Little Bee

Charlie and me, we came together halfway between the rocky point and the soldiers. I knelt and I held out my arms to him. His face was twisted with terror and I held him while he cried against my chest. I waited for the soldiers to come and get me, but they did not. The leader stood there and he watched, and I saw the way he slung his rifle back on his shoulder and lifted his hand to scratch his head again. I saw Sarah, with her hands behind her head, pulling at her hair and screaming to be let go while one of the soldiers restrained her.

After a long time Charlie stopped sobbing and he turned his face up toward mine. I peeled back his Batman mask a little, so I could see his face, and he smiled at me. I smiled back at him, in that moment that the soldiers’ leader gave me, that one minute of dignity he offered me as one human being to another before he sent his men across the hard sand to fetch me. Here it was then, finally: the quietest part of the late afternoon. I smiled down at Charlie, and I understood that he would be free now even if I would not. In this way the life that was in me would find its home in him now. It was not a sad feeling. I felt my heart take off lightly like a butterfly and I thought, yes, this is it, something has survived in me, something that does not need to run anymore, because it is worth more than all the money in the world and its currency, its true home, is the living. And not just the living in this particular country or in that particular country, but the secret, irresistible heart of the living. I smiled back at Charlie and I knew that the hopes of this whole human world could fit inside one soul. This is a good trick. This is called, globalization.

“Everything will be alright for you, Charlie,” I said.

But Charlie was not listening-already he was giggling and kicking and struggling to be put down. He stared over my shoulder at the local children, still playing in the shore break around the rocky point.

“Let me go! Let me go!”

I shook my head. “No Charlie. It is a very hot day. You ca

“No!”

“Please Charlie, you must. It is for your health.”

Charlie shook his head. I stood him in the sand and I knelt down beside him and I whispered in his ear.

“Charlie,” I said, “do you remember when I promised you, if you took off your costume, that I would tell you my real name?”

Charlie nodded.

“So do you still want to know my real name?”

Charlie tilted his head to one side so that both of the ears of his mask flopped over. Then he tilted it to the other side. Then finally he looked straight at me.

“What is yours real name?” he whispered.

I smiled. “My name is Udo.”

“Ooh-doh?”

“That is it. Udo means, peace. Do you know what peace is, Charlie?”

Charlie shook his head.

“Peace is a time when people can tell each other their real names.”

Charlie gri

“Udo?” he said.

“Yes Charlie?”

“I is going to take off mine Batman costume now.”

The soldiers were almost on us now.

“Hurry then, Charlie,” I whispered.

Charlie pulled off the mask first, and the local children gasped when they saw his blond hair. Their curiosity was greater than their fear of the soldiers and they ran with their ski

If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.

– Nigerian proverb

notes

THANK YOU FOR READING this story. The characters in it are imagined, although the action takes place in a reality which is intended to call to mind our own.

The “Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre” in the text does not exist in the real world, although some of its particulars would seem familiar to the thousands of asylum seekers detained in the ten real immigration removal centers [1]. which are operational in the United Kingdom at the time of writing, since they are based on the testimony of former interns of these places.

Similarly, the beach on which Sarah and Little Bee first meet in the novel is not intended to correspond to any specific location in Nigeria, although the interethnic and oil-related conflicts from which Little Bee is fleeing are real and ongoing in the Delta region of that country, which at the time of writing is the world’s eighth-biggest petroleum-exporting nation. [2]. In the period leading up to the writing of this novel, Nigeria was the second-biggest African exporter of asylum applicants to the United Kingdom. [3].

Jamaica is an order of magnitude less significant as a point of origin of asylum seekers, although during the same period between one hundred and one thousand Jamaicans each year sought asylum in the United Kingdom. [4].

Occasionally in the novel, real-world elements have been introduced into the text which I hereby acknowledge. (If I have unintentionally missed some, I hope I will be forgiven.) The novel begins with a quotation, complete with the original typo, from the UK Home Office publication Life in the United Kingdom (2005), fifth printing. “However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again” is taken from www.motherlandnigeria.com. The Ave Maria in the Ibo language is taken from the Christus Rex et Redemptor Mundi website at www.christusrex.org. The rather brilliant line “We do not see how anybody can abuse an excess of sanitary towels” is taken verbatim from the transcript of the Bedfordshire County Council special report of July 18, 2002, into the fire at the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Detention Centre on February 14, 2002, where it is attributed to Loraine Bayley of the Campaign to Stop Arbitrary Detention at Yarl’s Wood.

[1] Home Office UK Border Agency; see http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/managingborders/immigrationremovalcentres/.

[2] US Energy Information Administration, “Top World Oil Net Exporters 2006.”

[3] UK Office for National Statistics, “Applications received for asylum in the United Kingdom, excluding dependants, by nationality, 1994 to 2002.”

[4] Ibid.