Blog 4: Little Bee Free Write

Little Bee was able to capture my attention from the very beginning of the book. The introduction was just so bizarre that I couldn’t help but not become intrigued. The narrator explaining to the audience that she would rather be a British pound coin than an African girl was such a strange image. The main character is able to convey that her diminished value is due to globalization. She explains how the pound is free to travel wherever and has power, more power and authority than an immigrant African girl. This sentiment expressed that the main character had severe inner turmoil that I was dying to excavate. Then the main character explained how she was a refugee from Nigeria being held in a detention center for nearly two years. I was shocked by this depiction, because I was unaware that refugees were imprisoned after reaching “freedom”. Little Bee was only fourteen when she reached London and she was still held in a detention center, as if a young child clearly traumatized by her forced emigration could be associated with the terrorists activities of her hometown. For some reason, after getting attached to Little Bee, I assumed the main character was the author of the novel so I took a break from my reading and read the back cover of the book to learn more about the author. To my surprise, the author is a white male. I wondered why a white male was writing from the perspective of an African refugee, therefore I searched into Chris Cleave’s background. I found out that Cleave often writes about loss in relation to terrorist activity (like in his first novel Incendiary). The author was personally invested in this second novel and based a lot of the information from the book on his childhood in West Africa.