Little Bee

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.

I have tried, with whatever success the reader will judge, to make the characters’ speech patterns plausible. For the most part my work is based on close listening, although some Nigerian English idioms are from A Dictionary of Nigerian English [draft] by Roger Blench and A Dictionary of Nigerian English Usage by Herbert Igboanusi, Enicrownfit Publishers, Jan. 1, 2001; some Jamaican English idioms are from A Dictionary of Jamaican English by F. G. Cassidy and R. B. Le Page, University of the West Indies Press, Jan. 31, 2002; and some four-year-old English idioms are from my son, Batman.

Details of the UK immigration detention system were provided by Christine Bacon, who was very patient with me. Her direction of Asylum Monologues with the Actors for Refugees groups in the UK and Australia was an inspiration for this project. Christine also kindly read my manuscript and disabused me of some of my misconceptions. For those interested I recommend her eye-opening working paper for the University of Oxford Refugee Studies Centre, The Evolution of Immigration Detention in the UK: The Involvement of Private Prison Companies, at www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/PDFs/RSCworkingpaper27.pdf.

(If this or other links stop working, the documents will be available from my website at www.chriscleave.com.)

Background on the medical and social aspects of immigration and asylum was provided by Dr. Mina Fazel, Bob Hughes, and Teresa Hayter-original interviews with them can be found on my website.

The novel’s hits are down to the kind people who helped me; the misses are all mine.

acknowledgments

THANKS TO ANDY PATERSON and Olivia Paterson for excellent notes on my early draft. Thanks to Sharon Maguire and Anand Tucker for their warmth and support.

Thanks also to Bob Hughes, Teresa Hayter, and Christine Bacon for their hospitality, their encouragement, and for reading my manuscript and offering suggestions.

I owe a great deal to Suzie Doore, Jennifer Joel, Maya Mavjee, Marysue Rucci, and Peter Straus, whose several patient readings and insightful editorial notes on my drafts have been invaluable. Thank you.

about the author

CHRIS CLEAVE IS A novelist and a columnist for The Guardian newspaper in London.

His bestselling novel, Incendiary, was published in twenty countries, won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, was short-listed for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, won the United States Book-of-the-Month Club’s First Fiction Award, and won the Prix Special du Jury at the French Prix des Lecteurs 2007.

Inspired by his early childhood in West Africa and by an accidental visit to a British concentration camp, Little Bee is his second novel.

He lives in London with his French wife and two mischievous Anglo-French children.

He keeps his website at www.chriscleave.com.

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[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.