different characters could come together, in the cause of their common humanity.

  3. Carol Levy, Woodbury, NY

  How did you get the inspiration to write this story? It seems like a story that would be written by a woman.

  Thanks Carol. I was inspired to write the novel by the real-life story of Manuel Bravo, a refugee from Angola. In 2001 an Angolan man named Manuel Bravo fled to England and claimed asylum on the grounds that he and his family would be persecuted and killed if they were returned to Angola. He lived in a state of uncertainty for four years pending a decision on his application. Then, without warning, in September 2005 Manuel Bravo and his 13-year-old son were seized in a dawn raid and interned at an Immigration Removal Centre in southern England. They were told that they would be forcibly deported to Angola the next morning. That night, Manuel Bravo took his own life by hanging himself in a stairwell. His son was awoken in his cell and told the news. What had happened was that Manuel Bravo, aware of a rule under which unaccompanied minors cannot be deported from the UK, had taken his own life in order to save the life of his son. Among his last words to his child were: “Be brave. Work hard. Do well at school."

  In response to your comment that the novel seems like one that would have been written by a woman-well, I’m sure it could have been. I’m not so sure there’s all that much difference between male and female writers once they achieve a certain technical level. The further you go as a writer, the less difference it should make what body you happen to be inhabiting-either in real life, or in the life of your novel. I think the work is to imagine yourself into the psyche of any human being, of any gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and so on. It takes sustained and quiet concentration, but you get to the point where you can write these characters and put them in the service of your theme.

  4. Alison K., Northampton, MA

  Throughout the book, Little Bee was alert to her surroundings and imagined how she would kill herself, should the men come. At the end of the book, when the men finally came for Little Bee on the beach, why didn’t she try to kill herself?

  Thanks, Alison. I think by the end of the novel she’d become much stronger. She’d gone through that post-traumatic stage characterized by persistent thoughts of suicide, and she’d come out at the other end as a tougher cookie. I was very interested to explore this idea that suicidal tho
ughts might be part of a process in which she took back control of her destiny. In choosing not to succumb to the suicidal impulse, she became the master of her situation again. In her own words, she had “killed herself back to life."

  5. Amy Neral, Brookfield, OH

  I was so emotionally attached to your book that when her husband wouldn’t cut off his finger to save the girls, I yelled at my husband and smacked him with the book-gently-but he now asks me if I am reading “a book like the Bee one” before he answers any “if we were...would you...” questions. What motivated you when writing that specific part of the book?

  Amy, my apologies to you and your husband for being the indirect cause of this stark incident of domestic violence that sullied what would otherwise seem to be a good-humored marriage. I’m amused that he asks you if you’re reading “a book like the Bee one,” because my wife tends to ask me if I’m writing a book like the Bee one. (She argues that I must be disturbed on some level to write the more graphic scenes, while I tend to protest that I am actually quite a calm person.) The truth is that the finger-chopping scene came to me fully formed in a dream after I’d been working on drafts of the novel for a while, and I adapted the dream to fit my theme. I needed a concrete illustration of one of the abstract philosophical questions that the book explores-namely, how much of our comfortable lives should we give up in order to help those who have much less than we do? And what could be more concrete than a question that turns into a book that is then used to smack a significant other? Awesome.