Sour Honey: "Little Bee" and the Nice White Lady Novel

TRIGGER WARNING: Discussions of self-mutilation, violence, murder, sexual assault, dismemberment, cannibalism, discussion of mental illness, voiding of the bladder and bowls in public, and White Tears.

Chris Cleve’s “Little Bee” has been the talk of the publishing world for over two years now.  Showered with praise, optioned for a movie and the selection of book clubs everywhere, “Little Bee” has been portrayed as a trenchant story about immigration, the globalization of England’s economy, interracial friendship and the weight of grief.  The publisher has cutely declared on the back of the book that it needs no blurb; no, “Little Bee” is a novel that must be experienced from the beginning and thus you must stumble blindly into the character’s lives without preparation to be fully blown away by their experiences.  Well, readers, I have done that.  And no, “LB” is not some grand story about how to bridge the gap between races and reform our world economy.

Little Bee is, in short: White Guilt: The novel.

WARNING: THE SPOILER ZONE IS FOR THE UNLOADING OF SPOILERS ONLY.

The story gives us two main protagonists: Sarah O’Rourke, nee Summer, a middle-class, middle-aged white British woman and journalist who gave up more serious matters to write for a glossy magazine, with a husband named Andrew and their four-year old boy named Charlie.  Sarah is such a Bridget Jones expie in the beginning of this piece that she nervously chatters her way through everything, including two policemen coming to her office to inform her that her husband’s committed suicide. 

At the funeral she meets up again with our second protagonist, a girl of roughly sixteen calling herself “Little Bee” (which is not her actual name, but damn it, she’s going to be brave and stiff-upper-lipped and SYMBOLIC even if her chosen name only makes marginal sense).  Little Bee has just escaped a government detention center after sneaking illegally into England, and Sarah is the only woman in the continent she knows – and she knows that Sarah is bound to take her in.  For, she and Sarah are bound together Forever by a Tragic incident that occurred in Bee’s native Nigeria.  The middle part of the novel is fairly good, exploring Little Bee’s experience at a detention center and some bits about Sarah and her son’s grief over Andrew work quite well.  That is, until the Magical Negro trope sets in midway through the novel and the ridiculous story behind Andrew’s suicide and the origin point of Bee and Sarah’s interaction sets in.

The Magical Negro trope permeates this novel, even as it mocks it (note to the author:  just because you have Bee point out that if she amends her phrases with “it is a proverb in my country” to better ingratiate herself with the white Englishmen she lives about does not excuse your own use of Little Bee as a Mary Poppins slash perfect daughter for Sarah).  Charlie, you see, refuses to take off his Batman costume, even if that means peeing and pooing in it (something he does multiple times and something that is lovingly described by the author, for those of you who’re looking for something for the scat fetishist in your life).  Sarah is completely out of control of Charlie’s make-believe play, to the point where it eventually endangers his life, but wise-eyed Bee can get through to him and make him calm down.  Of course there is a mawkish scene in which a teary-eyed Sarah mouths a silent ‘thank you’ to her erstwhile new best friend and baby minder after she’s saved Charlie from a tantrum and made him change his piss-coated costume at nursery school.   Charlie and his awkward dialogue and whimsical Batman make-believe are clearly SYMBOLS in flashing red letters; he exists not as a character but as an object lesson for Bee and his mother and a symbol of self-delusion, protection, and untrammeled innocence; naturally, he is blond.   One waits for the inevitable moment in which he sheds his Batman togs and stumbles, free and fully himself, onto the scene as Charlie and naturally it arrives – though in the most contrived way possible.

Before Charlie’s disappearance, the backstory of Sarah and Andrew’s marriage and of Little Bee’s presence at Sarah’s home before the funeral spill out.  And yes, there are MORE SPOILERS here.

Sarah and Andrew, you see, went to Nigeria for vacation.  Why any astute couple, both literate journalists with an infant, would choose to vacation in the military junta filled Niger Delta to get over their breaking and broken marriage is beyond me, but Sarah and Andrew even do one better; they leave the bounds of their guarded hotel to walk on the beach, where they meet up with Bee, her sister, and the soldier from whom they have been running.  The tension in the scene is entirely undercut by the offer the soldier makes them – he collects fingers, the white man has been giving him the middle finger his whole life, if each of them cut off their own middle fingers and give them to him to string up on a necklace, he’ll let both girls go.

Reader, I chortled. 

