Interview with the author

Deborah Ellis was interviewed by David Freeman of Relaxwithabook.com

The transcript of the interview is below, but to listen to the interview please use the following links:

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David Freeman: At the end of 2001 there is one subject that is on the minds and lips of most - the Taliban and Afghanistan. The situation reflected in a book called The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis. This is very strong stuff. It's about a little girl living in Afghanistan. Did you go there?

Deborah Ellis: I was in Pakistan, in the refugee camps. I didn't get into Afghanistan myself.

DF: Did you meet this girl?

DE: I met the mother of a child who does what the girl does in the book which is cut off her hair and wear boys clothing and pretend to be a boy in order to work the streets of Kabul and earn a living for her family.

DF: So what made you go to this camp in the first place? Were you researching?

DE: Yes, I came into the whole Afghanistan issue from an anti-war, women's rights perspective. I had been doing that kind of work anyway, back in Canada and when the Taliban took over Kabul in September of 1996 it seemed like a natural fit with the work I had been doing.

So I was over there once just to try to find out how we could be of more use back in Canada and then one of the things I thought that I could do would be to collect the stories of these women who have been involved in this war for 20 years, what their lives have been like. So I went over there to interview women and children for a non-fiction adult book called `Women of the Afghan War' so I collected a couple of hundred stories from all periods of that war and while I was there I met the mother of this child and as soon as she told me her story I decided to write a children's novel.

DF: And how did you communicate, what were the actual practicalities, did you work with an interpreter?

DE: I used interpreters most of the time yes, I used different ones from a number of women's organisations. And I met a woman over there who was one of the premiere High School principals of Kabul before the Taliban took over and she knew a lot of people because a lot of her students were now refugees and she took me around, she introduced me to a lot of people.

DF: How long ago was this?

DE: About 2 and a half years ago.

DF: What was the overriding emotion - was it fear? I mean the mother in your book at one point declares "I am a university graduate and I'm not going to do this", with anger, she was affronted. Now, being affronted, was that emotion widespread?

DE: I think the emotion was more widespread at the beginning of the situation. Nobody really expected that the Taliban would hold power as long as they have. The people I talked to thought `They're a new government, they're going to get their act together, they're a bit obnoxious at the beginning but all governments are'; but their life would get back to normal. Nobody expected it to last this long so initially, once they accepted that it was lasting awhile there was a great deal of anger. People who could got out. But then as time goes by and there's no hope for things getting any better, when there's nothing to look forward to on the horizon then there's no place for that anger to go. People start losing the edge of that anger and they just become hopeless. And that's primarily what I saw in the camps was this sense of hopelessness.

You know when you and I get up in the morning we have this sense of what we're going to do during the day. We have a sense that maybe in 6 months we can do something else, we can plan and we know that we're going to be able to achieve it, reasonably; but these women, they have no sense of being able to control any aspect of their future. They have no sense of the future anymore and I found that to be one of the most tragic things about the women in Afghanistan.

DF: And do they think of the individual Taliban as demons? You have a touching scene where the little girl, who has become a letter-reader because she's literate, a Taliban comes and asks her to read the letter and she at that point realises that he's human and he is capable of tears. So what's the view of the individual Taliban?

DE: I put that scene in the book because I come into this from a non-violent perspective and one of the basic tenets of non-violence is to recognize the human being within the enemy. And it was difficult with the Taliban because their laws and their structures against women are so oppressive but I wanted to put that in to show that these are actual human beings in spite of the fact that they have these laws and they have this government. And also I think I can put that scene in there because I don't live in Afghanistan. I think if I had to live there and deal with these people I would find it a lot more difficult to see them as human beings.

DF: Kabul used to be wonderful, used to be beautiful.

DE: It used to be the hot spot of Central Asia, where people used to go for a hot time on a Saturday night.

DF: That's where they start and this is where they get to. Did you get any flavour of the `why'? Because here in the West in 2001 we're all thinking `Why' and `How'?

DE: Well I think why and how are some of the easiest questions to answer. Why and how is because different countries decided to muck about in Afghanistan and use it as a staging ground for cold war battles that had nothing essentially to do with the Afghan people.

Before the Soviets invaded the CIA was already in the country, mucking about and destabilising things which wasn't hard to do because the communist government was pretty unstable, they were fighting each other the way those governments always do. So it didn't take a whole lot to go in there and stir things up. And then of course the Soviet Union blundered in with their tanks and did that horrific invasion which gave Ronald Reagan the notion to pour in billions of dollars in weapons and army training and CIA personnel into the country which just made it much much worse.

