Little Bee

“Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming.” 

Little Bee’s concern with others being “pleased” is rooted in her experience as one who her countrymen want to eradicate. The xenophobic messages that she hears in England show that globalization is unequal: People want British money to travel well, but they are less interested in a human, African girl being able to travel freely. 

“Learning the Queen’s English is like scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toenails, the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had.” 

The “good time” is Little Bee’s brief experience in Britain, before she was deported and “scrubbed” of her hopeful adopted name. The Queen’s English is a kind of mask that she wears as part of that new identity, and it leaves residue just as horrible experience leave residue upon a life. The red varnish that she possesses at her detention center is, just like the Queen’s English, a kind of hidden pleasure and mask that helps her to survive and escape the pain of her own experience and past. 

“Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people from my country agree on. They say, That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong. That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon.” 

Little Bee feels, overwhelmingly, that she “does not belong.” Anywhere that she goes, she struggles to imagine herself fitting in. In Abuja, when she sees the beautiful city in the country she calls her own, she starts to see new faces of old places and imagine that she could have a life in this unfamiliar place that combines her home and the metropolis she only knows in Britain.