Journey Of Hope - Fall 2018 Journey of Hope 2018 | Page 24

THE GIRL WHO
BECAME A BOY
TO SURVIVE:
A conversation with the author of
The Breadwinner
by Hannah White
I
Hannah White (HW): Would
you describe the plot of The
Breadwinner for those who
aren’t familiar with it?
DEBORAH ELLIS (DE): Sure,
Parvana is an 11-year-old girl.
She is in a family that has had
some privilege in Afghanistan,
both parents have had an op-
portunity for good education.
Mother is a journalist, father is
a teacher. And they had a good
life, and then the years of war
bombed out their houses until
they’re left living together in
a small room in a bombed out
apartment building in Kabul.
The Taliban has taken over, of
course the mom can’t work any-
more. Her older sister is stuck
22 | JOURNEY OF HOPE
inside. Parvana helps her father
read in the marketplace as a way
of earning a bit of money until
he is arrested by the Taliban
for having a foreign education.
And then Parvana has to be
the one who has to take over as
the breadwinner for the family.
And it’s what she does and how
she does it that’s the story of
the book.
HW: Why choose Parvana, a
girl who dresses as a boy, as your
protagonist?
DE: I heard the stories of girls
who did that, while I was inter-
viewing women and kids and
families, I heard the stories of
that. That seemed like a cou-
rageous thing for a kid to do.
F YOU HAVEN’T READ
The Breadwinner, drop
what you are doing
and head to the nearest
library. To see it on the
shelf the 176-page nov-
el, written by Deborah
Ellis, blends in with
the other young adult nov-
els around it. But the book is
not like the others. A rare op-
portunity is tucked between The Breadwinner’s covers — an
opportunity to walk the streets
of Kabul, visit an Afghan home,
and live as a child of war lives.
Frightening at times, uplifting
at others, the story will take you
on a journey you aren’t likely to
forget anytime soon.
In August, I sat down with
Deborah Ellis to discuss the
book. Here is an excerpt from
our conversation:
And I was writing, of course, for
a Canadian audience initially
and thinking that our kids here
in Canada need courage as well.
Even though we’re not dealing
with the Taliban, we have chil-
dren here who have to deal with
violent parents, or racism, or
other kinds of injustice and so
I wanted them to be able to learn
from Parvana’s courage.
HW: You have strong charac-
ters in the book. Some of them are
obvious heroes like Parvana and
her sister, but there seems to me
to be another hero in the book —
education. Would you agree with
that?
DE: Yeah, man without it we’re
lost, right? I mean with it, people can have really high degrees and
still be war-mongering morons,
but without it we have no chance.
It’s so necessary, we have to have
it. Women have to have it.
HW: Why do you say women
in particular?
DE: Well, we have to have any
means of gaining power that
we can get because without that
power then we’re subject to the
men in our lives who may or
may not be good people and so
when we have it, whether it’s
economic power, access to infor-
mation, knowledge, skills — all
those things — it means we can
… that gives us choice in our
lives and without it we’re just
kind of stuck.
CENTRAL ASIA INSTITUTE