Parvana on her draining voyage through death and despair, sets out from where the first novel The Breadwinner ended. My daughter persisted in her demands that I read it. I gave in and agreed to take it on the family holiday to Cork. I could hardly do otherwise. It was on a walk through Dublin one evening that I had picked up the first in the series for her. It is a children’s book but raises issues that adults normally deal with and which have forced themselves upon a child just in her first year of teenage life.
Parvana lost her beloved father, so central to the first novel, through illness. She is forced to journey alone in inhospitable territory. The hell that is war moves at full throttle. Was it ever anything else other than hell? She must walk alone until along the way she meets a baby in a bombed out home and takes him with her. It seemed a greater challenge than the one she had earlier failed to rise to. Then she had opted out of burying the child’s mother, the strength was beyond summonsing. Physically she no longer felt capable. That resource had been used up in burying her own father. At times she must have felt the baby was just the kitten she had initially mistaken it to be. Its abandonment would then have been an unproblematic choice in the knowledge that a kitten could fend for itself unlike a baby. She did not abandon the child, instead pulling it aboard for her journey and named it Hassan.
Then, while in a cave she and the baby come across Azif, a one legged boy of seriously grumpy temperament. Later she met Lelia and her silent grandmother. From the new acquaintance she learned that hardship can be sometimes turn into opportunity. Lelia’s philosophy of ‘the minefield will take care of us’ became ingrained in her outlook. Goats and peasants, blown up as they sought to negotiate these fields of death and disfigurement, became a source of food and clothing.
Bombs rained down from the skies as the children comment on the illogic of grownups killing each other. In a world where war and tanks seemed the normal thing the famished Parvana would ask why something like eating could not also be regarded as normal. There seemed a greater human need for eating than bombing.
Ethical considerations were a factor in these young as evidenced by their discussions on the morality of stealing food. The disabled Asif told them that when he was hungry his uncle once threatened to have the Taliban cut his hands off for stealing strawberries. As if he had not experienced enough amputation.
But it was not just strawberry thieves that provoked the wrath of the men of god. Parvana had long given up trying to understand why the Taliban ‘hated women.’ Later she said to the child ‘it must be nice to be young.’ Her childhood had been stolen from her, leaving her to be thrust into adulthood and its concomitant responsibilities at such a tender age, 13.
The loss of her father was not the only personal grief Parvana experienced on this quest to find her mother swallowed up in one of the many refugee camps sprawled throughout the vast terrain.
Parvana's Journey by Deborah Ellis. Oxford University Press 2002
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