Breadwinner author Deborah Ellis remains hopeful
Work draws on need to tell untold stories
“I’m a woman, so I get welcomed to the world of women and children, which is pretty much the same world everywhere.”
DEBORAH ELLIS
In the last entry in Deborah Ellis’s new short-story collection, Sit, one of her protagonists — a scrawny daydreamer named Jafar stuck labouring in an Indonesian chair factory — realizes in a moment of silent triumph that stories “come from every country, every group of people, from people who are very, very rich and from people who work very hard for everything they get.”
That sure would be an eloquent mission statement for Ellis herself, the decorated Canadian author who has built a bibliography based on careful cultural empathy and deeply researched explorations into the experiences of those whose voices are otherwise rarely broadcast. On Nov. 24, her beloved 2000 children’s novel The
Breadwinner will be splashed across cinema screens in a new animated form. Perhaps17 years ago, it would have been hard to imagine a children’s novel about an 11-year-old girl in war-ravaged Afghanistan ever re- ceiving a literal Hollywood ending.
Certainly, Ellis herself couldn’t have imagined marching across a TIFF stage or mingling with Angelina Jolie (an executive producer on the film who, for the record, Ellis found “very gracious”).
Well, if Ellis is as surprised as anyone by the enduring popularity of The Bread
winner, the Governor General’s Awardwinning author does have a theory as to why the tale continues to captivate.
“I think it’s just all about courage, right?” she said. “We all look for courage in our own lives. We look for examples of it wherever we can find them because we think if we can learn from other people’s courage, that will help us to have courage ourselves. “The Breadwinner is all about courage.” If there’s something motivating about the courage of others, Ellis is as inspiring figure in her own right.
The Paris, Ont.-raised writer first became involved in anti-war activism as a 17-year-old driven to despair by the hovering threat of nuclear conflict. In 1996, she was so moved reading about the brutality being inflicted on women and girls during the Taliban’s occupation of Afghanistan that she journeyed to refugee camps in Pakistan to spend months meeting with Afghan women and documenting their stories. There, she met a young girl who had chopped off her hair so she could identify as a boy and earn money for her family, who of course inspired The Breadwinner.
Since then, Ellis has travelled tirelessly to parts of the world many in the West would rather ignore.
She did so to find stories that otherwise weren’t being told, even as doing so required that she immerse herself in some of the world’s most unstable and fraught environments.
For Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak, she visited camps and occupied territories in the Middle East at a time when tension felt particularly high. One of the stories in Sit was inspired by her more recent exploration of Japan’s Fukushima Exclusion Zone, the evacuated site of the world’s secondlargest nuclear accident. To research The Heaven Shop, she spent time in Malawi, where she was robbed and chased. She’s been threatened with death in camps and menaced by Taliban loyalists who claimed to be following her every move. Though Ellis continues her work in such persistently precarious situations, she does so knowing her safety is at risk.
“I do get scared,” she said. “I think if I had children that would be a different ball game, but I don’t. And I’m a woman, so I get welcomed to the world of women and children, which is pretty much the same world everywhere.”
Perhaps it’s conversations such as those that have imbued Ellis with such respect for the wisdom of children. That faith in the capacity of kids manifests both in the resourceful and tenacious young characters who populate her books, as well as her trust that young readers are sufficiently mature to absorb complex stories of struggle and suffering told without condescension.
“It just seemed that if we’re doing these things to children, then that stuff should be reflected in their literature,” she said. “And if we’re too ashamed to put it in their literature, we shouldn’t be doing it.”
(Ellis’s publisher at Groundwood Books, Sheila Barry, died on Tuesday of cancer. She championed Ellis’s writing, including The Breadwinner, telling Quill and Quire in 2015 that it was still “a very relevant book. And children love it.”)
When Ellis wrote The Breadwinner, she dedicated the royalties of the book to charity because, she reasoned, “it made absolutely no sense for me to go over there and meet people and collect their stories and take money for it.” She figured at the time that the $3,000 advance she had been given was a “lot of money,” far more than she ever would have been able to raise through fundraising.
Well, Ellis has become quite the altruistic breadwinner indeed; that trilogy has now raised close to $2 million for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. She’s been similarly generous with royalties from her other books: No Ordinary Day benefited the Leprosy Mission Canada; Children of War: Voices of Iraqi Refugees raised money for the Children in Crisis Fund of the International Board on Books for Young People; Mud City helped Street Kids International; and Looks Like Daylight boosted the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada.
Ellis has seen progress along the way, but catastrophe too; one Afghan women’s centre funded by Ellis’s contributions was destroyed by a bombing. And after a lifetime of antiwar activism, Ellis is of course troubled by a collective attitude toward war — and especially nuclear war — that she sees as increasingly cavalier.
Asked, however, if she ever succumbs to a feeling of hopelessness about the world, Ellis is emphatic.
“I’ve met with people all over the world who have many more reasons to be hopeless than I do, and they still get up every morning and try to make things better for their families and communities. So for someone like me, who has lived a fairly blessed life, to be hopeless; it’s an affectation. It’s an indulgence. Shame on me if I go there. That’s one thing,” she began.
“The other thing is, you think, ‘People are going to be hungry, so why bother to feed them?’ Well, every time they get a meal they’re a little stronger. If they’re hungry tomorrow, at least they ate today. Same thing with Afghanistan. Schools get bombed and they get rebuilt and they get bombed again. But in that interim, kids have had some exposure to education and some exposure to the incredible power of their own minds. They have a sense of what they’re capable of doing.
“They can think, ‘we’ve done this once, it was taken from us, let’s build it up again.’ You have to come to terms with the fact that things often don’t last. The things don’t last, but the qualities that people get from them? They can last.”