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Chapter Two
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Little Bee, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Refugee Experience
Cross-Cultural Relationships
Horror and Trauma
Moral Compromise and Self-Interest
Identity and Fear
Summary
Analysis
Little Bee reflects that the word “horror” means different things to different people. In the developed world, people watch horror movies to remind themselves that there is no horror in their real lives. For girls like herself, horror is a constant presence, an “illness” which cannot be recovered from. When Little Bee stows away on the cargo ship to travel to England, her horror follows her in traumatic nightmares. She cannot escape it. When men carry her from the ship into the detention center, her horror follows.
Little Bee’s reflections suggest that the developed world has effectively insulated itself from the horrors unfolding in other parts of the world. Little Bee’s nightmares also suggest that even if one removes oneself from immediate danger and the environment where such horrors take place, that horror often lingers in the form of trauma.
Themes
Little Bee advises the reader that there are “things men can do to you in this life” that are so horrid, it would be better to die. Knowing this, Little Bee makes a practice of figuring out how she will kill herself in any situation with whatever is at hand, in case “the men come suddenly” to take her away. For her first six months of detention, Little Bee spends her nights screaming in terror and her days working out how to kill herself in every corner of every room in the center. When she thinks they will deport her, she imagines how she will kill herself in Nigeria, which she thinks will be similar to killing herself in detention but with much nicer scenery. Imagining it almost becomes an enjoyable preoccupation.
Once again, “the men” represents anyone who would wish Little Bee harm. Once again, Little Bee’s night terrors suggest that her experiences have left her extremely traumatized, while her constant dwelling on suicide suggests that her traumatic memories cause her to place little value on her own life anymore, since she would rather destroy it than experience more horror.
Themes
After spending an entire day carefully planning how she will build a tower in the jungle to hang herself from, Little Bee realizes that she could simply climb a tree and dive headfirst onto a rock. Her own silliness makes her smile, and it’s the first time she’s smiled since leaving Nigeria. She starts eating without fuss, and watching TV and reading newspapers to teach herself the Queen’s English. Little Bee still screams at night, but not quite so often. She still fantasizes about suicide, but with a humorous edge to it. Alongside her horror, Little Bee realizes that hope is growing: “I had killed myself back to life.” As she reads, Little Bee discovers that she’s fond of Queen Elizabeth, and imagines the two of them killing themselves together, since so many bad things have happened to queens in the past.
Little Bee’s mixture of horror and humor allow the author to explore extremely dark aspects of the human experience, such as the trauma that results from horrific events, while still maintaining just enough levity in the narrative to carry the reader forward. Every horrific event in the book relates to something that actually occurred in history—the Nigerian oil war in the novel is based on the real-life conflict over oil in the Niger Delta, for instance.
Themes
Little Bee feels frightened when she eventually steps out of the detention center, but she smiles because she knows she is ready to die, if necessary. She notices that Yevette is nervous and asks what is wrong, since Yevette normally laughs and jokes. Yevette whispers that they are illegal immigrants now—she played some sort of trick to win their release, but she cannot explain so close to the center. This makes Little Bee nervous, but she decides not to think about it. The girl with green trainers asks where they will go and Yevette points through the open gates and out to the horizon. Beyond them is an empty road and open fields. Two farmers and a tractor work in the nearest field.
Little Bee becomes an illegal immigrant despite her best efforts to obtain legal asylum status. This suggests that many illegal immigrants and refugees attempt to gain legal citizenship and go through the legal process, but the system is too slow or events beyond their control lead to their status as undocumented migrants. The empty road and open countryside in front of the girls represents the potential of their new lives in England but also the uncertainty, since they don’t know where they will go or how to get there.
Themes
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As they wait for the taxi, Yevette asks Little Bee what sort of men she likes, but the question makes Little Bee uncomfortable. She finally says that she wants a kind man who speaks many languages and could protect her. Yevette thinks this unrealistic. The girl with green trainers says Little Bee is obviously a virgin, and that Yevette should just leave her alone. Yevette and the girl bicker until the taxi pulls up. Little Bee approaches the cab driver and tries to complement his permed hair but mistakenly insults him instead. The cab driver slanders refugees and then drives quickly away, leaving the four girls standing on the empty road.
Little Bee’s accidental insult toward the taxi driver demonstrates the difficulty of crossing language and cultural barriers, suggesting that such cultural conflict is yet another challenge that refugees face. Meanwhile, the taxi driver’s slander and immediate rejection of the girls suggests that native citizens of a country often lack understanding or any graciousness towards refugees, instead assuming the worst about their character from the outset.