Andrew fails this “test of manhood” (the reader’s notes are oh-so-kind as to phrase it exactly this way) but Sarah chops off her middle finger, thus somehow freeing Little Bee from her bondage and guaranteeing the moral correctness of her survival, even though she goes away with her captors in the end.  This somehow also makes the cheating, impulsive, weak-willed Sarah morally superior to Andrew, who, even though he becomes a fierce critic of Nigerian politics and uses his columns to shine a light n what’s going on in Nigeria, gives way to mental illness and is eaten alive by guilt and left to assume both girls perished.  All of this because he didn’t have the courage (?) to mutilate himself (?!).

Consider this: were you in a new land, confronted by people you aren’t familiar with, would you happily hack off your finger for a total stranger?  And if you did, would you let that stranger promptly renege on your deal and carry off the woman whose life you have ostensibly saved?  Do you really trust the kind of man who runs around with a necklace of fingers strung about his neck?  You shouldn’t, for they intend to kill Bee anyway; she only escapes by running and hiding under the skeleton of a boat while they sleep, leaving her sister to die (it’s interesting that Bee cannot summon the courage to die for her own flesh and blood, but when her second, white family is put in danger she runs toward those same guns.  Darn, there are those pesky spoilers again!).  Apparently, if you wouldn’t sacrifice yourself for an unknown adolescent at any time and for any reason, you are total and complete scum.  Self-preservation is only for whimsical nannies in books, apparently.

Bee and Sarah try to talk out what’s happened between them while Sarah fails at getting on with her life in the wake of Andrew’s suicide.  This is where we’re introduced to the story’s only consistent, living adult male protagonist; Lawrence, the man with whom Sarah’s been having an affair for a number of years, and with whom she has – in spite of her husband’s apparent collapse – continued to see even though Lawrence has a family of his own.  Lawrence starts visiting Sarah and Charlie’s flat, often staying the night, including the evening of the funeral (!!) and Sarah waffles between dumping Lawrence and committing to him, even though that would mean the total loss of both of their families and a symbolic full-on commitment to her bourgeois status and a loss of her original, crusading journalist self.  Lawrence knows of Bee, who is also staying with Sarah, and is jealous of their friendship and thus is fully prepared to rat her out to immigration.   Bee, who has been told of their affair by Sarah, holds this fact over his head and threatens to tell his wife if he tries to have her deported (how she would do this while in custody is another matter entirely)….And yet she also trusts him with the true story of how Andrew died.  This is just one of many points in which Bee is uncomfortably positioned between being a naïf innocent and a scarred veteran of war and internment – her mercenary behavior makes her quite unappealing yet is she is so Whimsical and Learned!  How could you hate her?  This reader did.

That ‘true story’, by the by, is patently ridiculous.  In the two years since the fateful day in Nigeria, Andrew has crumpled into a schizophrenic shell of himself, pacing gardens and speaking aloud to himself, ranting at Sarah: somehow managing to be a brilliant journalist and possessed of paranoid delusions at the same time.  That Sarah even considers her obviously-suicidal-and-on-a-manic upswing husband alone with himself or their child is stupid in of itself; what Bee chooses to do is unforgivable.  She presents herself to the man, who raves about her being a ghost, and continues to do so on multiple different days even though he believes her a delusion.  Why doesn’t she present herself to Sarah instead?  That she drives him in his state to climb on a chair is one thing; she is admittedly not blameworthy for not calling the police and drawing them to the scene of the suicide – but for provoking a delusional man to his end she is somewhat despicable.

In case you haven’t caught on, I should warn you: every male character in the story besides Charlie is either a bloodthirsty asshole, an adulterous jerk or a poorly-sketched weakling whose mental illness has been researched by delving into wiki articles.  

Little Bee’s portrayed as both a cynical observer on the cold racism of London and a wide-eyed new immigrant – the novel has no idea what to do with her until she melts under the onslaught of Sarah’s self-prostration.  She’s filled with wise observations on the shitty morass Sarah has made of her dignity and private life yet gasps about “the ladies back home” and what they would say to see her doing x y or z.  She has met the acquaintance of cars, guns and wind-up radios but is utterly flabbergasted by the sight of a train.  In other words, Little Bee is a mammy, and she exists to be redeemed and give her life for the Nice White British Lady who made an impulsive blood sacrifice in her name So Many Years Ago.  But in the end, we’re left to ask: what purpose?

For there ultimately is no purpose to Little Bee’s life; she herself never gets to reap the riches of what she’s gained in experience, blood and fear; these are the rewards that Sarah, if she lives, are to enjoy by publishing Little Bee’s story.  Her story becomes something Nice White People will read in time, clasp their pearls and maybe get them to sign a relief check that would be eventually dumped into the pockets of the militia leaders causing the region’s misery.

