At the tender age of 8, I was captivated by Deborah Ellis’s novels The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey, and Mud City – A trilogy inspired from a story that an Afghani woman had told Ellis while she was visiting a refugee camp in 1996. This woman told Ellis of her young daughter who didn’t live with her in the refugee camp but rather had to disguise herself as a boy in order to provide for her family. Ellis was inspired by the interview and based her novels on Parvana, and her plight as a child in the war torn country of Afghanistan. These novels though fictionalized are important comodifyied examples of traumatic life narratives of children, specifically produced for an audience of western children.
These novels were revolutionary to my thinking of the world as a child. At such young age, I was inherently less aware of the world outside of my own ‘world’. I didn’t know much about global issues or the plight of children like Parvana, and so by reading these novels I realized how different other kids lives were to my own. Reading Ellis’s novels made me empathetic to not only Parvana’s tale, but sparked my curiosity. I began to read more stories of children who faced hardships, and in the process got quickly enthralled in the genre.
In an interview with Deborah Ellis from the website Papertigers, Ellis says, “some of the things I heard from kids [in the Afghani refugee camp] formed the basis for the Breadwinner novels.” Ellis only bases the books off of a few anecdotes from children as well as the mother in the refugee camp, and therefore had to create much of the story herself. Novels like Debroah Ellis’s The breadwinner pose questions about the genre of life narratives, and what defines a life narrative versus a fictional novel.
The breadwinner is a very powerful story of the trauma Afganhi children faced during the war and because of its success was able to bring light to these social issues. The problem is thought that most of the novel was in fact fictionalized; manipulated and co-opted for a western audience. It served as a “soft weapon” (Whitlock), comodifyed for a specific audience of western children, but powerful none the less.
Ellis says, “We create the world we want to see,” which is exactly what comodifyed life narratives for a western audience do; they shape how the west sees the world. By producing narratives for a western audience the stories are often shaped a certain way in order to be the most successful in western markets, often disregarding authenticity of the story, posing questions about the ethics of these comodifyed works. For this reason fictionalized life narratives such as The Breadwinner face a lot of controversy, and the reader of these novels should keep in mind that the truth is often stretched in order to be successful in the markets.
Click here for an interview with Deborah Ellis, entitled “The Power of One Voice”, which goes into more detail some of her works and writing process.