Little Bee

Little Bee begins in the first person, from the voice of Little Bee. Little Bee is “an African girl” from Nigeria who wishes she could be “a British pound coin” instead because “everyone would be pleased to see [her] coming” (1). Unlike the pound, she has neither “power” nor “property” (1). She is not “free to travel safely” like money in the period of what “is called, globalization” (1).

Learning “the Queen’s English” (2) is Little Bee’s way of surviving. This required forgetting “all the best tricks of [her] mother tongue” (2). She learned it while held “in an immigration detention center, in Essex” (3), for two years. “The pretty ones and the talkative ones” could stay in the country, where others would be sent back (3).

Little Bee was released, she explains, and given a transport voucher and a phone call. The detention officer is not watching as she and other girls are released; he is looking at a pornographic magazine. Little Bee explains that she uses different language to explain the nature of this magazine to her reader than she would to her sister and other girls at home. They, Little Bee explains, would be shocked that “it is not shameful in Great Britain, to show your bobbis in the newspaper” (5).