There is a plot point in which whenever Little Bee enters a room, she tries to ascertain the easiest way in which she can commit suicide, in case “they” come.  This is because she witnessed the soldiers who presented her to Andrew and Sarah rape and dismember her sister before feeding the child to a hungry dog.  This plot point is treated with all of the weight Sarah’s ludicrous description of her ultimately pointless self-maiming on the beach.  Little Bee’s trauma is there but it is so il-defined that  she can seemingly get on with her life and put her sister in the back of her mind until a ridiculous, prophetic dream ruins her future and puts her friends’ lives in danger.

For this is how the last hundred pages of the novel shake out: Little Bee is arrested and deported because Bee calls the police when Charlie disappears during an outing (he of course has slipped into another Batman fantasy and was hiding in his ‘Batcave’; a drainage pipe).  Sarah, her White Guilt on full overload, quits her job at the glossy and follows Bee onto the plane taking her back to Nigeria WITH A COSTUMED CHARLIE and, using liberal amounts of money, manages to both win them a comfortable suite and enough freedom so that she and Bee can roam the streets of Nigeria during the day and interview people too afraid to speak to white journalists, collecting information for articles Sarah plans on publishing when she gets back to Nigeria.  Feeling fulfilled and happy, Bee and Sarah make vague plans to apply for a visa for Bee so they can all go back to England eventually, with Sarah considering dumping Lawrence in the process.  This all hums along splendidly, until Bee gets a Mysterious Prophetic Dream about her sister that demands she visit the beach where the woman died three years ago.  They meet happy families and children there, and Bee falls asleep…only to be jolted awake by Sarah.  The men on the beach have come for her, the warlords who once tried to kill her, and to save Sarah’s and Charlie’s lives, she finally strips off Charlie’s symbolism Batcostume so he can safely mingle with the other children, then bravely chooses not to commit suicide and take a presumed raping and a bullet in the face for her adopted family.  She is totally serene and peaceful about this, for Charlie will remember her and so will Sarah…if both manage not to die.  The end!

The number of ridiculous logic leaps involved with this ending are enough to make you crater your sinuses in with a hearty facepalm.  First of all: why would Sarah take her child with her to Nigeria?  Why wouldn’t she leave Charlie with her family or heck, even her girlfriend at the magazine?  If she felt it necessary for Charlie to come with her, why would she risk her life by bribing the guard and leaving her hotel – and why would she take the ultimate risk to make Little Bee happy and bring her back to the place that holds such bad memories and bring Charlie with them to the beach?  Why didn’t they go to the British consulate in Niger while they waited for the visas to go through?  Why would she allow the sun to set and allow them to linger for hours; why would she ‘misjudge’ the situation and put her allegedly-precious Charlie in harm’s way? 

Why would Little Bee have a prophetic dream about her sister when she never experienced such dreams before?   Is her sister trying to drag her down toward her own death?

Why would she take off Charlie’s costume to make him less conspicuous?  Isn’t he noticeable enough as a white, blond child amidst Nigerian boys and girls?  Shouldn’t he be allowed to have the comfort of dying in his costume?

Why is Bee so happy to die for this kind family when she refused to die for her own flesh and blood?  Why is it necessary for her to die on the beach at all, except to jerk the reader’s heartstrings and Teach Sarah a Lesson about Self-Sacrifice?

 

This, dear reader, is the only book in recent memory where a character’s choice not to commit suicide is actually deemed character development.    

42 million Africans have been displaced throughout the Niger Valley over the past twenty years due to conflicts between warlords working for Westernized oil concerns, and conflicts between American and British-hired warlords, military  and otherwise, continue.  This is not a subject to be turned into a weepy Oscar Bait chick flick that will air on Lifetime at midnight between showings of Where the Heart is and the Secret Life Of Bees.   And yet it will be; the movie’s already set to be made even though it is such a mawkish screech of an ending that you can almost see it in your mind’s eye - you can actually picture the ending on the big screen; Naomi Watts clutching a blond child to her bosom while Willow Smith is led off to her death.  The last shot will be the morning edition of a big British paper with Sarah’s byline.  Roll credits.  Picture Peter Griffin in the theatre, crying over the completely obvious plot twists and the stupid attempted tearjerker of an ending.

                                                  

He's got a bad feeling about Suicidy

Little Bee is anything but “the next Kite Runner”.  I hate to use the term, but it is what it is: a “nice white lady” novel that can be clutched to the bosom of its middle-aged, middle-class readers, who will wipe their tears, relate to Sarah, love that quirky Bee, and use the book as emotional masturbation material  that will allow them to declare that they Really Understand those Wacky Colored Folks.   Under the hype and the beautiful cover, it’s the literary equivalent of Oskar Gold, the applause-baiting, Oscar-lusting fake movie constructed by Tearjerker in the same-named American Dad episode. 

Don’t hug him, Little Bee.  He’s Herman Goering with a cockney accent.