I recently finished reading "Little Bee" by Chris Cleave. Usually, I find it tiresome to read women-centric books written by male authors, but I didn't even notice a man was writing until the very end when I read the acknowledgments. Perhaps it helped that there was no sexuality in this book. This book was about the horrors of humanity, the horrors of gaping wounds left on one's neck after a bullet has grazed you there. You may walk around for hours afterward -- bleeding, puss oozing from an unhealable wound trying in vain to clot itself up, but eventually you will succumb and die.
The horror, the horror. Joseph Conrad's famous line is relevant here because what we learn from Little Bee's story is that the horror is not only all around us, outside of us, but it is also inside of us. Inherent to ourselves, inevitable in our relations with those around us. We deceive our lovers and partners, we murder other tribes for their resources. We, in effect, hang ourselves by our own rope every time.
This book is powerful. It also made me stop and think about my own prejudices and remember just how horrors commited by one people against another are a major part of everyone's history. Genocide was not invented by Hitler's Third Reich, and it is important to remember that. No one people or nation is worse than another, but it is shocking to see that this is happening today, transpiring right this very second. How can we live with this cognitive dissonance? Because we have to. Life is about happy mediums. Can there be happy endings? No, but there can be bittersweet ones.
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