Little Bee is at times very funny indeed, and yet it deals with serious and tragic events. How did you arrive at and perfect the bittersweet tone of the book?I was able to do it because I have good readers. I can have my characters explore some fairly dark humor — for example, listing methods for a young Nigerian girl to kill herself at a garden party hosted by the Queen of England — while trusting my readers to understand that I am not making light of a serious theme. Rather, I am offering up a dark theme to the light, so that it may be examined. This is the only way I know to tell a serious story about current events without it becoming a lecture. And when I interviewed refugees and asylum seekers while researching this novel, I found that some of them use humor in this way too. These are people with very painful stories to tell. They have learned that in order to survive, they must get people in positions of power to listen to — and believe — their stories. And they have further learned that such people are more likely to listen if they make their stories entertaining, by showing the joy of their lives as well as the tragedy. They are the masters at telling their stories — because if they don’t get that balance right, they die. That’s motivation, right there. As far as storytelling goes, they’re playing in the major leagues. Novelists are amateurs by comparison.
How did writing Little Bee differ from your experience with your previous works (if it did)? What was the greatest challenge you faced in writing this book, and how did you solve it?
I’ve only published one previous novel, which is called Incendiary (Bond Street Books, 2005). Incendiary and Little Bee came from very different places. I wrote Incendiary out of anger — incandescent fury at the men who brought us the “War on Terror”. As a writer, one is easily frightened when someone declares war on a noun, but at the time I think I felt it acutely because our first child had just been born and I hated the way our elected leaders were so clearly making his world a more dangerous place. When I get angry it tends to come out as dark comedy, or layered irony — anyway, Incendiary was how it came out. I wrote the draft in six weeks in early 2004, after the Madrid bombings and while the Abu Ghraib torture story was breaking. I went into a room in Paris with a coffee maker and a radio and I came out six weeks later with a beard and a manuscript, not really knowing how I’d done it.
Little Bee came out of a sense of my own complicity in some of the evils of the world. I’d moved on from considering myself as an outraged — and blameless — observer, which I guess is where I was at with Incendiary. A year on, I realised that people like me are often part of the problem. I began to think about my life, and how it is relatively easy, and how it is therefore relatively easy to ignore the suffering of others. And since suffering is the rule rather than the exception in the world, it’s not an easy moral question to duck as a writer. So I decided to address it directly, by imagining the most striking example of someone who is dispossessed — Little Bee — coming to ask for a help from someone — Sarah — who is a little like me. I never plot my work in advance, so I was very interested to discover how the moral ambiguities would play out.
As a writing task, Little Bee was harder than Incendiary. I did a year of research. I interviewed asylum seekers and people involved in their cases, I researched the oil wars in Nigeria, and I familiarised myself with Nigerian English and Jamaican English. It was a lot of work before I even started writing. Then the book took a year to write, after which I faced the biggest challenge when the book was rejected by all of my publishers. It was a test of will, and one that I got through thanks to the extraordinary faith my Canadian publisher showed when she bought the novel, sight unseen, on the understanding that I would rewrite it. She was the only one of my publishers who did that. Thanks to her the novel exists. I rewrote it in six months, and the final draft is Little Bee.
Who influences your writing? Are there any authors (or musicians, or filmmakers, or...?) whose work helped you shape this book?
Cormac McCarthy is the living writer I most admire. I hope he has been an influence on me. Not in terms of his style, which I could not and would not emulate, but because of his unflinching examination of the metaphysical darkness that invests us, waiting for its dawn. He’s a very brave writer.
I also like writers who can make me laugh while telling a compelling story. For this reason I love the work of John Steinbeck. It’s his little novels I like more than the important ones. Whenever I’m feeling low I go back and read the scene from Cannery Row where Doc orders a beer milkshake.
Could you explain why the novel’s title is Little Bee in North America, but The Other Hand in the UK, Australia and South Africa?
That’s a simple case of having different publishers in different countries. I like my editors a lot and for this novel I deferred to them regarding titles and jackets, because they’re better at it than me. (In return they let me write some fairly wild texts). My working title for this novel was Saturday Night in Western Civilization, which I couldn’t persuade any of my publishers to love as I did. My next choice for a title was The Developing World. At which point one of my editors took me aside and hissed: “What part of ‘you mustn’t make it sound like a geography textbook’ is confusing you?” So then I came up with a shortlist of three more titles I liked. Of these, the UK, Australia, NZ and SA publisher liked The Other Hand while the Canada publisher and the US publisher liked Little Bee.
Do you have any tips you would give a book club to enhance their discussion of Little Bee?
Absolutely — first I’d suggest some books you could read in conjunction with it. The Grapes of Wrath is arguably Steinbeck’s greatest novel, and it’s also a refugee novel. It’s really asking the same question Little Bee is asking: how much help should people with relatively secure lives afford to those who have nothing, simply out of human solidarity? Then, for some non-fiction context, I’d recommend A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, a veteran of the conflict in Sierra Leone. And Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees by Caroline Moorehead, an excellent and dedicated journalist.
Next I’d suggest some fun stuff you could try. Little Bee says, “I have noticed, in your country, I can say anything so long as I say that is the proverb in my country. Then people will nod their heads and look very serious”. If yours is the sort of book club that enjoys a glass of wine with your literature, then why not try making up some proverbs of your own. The more gravely you recite them, the wiser you will sound. On the same lines, why not get the members of your book club to rename each other according to their personality traits, the way Udo (Little Bee) and Nkiruka (Kindness) do in the novel. You could award prizes for the best efforts…