So they were essentially fighting for freedom until the last drop of Afghan blood, and that's the legacy that we're looking at today. The Taliban is not something that dropped down from earth from the planet Mars. They are an artificially created army that came out of the Cold War and we bear responsibility for because we allowed our governments to do what they did in Afghanistan.

DF: Where does education sit in this? Because again the little girl in the book says that she can't write to the Taliban because they can't read and write anyway. Is this a regime, a way of thought that surfs along on a tide of ignorance?

DE: Ignorance is a pretty powerful tide to surf on, I think a lot of governments through history have managed to surf that tide for some time. But the Taliban were initially boys who were orphaned during the Soviet war. They were trained at religious schools, so-called religious schools in Pakistan and they were trained essentially to do 2 things which is to recite portions of the Koran and to fight a modern war with modern weapons. They have no experience of living, they have no experience of family and so you've got a situation where the streets of the city are controlled by teenage boys - 18, 19 years old who have whips and guns and complete authority to beat any woman that they see and decide to beat for any kind of infraction. And if that were London or New York or Toronto I think we would find that a totally horrifying prospect.

DF: What about the symbols? This burkha? The women that you met in the camp, what was their view of that?

DE: The burkha has some traditions in Afghanistan but for a long time the women have been working towards having it as a choice. The women in the cities did wear it as a choice or often they did not wear it, again as a choice and it had been something that they had been struggling with pretty much since the turn of the century, the old century. The women in the cities were in modern dress. By and large they were wearing mini skirts, pants and had the same kind of weird hairdos that we had in the 1960's and all that stuff.

The burkha is foreign to most of the women from the cities. Their mothers didn't wear it, they didn't wear it, but then now all of a sudden they have to wear it.

DF: And little things come out, like music. You read the Taliban don't have music. But music is everywhere in our culture - it's used for joy, it's used for selling, it's used for filling in the gaps in life. How does one say - there will be no music? Because it is written to the human soul, people will hum and they will whistle and they will sing.

DE: And Afghanistan was a very musical culture. There were a lot of instruments that are part of the culture and were created there - songs and dances that are part of the tribal traditions. I think when you've got enough guns and enough power and enough people who are afraid you can pretty much make or do anything or not do anything. But it becomes very problematic because there have been cases where children have been beaten or imprisoned simply for drumming something or whistling or singing - you know, the way kids do. So it's not simply a law against Western music, it's not simply restrictions against Madonna for example, it's restrictions against everyday singing and whistling and mourning songs and things that you were talking about.

DF: It's so difficult to understand in a culture that kind of rejoices in sexuality and young boys usually have more testosterone than they know what to do with and here they are using that energy, that procreative energy if you like to destroy. It's an aberration. When you were confronted with it what did you feel? What was the raw thought that you had?

DE: Oh I was afraid all the time I was in Pakistan and I was there as a very privileged person, I had my passport and my airline ticket home strapped to my body and I knew that I was getting out of there. I was afraid the entire time and there is this atmosphere of fear within Peshawar and the border cities. Not only are they afraid of the Taliban because the Taliban have a very strong presence in that area, but the different factions that were fighting the civil war still had very strong presences and there were assassinations all the time. There's a really big atmosphere of fear all over the place.

DF: The woman who started this story, where were you when you met her, what was she doing?

DE: It was really remarkable. There is a woman's organisation operating secretly in Afghanistan, they're called the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan and a lot of money from this book goes to them. They do, among other things, secret schools, newspapers and things like that, and membership in the organisation is punishable by death. One of the things that they did was smuggle some women out of Afghanistan to attend an International Women's Day rally in Pakistan and I was able to talk to some of the women that they smuggled including the mother of the child, so that's where I met her.

DF: And did she ask you to tell her story?

DE: It was kind of funny the way it happened because I was at the end of the interview, I had run out of questions and we were packing up to go and she just kind of mentioned casually that her daughter does this. And as soon as she said that I sat her back down and then got back into it. She's very proud of her daughter and kind of in awe that her daughter has such courage and she was only 10 years old. She's an amazing child.

DF: And the idea is that this family is all women because the father was put in jail for something ... for what?

