“The men came and they…”

“The men came an they burned my village, tied my girls, raped my girls, took my girls, whipped my husband, cut my breast, I ran away through the bush, found a ship, crossed the sea and then they put me here.” (Cleave, 11)

I have a confession.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I am reading the novel Little Bee by Chris Cleave. The story revolves around a teenage Nigerian girl who makes her way to England illegally on a boat to seek refuge from crimes going on in her home country and is held in a immigrant detention center there for two years. In the detention center, Little Bee meets many girls with similar stories to hers, and she mentions that all stories begin with “The men came and they…”. The above quote is the story of one of the girls that she meets. As I am a girl of a similar age, many parts of this novel made me extremely emotional. I even had to stop, take a breath and take in what I just read. There aren’t many novels that make me cry but this was defiantly one of them.

Since the novel takes place in 2007, it highlights how women are oppressed and mistreated even in today’s day and age. These refugee women are merely seen as sex objects, they are raped, beaten brutally and murdered . Even today, in many countries men see women as an instrument for the sexual pleasure . Its very sad that men neglect the  intellectual abilities and capabilities of women even today. For example, a few months ago in India, a medical student of the age of 23 was gang raped, beaten and killed on a public bus and then dumped on a roadside. It saddens me for she had a dream to become a doctor and help her family escape poverty. She was also very young and had such a bright future ahead of her. However, I feel that this novel does an wonderful job in opening the eyes of society to these sorts of incidents, which are happening every day.