Little Bee

"I think I wanted to say thank you to Sarah for saving me, but also I wanted to punish Andrew for letting my sister be killed." (Page 249).  When I was reading Little Bee by Chris Cleave, this quote tied together for me the cycle of positive and negative events that was occurring throughout the story, and summed up the tension and complexity of the different characters’ perspectives.  Little Bee is a book about two women, a British fashion magazine owner, Sarah, and a Nigerian refugee, Little Bee.  A few years after a horrendous event that they experienced on an African beach, they meet again on the day of Sarah’s husband Andrew’s funeral.  Throughout the book, you learn more about each woman’s past, their lives up to that point and how they then bond.  Ultimately, Sarah realizes that her sometimes impulsive choices affect not only affect her life, but also the people around her in a more drastic way than she ever believed possible.  Little Bee makes this explicit in the quote above, during a key moment late in the book.  Even acts that seem positive, or selfless, can have negative consequences.

First, Sarah’s choices affect Little Bee and her sister.  For example, when Sarah and her husband Andrew are on the beach in Nigeria they are attacked by a group of African soldiers and Sarah cuts off her finger to save two captured girls (Little Bee and her sister) and herself. Little Bee describes the event.  “She saw the white woman put her own left hand down on the hard sand, and she saw her pick up the machete, and she saw her chop of her middle finger with one simple chop.” (Page 115) While on the beach, everyone who Sarah believes is innocent or in need is threatened.  Sarah’s way of always acting before she thinks through the after-effects, causes her to save someone’s life.  Because of this small but significant sacrifice, Little Bee survives and eventually escapes to England.  Therefore Sarah’s decision affects the people around her in different ways.  Most obviously, if she hadn’t cut off her finger Little Bee would never have had a chance to start a new life and almost certainly would have been killed shortly after.

On the other hand, Sarah’s impetuousness also leads her to start an affair with a man from work; this affects her husband Andrew when he finds out.  Throughout the story you learn of Sarah’s affair with a man she met through work for her magazine. Sarah tries to rationalize the affair as something that was positive for her, and not too serious for others.  She tells herself: “To have an affair, I began to realize, was a relatively minor transgression.  But to really escape from Andrew, to really become myself, I had to go the whole way and fall in love.” (Pages 261-62). Eventually, however, Andrew learns of her affair and does not understand fully how to cope with it.  Significantly, the affair was what led Sarah and Andrew to Africa in the first place.  In the end, Andrew is so overwhelmed and depressed he commits suicide.  Sarah affects Andrew’s life because she does not realize how a few mistakes that may not have had much of an impact on her while she was on “a journey to find herself”,  can destroy the lives of others.

In conclusion, in Little Bee by Chris Cleave, Sarah realizes that her choices affect not only herself but the people around her as well.  Every day people go on about their lives doing things “in the moment” and not thinking how it will affect themselves and others in the future.  Reading about the differences in Sarah’s and Little Bee’s lives and the lives of all the people that were important to them made me realize how those few small moments when their lives clashed impacted them so greatly.  The book made me understand not only how choices affect you, but also that life is made up of a chain of different paths that can be tremendously changed by the smallest things.  Sometimes you can fix certain choices or just move on with the changes, but there will also be times where bad choices just live in the back of your brain, always being pushed away so not to remind you of the consequences. But really the best thing to do is to learn from bad choices, admit the mistakes, and try to make up for it because in the end, you can never change the past.