DE: In the book he's in jail because he has a foreign education which is enough to put you in jail in Afghanistan.

DF: And for the women to go out on their own they need a letter pinned to them from their husbands.

DE: That's right, they either have to have a male escort which could be a son, a brother or a husband. Or they have to have a note pinned to them which is really funny because most of the Taliban can't read.

DF: So, this family of women, they've been quite rich and their circumstances have been reduced, reduced, reduced.

DE: Yeah, they used to have a very big, posh house in Kabul because their parents were professionals and so forth. And every time there is a bombing they move to more reduced circumstances until the entire family is living in one little room in a broken down apartment house. But even with that they're pretty lucky because they only have to share with each other, they don't have to share with other families.

DF: So somebody has to do something and this little girl does it.

DE: That's right.

DF: The book is aimed at young teenagers, did you have any worries, did you have to take stuff out? Because there's one scene in which they go off to the central stadium and think they're going to see a football match but of course the football stadium isn't used for football anymore ...

DE: Right, the football stadium is now used for executions. And it's interesting because someone asked the Taliban `Why don't you play football in the stadium?' they said `Well if the West will build us a place for executions then we'll use it ... '

DF: And use the football ground for football.

DE: Yes, and I debated about a lot of the things in the book, about what to put in and I decided to leave that one in. And I decided to leave it in because I wanted to do honour to the experiences of children living in Afghanistan at the moment. And to leave things out because they're horrific, I didn't think that would be doing them honour. They're living through it, they're surviving it somehow and I think that needs to be remembered.

DF: It's a while ago since you were there, what's your perception of it now?

DE: Oh I know it's much, much worse now than it was then. The resources at the time when I was there were pretty low and I think with the new influx of refugees the resources are going to be even more stretched. There might be a little blip of time where because of international attention they get extra money and extra things to work with but I don't imagine that attention's going to last for very long.

Also, the government of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan are really, really sick of the Afghans, they've been trying to kick them out of the country for some time now and they keep threatening them and making little moves to do that. There are some privately-run Afghan schools in Pakistan and every now and again the government will close them all down and there's a long process of negotiation to re-open them. I think the situation is very, very bad right now.

DF: So how do you feel when you watch the news night after night?

DE: I just feel tremendously angry. I came back from Pakistan furious and it's just grown. Some times you can get a sense that from great suffering some good will come out of it - like in the second world war, through all the hardship they beat fascism - that was a good thing that came out of that. But nothing good has come out of this, there is absolutely no point to these people's suffering. There has been nothing gained and so for 20 years they have lived lives of pure and utter hell and for nothing.

DF: So when you look at what is happening on the world stage now - are you pessimistic?

DE: I am pessimistic. I think we have a small window of opportunity where we can get a decent government into Afghanistan but that's a very small window of opportunity and the world leaders involved don't seem to be moving towards taking that opportunity. If women were are not mightily represented in the negotiation process to set-up a new government then their needs and the needs of the children of the country will go unnoticed as they have been for the last 3 years.

The people that they are now fighting with, the Northern Alliance, are the same thugs that raped and bombed the cities and destroyed the country during the civil war. If they come back to power they're going to be at each other's throats and it will be the same nonsense as before. So I am pessimistic, I don't think the bombing is going to do much more than damage. I think they're laying down land mines. I just think it's going to get a whole lot worse. And I think we're going to have a small window and if that window is missed and world attention goes away again I think it could be another couple of decades before we can perhaps do something useful again.

DF: In this country we're used to the term Protestant and Catholic being lobbed as grenades; and you realise it has nothing to do at all with religion. In this situation does this have anything to do with religion?

DE: No, that's something that women told me over and over again - that the Taliban do not represent Islam. And in writing the book I steered away from Islam as I know nothing about it and I didn't want it to be the issue. I wanted the war and repression to be the issues.

DF: When you wrote this book it wasn't as topical as it is now - so what was your reason? What did you want the book to do?

DE: I had basically 2 reasons. One - I wanted to get the story out of my head and the other reason was I thought that if a publisher bought it they would give me a $3000 advance which I could then turn over to the camps and some good would come out of it. That was kind of the best that I hoped for.

DF: And now, because of its relevance, because of its incise, because it gives you a little window into the grinding awfulness of all this - money will go back to those who need it.

DE: Yes, that's right.

DF: Deborah Ellis, thank you very much. Back soon with another one.