Themes
Without transportation, the girls decide to simply start walking down the road, though they worry that the farmers in the field might try to stop them. As they walk past the field, the farmers call out to them until Yevette pauses to speak with them. The larger of the two men asks if the girls escaped the detention center. The girl with green trainers insists that they are legal refugees, even though they don’t have papers, and the farmers can call the immigration office to confirm. Yevette tells her not to do that, and the girl with green trainers realizes that they are not legal immigrants. She is furious at Yevette, but falls silent.
Again, the girl’s claim that they are legally released and anger at Yevette when she realizes they are not suggests that she did not want to simply escape into England, but wanted to go through the legal asylum process. This again suggests that many refugees do not enter other countries illegally by choice, but are compelled by unavoidable circumstances.
Themes
The two farmers refer to themselves as Albert and Mr. Ayres. Mr. Ayres gently asks if the girls have any relatives or any place for them to go, and notes that it would be illegal to let them stay on his farm. Yevette fears Mr. Ayres is threatening to turn them in, but he laughs and tells them they can stay anyway. Albert will show them where they can sleep in the seasonal workers’ dormitory for a week, and his wife will find some extra food for them. As soon as Mr. Ayres offers this, the girl with green trainers bursts into tears, and Yevette explains that she’s just not used to people treating her kindly.
Although the girls—and likely the reader—assume that Mr. Ayres and Albert are villainous figures, they are actually compassionate and generous people. The girls’ mistaken assumptions suggests that just as native citizens often make negative and wrong assumptions about refugees, refugees in turn may make similarly wrong assumptions about native citizens.
Themes
Albert leads them across the farmyard to the dormitory. As they walk, Little Bee notices that the hens cower nervously together at the sight of strangers. Their anxious movements and sounds recalls memories of hiding with Nkiruka in the jungle, watching their village burn and listening to the villagers scream in pain as they died. Albert shows the girls to a long building with bed and clean mattresses lined along the side. Long chains hang from the ceiling, connected to skylights so that they can be opened or closed from the ground. Albert tries to joke with the girls as he shows them where towels and sheets are, but they stare at him blankly so he leaves them in peace.
The fact that simple chickens cause Little Bee to recall horrific memories of fear and destruction demonstrates the manner in which her experienced horrors follow her even into safe places such as Mr. Ayres’s farm. Although Little Bee is no longer in danger and has lived a full two years since the men destroyed her village, simple images from daily life are enough to bring such painful memories to the surface, suggesting that trauma is long-lasting and easily triggered.
Themes
The girls stand together in the center of the dormitory. Albert left the door partway open, and a few hens wander in to peck at the floor. When the girl with green trainers sees them, she screams and jumps onto a bed, cowering behind a pillow. Yevette tries to calm her and remarks that she’s in bad shape. Yevette and Little Bee sit and talk about what to do next. Little Bee shows Yevette Andrew’s driver’s license and says she might find him, though she’s not sure if she should. Yevette thinks it’s odd that Little Bee wants to find a white man and asks how she knows him, but Little Bee refuses to reveal anything more than that she met him on a Nigerian beach.
The girl’s terror at seeing chickens suggests that she carries similar trauma to Little Bee, though seemingly more extreme. This further suggests that such trauma is a common occurrence among refugees, all of whom fled from danger and many of whom witnessed such horrors as Little Bee has. In addition to the many challenges already facing refugees, managing such trauma seems a particularly heavy burden.
Themes
Yevette is annoyed that Little Bee won’t talk about the day she met Andrew. Little Bee asks if Yevette doesn’t have things in her life she doesn’t want to talk about either, and Yevette admits she does, and hints that someone murdered her children in Jamaica. Yevette tearfully explains that she had sex with one of the immigration officers to secure her release from detention. The man needed to make her release—without paperwork or approval—look like a clerical accident, so he released three others at the same time, which is why they are all illegal immigrants now. As far as Yevette is concerned, that is the only way for them not to be deported anyway, and both her and Little Bee will be murdered if they return to their home countries.
Yevette’s hint that her children were murdered suggests that like Little Bee and the girl with green trainers, she carries her own traumatic memories. This furthers the depiction of refugees as people fleeing horrific violence, rather than people who simply want a more comfortable life in a wealthier country. Yevette’s deal with the immigration officer suggests that the legal immigration system itself is corrupt, prone to making under-the-table agreements and exploiting vulnerable people who fear for their lives.
Themes
The girl with green trainers stands on a bed and starts screaming again. Yevette stands and starts to chase the chicken out of the building until the girl points out a shaft of light and begins hallucinating about her daughter standing there. Little Bee plays along with the hallucination and convinces Yevette to as well, talking to the girl as if she were standing there.
