It doesn't end like that in the book, Miss 15 remarked quietly.
Last night we watched The Breadwinner. An animated 2017 movie of the novel of the same name by Deborah Ellis - a book which so profoundly touched my then 12 year old daughter 3+ years ago when she first read it as a class project, that she really wanted us to watch the movie version together.
In short, it's a story set during the fall of Kabul during the US led war with Afghanistan. Parvana, aged 11, is desperate to support her family and find her crippled father after he is arrested by the Taliban. After her mother is beaten and with food and water running out, she decides to cut her hair and dress as a boy to earn money to support her family.
The animation and the art are superb. Image credits: BBC.com and Animation Magazine.
It was decidedly ODD telling my daughter in hushed tones during the slow bits that I remember the fall of Kabul and that my journalism lecturer, Peter Davis, had been a war correspondent stationed there. From what I remember of his incisive lectures, it was definitely not the Disney-level dream I watched last night.
At least 40% of the movie is given over to a sub-story that Parvana tells her little brother, about a BOY who has to save his village. The sub-story is magical and delightful and of course he retrieves the stolen seeds from the evil tusked elephant, after he has defeated the roaming jaguars using the gifts he has earned on his journey. He has saved the village! The whole of the story within the story uses decoupage style imagery with a Russian folk vibe that is simply gorgeous. My daughter assures me this wasn't central at all to the novel, and 'is just for the movie'.
Somehow, they managed to sidestep all the hints at darkness that were there (arranged marriage, a daughter abused, literacy being illegal etc) and create a pretty happy ending, all things considered.
And it left both my daughter and I flat. Smiling cos it has been fun and beautiful, but inwardly knowing we had been lied to.
"So what happened in the end of the book?", I asked my daughter.
"Parvana came back and they'd all gone. No one waited for . And she was left alone".
This morning I sat with the aftertaste of the movie in my mind as I flicked over the global news on social media. I saw more US buildings burned and reports of another innocent black man shot in Atlanta. I couldn't help but think about The Breadwinner in this context. How after only 30 years since the fall of Kabul, the victors have sanitized and G rated the story - rewritten history. In a sweet, cutesy, mainstream and palatable way that somehow (IMHO) has invalidated the REAL story of Parvana.
The animated movie WAS very well received and awarded. Predictably.
I searched my mind over a second coffee and I don't remember any public outcry about this film, about the sanitizing of this war Pocahontas-Disney-style.
I wonder if in decades to come the Afghani people will accuse us as being complicit in the attempted US funded genocide, for accepting this spoon-feeding of the sugar-water version of history. I wonder how much input the US government has had into promoting and popularizing this slightly different and much prettier narrative.
Apart from writing this piece, there is little else I can DO to let it be known that I simply don't buy it. Well, maybe there IS one more thing: I have asked my daughter to excavate her brothel-of-a-covid-19-lockdown-bedroom and find me the original book. I intend to read the original and gift it to some young women learning to read English here in Asia. So that at least someone gets a glimpse of how things were for young women in Afghanistan during the fall of Kabul.
Last night made me realize again how vigilant we need to be when settling down to western "entertainment" and how movies have become just one more tool in the global propaganda war.
Feeling for a night snuggled in with an important book.
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