-- from Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship (UK Home Office, 2005)
Finally caught up to the highly acclaimed 2009 novel, "Little Bee," by Chris Cleave, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper in London.
Little Bee is the name of a young Nigerian girl who escapes the terror of her homeland,. caught up in mad violence over vast oil deposits, and lands in a detention center for illegal immigrants and refugees.
The other main character in the novel, Sarah O'Rourke, is a British magazine editor who lives in the gentrified suburbs of London, has a Batman-costume-wearing 4-year-old son and a lover named Lawrence who's as plain vanilla as his name.
Sarah's husband, Andrew, a smart, opinionated newspaper columnist has just committed suicide and that forces Sarah to take a hard look at her selfish existence and make some choices -- about actually being "present" for son Charlie, about continuing the affair with Lawrence and, above all, whether she has any obligation to help Little Bee apply for asylum.
Little Bee, you see, had encountered the vacationing Andrew and Sarah on a beach in Nigeria several years earlier. The couple's attempt to patch their relationship instead resulted in a life-or-death standoff with armed men who had terrorized Little Bee's village and now were threatening to kill her and her older sister.
I won't reveal anything more about that, except to say that Little Bee survives that encounter and flees to Britain. The only people she knows of are Andrew and Sarah and, after escaping the detention center, she shows up on the O'Rourkes' doorstep.
The author, Cleave, takes on the challenge of writing in the voice of both Little Bee and Sarah and taking us inside their minds, one having grown up in a place where "Top Gun" was the only American movie available, the other having every conceivable privilege. He spent his early childhood in West Africa and did a great deal of research on Britain's immigration removal centers, so he is able (for me, anyway) to write convincingly about the inter-ethnic conflicts and harsh conditions in the centers.
In doing so, he gives the lie to the UK Home Office's claim of being "a safe haven" for asylum seekers. Of course, Britain is hardly alone in taking a hard line against illegal immigrants. It's a universal and ages-old story of people seeking freedom from repression -- or simply a better life for their families -- and running into official resistance and racist backlash from ordinary citizens.
I'm reminded of "Illegal," a movie that I saw earlier this year at the Portland International Film Festival, about a Russian immigrant living illegally in Belgium. And years before that, "El Norte," the story of a teenage brother and sister who flee Guatemala and head for Los Angeles, hoping to start a new life in The North.
As long as we have repressive governments, we'll have stories like these. The power of a personal narrative like "Little Bee" is that it can break through the dehumanization and demonization that too often characterizes the millions of faceless refugees around the globe. In this case, Cleave juxtaposes Sarah's comfortable life with that of Little Bee's desperation and resourcefulness to pose some important moral questions about selflessness and sacrifice.
Bottom line: an excellent book. See the New York Times review here. For other reader reviews, see www.goodreads.com
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