The girl’s hallucination, first about chickens and then about her daughter, suggests that her trauma has left her with serious mental and emotional damage, which again demonstrates the manner in which trauma can plague an person long after they’ve escaped physical danger.
Themes
Little Bee lies back on her bed and stares at the gray chains. She decides that if the head of the United Nations ever called on her to make a flag for refugees, she’d make it gray, like the detention center, like worn-out clothing, like the moral gray area she inhabits as an illegal refugee. Little Bee decides that the flag wouldn’t even need to be a flag; it could just be a worn-out, gray brassiere hanging from a pole. Looking at the chains, Little Bee imagines she could easily hang herself from them.
This passage establishes gray as a symbol for the hollowness, fatigue, and even ambiguity that refugees can feel, particularly after years of trying to survive and find a safe place to live. Little Bee’s thought that refugees don’t even need a flag, just a worn out piece of clothing, suggests that they are without country, nation, or home, and the only thing they possess is their own fatigue and the clothes on their backs.
Themes
In the afternoon, the farmer’s wife arrives with food and chats pleasantly with Yevette and Little Bee. She tells Little Bee how to get to Surrey, but warns her not to go; the suburbs are not a good place for a refugee. That night, Little Bee dreams about her village before the men destroyed it, before they realized an oil field lie beneath it that they wanted to take. Some boys found an old tire and made a tire swing out of it, and children would sit on it and bicker and swing and sing together. Little Bee watches Nkiruka swing happily back and forth in her dream.
In the novel, the suburbs represent the most homogenous, nativist representation of modern life in a developed society. Compared to the cities, which cultivate diversity, people in the suburbs are presented as primarily white, upper class, narrowminded, and preoccupied with status and wealth rather than caring for refugees like Ayres and his wife do.
Themes
Little Bee wakes to see something swinging back and forth in front of her bed. As she wipes tears from her eyes, she sees that it is a green shoe. The girl in the green trainers hanged herself in the night. A puddle of urine pools on the floor beneath her body. Little Bee touches the girl’s leg and feels that it’s cold. She knows that she must leave, since a death brings policemen and questions that are impossible to answer without papers. Little Bee gives Yevette a small kiss on the cheek, and wanders outward through the farmyard, in the direction of London which glows on the horizon. As she walks, she feels that Nkiruka walks beside her so she is not alone.
The girl’s suicide again suggests that trauma can still plague a person even when they are physically safe. Tragically, Little Bee decides to continue on alone for the sake of her own survival, even though she briefly had companions for the first time in two years. This again depicts the difficulty of life as a refugee, since fear and the possibility of arrest cause one to constantly uproot themselves from their environment and their community.
Themes
As Little Bee walks, the night fades and turns to the gray of dawn, which gives way to gold as the sun rises over the horizon. The world suddenly seems beautiful, and Little Bee thinks that she will never be lost in gray again. She hears a rumble in the distance that sounds like a waterfall, but is actually a freeway. Waiting for a gap in the heavy flow of traffic, she sprints across each lane. Little Bee notes the freeway in her mind as another place to easily kill herself, should she need to. She wanders across more fields until she finds a smaller road with houses that look nearly identical to one another. There are shiny cars parked out front each house, much nicer than her father or uncle’s broken down cars, which they’d had until “the afternoon when the men came and shot them.”
Although Little Bee is alone again, the world’s transition from gray to gold as the sun rises suggests that Little Bee is again feeling hopeful about her potential future, now that she is free from the detention center. This sense of hope notably sits alongside her constant contemplation of suicide, which suggests that Little Bee’s traumatic memories and fear can exist alongside hope and happiness, rather than one emotion overruling the other. Though she is hopeful, she still understands that horror may return at any moment.
Themes
As Little Bee continues walking, the buildings grow larger and the crowds of people thicker. The noise and the traffic seem overwhelming, and she sees many shocking sights: nearly naked women on billboards, double-decker buses, cranes lifting heavy loads. Little Bee finds the River Thames, and she whispers to Nkiruka that they are finally going to be safe. She knows that if she follows the river bank, she will find Kingston-upon-Thames in Surrey, where Andrew lives. Little Bee smiles as she walks, though the crowds scare her; in her village, if one ever saw more than 50 people at a time, it meant they’d died and gone to the “city of the spirits.” The throngs of people make Little Bee feel “so very, very alone.”
Little Bee’s surprise at many of the modern amenities and the sheer size of everything emphasizes the difference between the world she had to leave behind and the one she’s been thrust into. The overwhelming sense of it all suggests that cultural shock for refugees can be severe and overwhelming, depicting yet another challenge that refugees may face in their journey to adjust to a foreign country and culture. This also suggests that they may feel separate or excluded from the people they see, since everything is unfamiliar.
Themes
