Parvana's Journey

It’s finally happened. My tolerance for children’s books has completely gone by the wayside, my ability to look at a book not as an educated adult but as simply someone waiting for a story is absolutely dashed. Again, I read Deborah Ellis’s Parvana’s Journey for my course on taboos in children’s literature. In a sweeping generalization, the book is about war torn Afghanistan and several children struggling to survive as refugees, tracking Parvana, a young girl, trying to find her family after her father’s death.

Clearly meant to be a child’s first exposure to the conflict surrounding the Middle East, Ellis has no qualms about beating her reader over the head with every single point and image within the text. There is nothing subtle about her story telling, and perhaps more harshly, nothing redeeming in her actual writing either. The reader is unable to draw any conclusion for themselves, because Ellis is there shouting with a megaphone, “You see!? Adults are supposed to take care of children, not abandon them! War is bad! I think women are mistreated!” Such a tirade of obvious realizations does nothing to educate a young reader, and leaves adults filled with contempt and scorn.

As this educated reader that I assume myself to be, I find the need to try and find some sort of redemption for Parvana’s Journey, because the idea of a book not having any merit at all saddens me greatly. However, I will admit to struggling with that pursuit right now. I take issue with Ellis’s portrayal of women in Afghanistan, for she takes a traditional Western feminist stance, claiming the burqa as an object of oppression and writing in a style that has been described as “save the Muslim girl.” While I wish to avoid a purely political and anthropological tirade here, I believe that Muslim women are quite capable of saving themselves without the meddling of Westerners who understand nothing of their culture or the customs behind the burqa.

I also fail to see how this book can be any sort of helpful educational tool. Yes, it does give a very basic and elementary view of the Afghani war that can serve as a first exposure for a child. There is violence, bombing, death, every horror of war an adult can imagine, and yet nothing ever stays too bad. There is a lack of true realism that I find disheartening. It’s as though Ellis didn’t quite have the balls to leave her novel with an ambiguous and potentially sad ending, instead choosing to wrap up her plot neatly with Parvana finding her mother and assuming that everything would then be okay. What does this teach a young child? That nothing everything bad will be easily fixed and that there is no true suffering? I don’t propose to let my child in on the crushing cruelty of the world at an inappropriate age, but if anything I would rather my child watch the news with me and then we talk about current events, than them reading this novel and not being allowed to draw the lessons from it themselves.

I promise the reader of this review that I did not go into writing this meaning to be scathing. It’s just that sort of book. So read at your own peril. I certainly won’t be joining you for a second go.