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Taking Kabul by the horns

May 11 2003

Deborah Ellis: "You have to see the human being in the enemy. If there is potential for change, there is still hope."

Deborah Ellis defied the Taliban to write her bestseller about Afghan children, writes Jane Sullivan.

Writers of books for children don't usually receive death threats. Deborah Ellis did. Four years ago, she spoke in support of Afghan women at an International Women's Day rally in Peshawar. A couple of days later, a letter came for the "foreigner woman" from "a soldier of Islam". This was her first and last warning, it said. She must save her life and leave the city. They were following her. "There was a drawing," she says. "A dagger with blood dripping off it."

Any fear she felt at such a threat was tempered by the knowledge of what Afghan women went through every day. "I talked to women who had been shot at in the marketplace, or whose sisters had been killed, or who had acid thrown in their faces. Many of them had to have male bodyguards." To get a death threat, "you don't have to do anything more radical than teach other women to read or write".

Ellis hadn't planned to write a book for kids. She was researching a book about how Afghan women had survived 20 years of warfare, culminating in the tyrannical rule of the Taliban. Then one of the women she interviewed remarked in passing that she had a daughter aged 11 who had cut off her hair and was pretending to be a boy, so she could support the family.

"As soon as this woman told me about her daughter, I got one of those feelings like a lightning bolt to my head," she says.

She went home to Toronto and wrote her non-fiction book for adults, Women of the Afghan War. After that, using the background she had acquired from talking to dozens of Afghan women, she spent three months writing a novel for young readers about a girl called Parvana, who disguises herself as a boy to work in the markets of Kabul. Her father is in jail, her elder brother has been killed by a land mine, and under Taliban rule, her mother and elder sister are not allowed to leave the house without a man.

Ellis had been writing prolifically since she was 12, mostly with no success.

"I had no clue I would even be published, I was hoping I'd get a bit of an advance to pay for some teachers over there and send some kids to school," she says on the phone from her Toronto home. "I was pretty much of a nobody at that point. I just hoped other kids could read the book."

A publisher snapped up her novel and it took off. Young readers the world over have been captivated by Parvana, an ordinary little girl who loves ice cream and fights with her big sister, who is suddenly catapaulted into poverty, oppression, trauma and extreme danger.

They have discovered a world where the most mundane things are hazardous. You have to fetch water in a bucket in half-a-dozen trips up and down bomb-damaged stairs. If you're a girl in a burka, you risk falling because you can't see properly through the mesh over your face. If you don't have a man or a boy with you, you risk arrest.

To date, Parvana (or The Breadwinner, as it is known in Canada and the US) has sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide. In Australia, the book and its sequel, Parvana's Journey, have sold 40,000 copies. A third book in the series, Mud City, will be out shortly. Ellis is in huge demand as a speaker at Canadian schools and she's a star guest at the Reading Matters conference on children's literature in Melbourne this week. All her royalties go towards the education of Afghan girls in refugee camps in Pakistan.

Becoming a bestselling author is an unexpected fate for a modest and down-to-earth woman who has always been a fighter for peace and justice. She works as a mental health counsellor and has a long history of anti-war and women's rights activism.

Ellis's mother was a nurse, her father works for a hydro company in Ontario. When she was aged between 14 and 16, she spent time in a children's psychiatric facility - "the funny farm", as she puts it. "I still can't quite figure it out. I was really bored, pretty anti-social and not much of a joiner, and people thought that was a problem. I hated high school. In a way it was good ... I think for a writer it's good to be comfortable with being on the outside."

When she came out of "the funny farm", she channeled her energies into anti-war protests and the women's movement. Once she was in a group that tried to perform a citizen's arrest on Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher when they came to Toronto, for crimes against humanity. The police stopped them.

In her self-deprecating way, she says she decided to go and collect Afghan women's stories because she was "a really lousy fundraiser". As for her writing - "Oh, my goodness! A lot of my books were very bad and are stowed in my closet, no publisher would touch them. I'm sure I'll continue to turn out bad stuff. I first published an adult novel that was really awful and sold about 14 copies and then the publisher went out of business."

The breakthrough for her was her novel for young people, Looking for X (just published in Australia), which won the children's literature section of the 2000 Governor General's Award, the top Canadian literary prize. It's a story about Khyber, an 11-year-old Canadian girl with a mum who used to be a stripper and two autistic brothers. She's a rebel, she hates social workers and she has a yearning to go to romantic places such as the Khyber Pass. Ellis says it's not autobiographical, but there are surely a few echoes of her youth here.

She continues to be prolific and varied in her writing. Another young adult novel, Company of Fools, is set in France in the time of the Great Plague. And she has just been to Israel and Palestine to interview children for a forthcoming book of oral history: "One thing I found overwhelming was how little the kids knew about each other. Each group thinks the other wants to kill them."

In the Parvana books, the children are often more resourceful and resilient than the adults, who can end up completely broken by their ordeals. Ellis says she saw many cases in the refugee camps where children ended up taking care of parents who couldn't cope any more. But she feels now that she didn't make it clear enough in her books how damaged Afghan children could become. "There were so many instances of elective mutism, nightmares, a lot of bed-wetting."

She made a point of including a scene in Parvana where a Talib man weeps in anguish over his own loss. It comes from her training in non-violent direct action. "You have to see the human being in the enemy. If there is potential for change, there is still hope."

There were limits to what she could write. Parvana goes into a crowded stadium, expecting a football game. Instead, she finds the Taliban cutting off the hands of thieves. There were times when children were made to witness the execution or mutilation of their own parents in such public places, Ellis says, "but there was no way I felt capable of writing it. I didn't want kids to know about that part of it".

She is prepared, though, to reveal a great deal about the horrors of war. One of the things she talks about to schools is the way in which sane, intelligent people get together and decide to make a thing of pure evil: a land mine that looks like a toy, so children will pick it up.

"There's a big thing in Canada that parents need to talk to their children about drugs and sex. I don't think talking to your kids about war is any less important than that.

"We have a very strange view of children in this part of the world ... we have some children we think are the most precious things alive. We have to protect and nurture and do everything we can to them to make them grow up safe and happy, but at the same time we're completely content to let most of the children in the world drink poisoned water ... We know it's going on and we don't stop it."

All of the children she talks to ask: if grown-ups know the result of war, why do we keep having wars? "It's hard to come up with a good answer to that one."

Deborah Ellis's books are published in Australia by Allen&Unwin. She is a guest at the Reading Matters conference at the State Library of Victoria from Thursday to Saturday. Jane Sullivan talks to her on Saturday morning. Inquiries: 8664 7014.



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