The Breadwinner

Here, Mother and Nooria ask Parvana to fetch water, even though she’s just spent a long day in the market. Since there’s no one else who can safely accomplish this task, it falls to Parvana. This speaks to the precarious state that women find themselves in under the Taliban. Mother and Nooria, as an adult and a young adult, can’t safely leave their homes alone to fetch water for their family, simply because they’re women. The Taliban may seek to protect women by mandating that they stay inside, but in practice, this only pushes families even deeper into poverty.

At the same time, children Parvana’s age, who aren’t policed as heavily by the Taliban, must take on many household duties that their parents or older siblings cannot do. It’s not legal or entirely safe for Parvana to leave the apartment alone to fetch water, but her chances of having a soldier stop her are much less than Nooria or Mother’s chances. All of this shows that the Taliban’s rules force children to grow up much faster than they would otherwise.

Parvana thinks about how lonely she is in her new home; all her other siblings tend to pair up with each other, leaving her alone—and Parvana can’t safely befriend any neighbor children either, since the Taliban encourages neighbors to spy on one another. This shows that the Taliban have created a culture of fear that discourages people from forming strong connections with each other and consequently makes them isolated and suspicious of outsiders. It forces people, in other words, to rely only on family. However, this is challenging for someone like Parvana, who doesn’t have any siblings her age and who is therefore on her own to fill her time. And by depriving people in Kabul of their friends, the Taliban essentially leave families to their own devices to survive, which the novel makes clear doesn’t work—after all, Parvana and her family survive largely thanks to kind friends and strangers. Here, Parvana is taking on chores that Nooria and Mother cannot do, and Father can only make so much in the market. Families on their own in this system are liable to fail as soon as disaster strikes or something changes, because there’s no one else for them to rely on.

After Father is arrested, Parvana remembers arguments her parents had about whether or not to leave Afghanistan; Mother wanted to leave while they still had the opportunity to do so, while Father insisted they had a responsibility to their country to stay. Here, Father is demonstrating the kind of resistance he wants his daughters to learn to engage in and appreciate. To him, staying rather than fleeing in fear is its own quiet form of resistance. By staying, he may have the opportunity to work for a better future in his home country, something they wouldn’t have as refugees or immigrants in another country. Mother, however, refuses to do her work as a writer and a reporter while the Taliban are in charge. Instead, she wants to be able to write about Afghanistan and its issues from afar. As far as Father is concerned, Mother doesn’t yet understand the value of standing up to the Taliban by writing now, when it’s illegal and dangerous to do so. As the novel unfolds, Mother indeed comes to see the value in this with help from Mrs. Weera.

When Nooria decides to send Parvana, disguised as a boy, to buy food in the market for the family, Parvana realizes she can refuse and force Nooria to go herself. Surprisingly, though, having this power over Nooria doesn’t feel very satisfying. In this moment, Parvana begins to come of age in a big way. She realizes that there are far more pressing and more important things in life—like feeding her younger siblings and Mother—than engaging in a petty fight with her big sister. She’s beginning to think of people other than herself, and decides to accept the responsibility she has to care for her family. Though family has always been important to Parvana, it’s gradually becoming the most important thing to her and, therefore, something she’s willing to sacrifice and do scary things in order to support.

It’s telling, though, that Parvana’s seemingly mature perspective might just come from exhaustion and hunger. The Taliban arrested Father for seemingly no reason, and in essence did nothing more than terrorize Parvana’s family and deprive them of their sole breadwinner. In a situation like this, Parvana really has no choice but to grow up sooner than she might otherwise and shoulder more responsibility. She must, if she wants to survive.

When Parvana returns home from the market with Mrs. Weera, Nooria is relieved and ecstatic to have another adult around to help her. This drives home the fact that though Nooria is 17 and in many ways is treated like an adult, she’s still a child. In this sense, she’s not all that different from Parvana—she just has different constraints on what she can do and how she’s expected to act.

With this, the novel highlights how war and conflict tragically robs children of their childhoods and forces them to grow up much earlier than they should. Over the last four days while Mother remained on the toshak, Nooria has had to manage the little ones, prepare meals, and make choices about how to allocate their dwindling resources. This is a lot to ask of anyone, let alone someone so young. Mrs. Weera, then, looks like a savior as she walks in the door. This, of course, has to do in part with Mrs. Weera’s confident, no-nonsense demeanor and her willingness to step in and commandeer a situation—but in this situation, that’s entirely a good thing, as it allows Nooria to feel like someone is caring for her again, something she clearly craves.

While Mrs. Weera attends to Mother and Ali’s dirty diapers, Parvana carries bucket after bucket of water from the tap to the apartment. It’s important to keep in mind just how treacherous of a journey this is—the apartment is on the third floor, and the steps going up are unstable and don’t have safe railings. Parvana has to work hard not just because the bucket is heavy, but because the path from the tap to home is so dangerous—although Parvana is a young girl and not technically a woman yet, a Taliban soldier could certainly take offense to her being out alone and stop her at any minute.

However, what’s more important to Parvana at this moment is caring for her family. She knows that Mrs. Weera can’t help them unless Parvana pulls her weight and gives Mrs. Weera what she needs to get Mother and the apartment cleaned up. At this moment, it doesn’t matter that her feet are bleeding or the buckets are heavy. What matters is getting her family to a place that doesn’t feel quite so dirty, desperate, and terrifying.

After Mother and Mrs. Weera propose their plan to turn Parvana into a boy to Parvana, Parvana is angry and terrified. At this point, Parvana’s hair is long. Though she described it earlier in the novel as stringy, it’s still a point of pride for her. It’s a symbol of her femininity, and she’s proud of how long she’s gotten it to grow. Because of this, it’s upsetting to be asked to cut it all off—it’s like being asked to cut off a major part of her identity. However, even more than being asked to give up her femininity, Parvana keys in on the fact that being turned into a boy means that the adults are also effectively asking her to give up her childhood. She needs to look like a boy so she can work and feed the family, something she cannot do as a girl. And for Parvana, this is both insulting and unthinkable. In her mind, adults and older children are supposed to care for those younger than they are, not the other way around. This is why she suggests that Nooria dress as a boy instead. But because Parvana is at a place in her development where she can pass as male and Nooria isn’t, the responsibility falls to Parvana, whether she likes it or not.

During the discussion about turning Parvana into a boy by cutting her hair, Mrs. Weera makes the point that Parvana has to agree to this plan or it won’t work. For Parvana, this makes all the difference. In this moment, then, Parvana begins to see that while being made to resemble a boy certainly will force her to mature more quickly, it will also give her more agency over her life. All she has to do is exercise that agency the first time, by agreeing to let the adults cut her hair.

Mrs. Weera clearly understands that they need Parvana’s blessing in order to make this work. This is why she appeals to Parvana’s feelings of being responsible to her family, and it’s also why she’s encouraging. She knows that Parvana is capable of acting the part of a young boy, and it’s important that Parvana hear that from someone she respects and trusts. This begins to illustrate the importance of friends—at times, friends can sometimes convince a person to make the right choice where their family cannot.

After Mother learns that Parvana earned a lot of money digging up bones in a graveyard, she insists that they don’t need that kind of money—but both Parvana and Nooria push back on Mother. In this moment, both Parvana and Nooria begin to assume more agency and responsibility than they have in the past. Both girls have, for the most part, deferred to their mother and acted the part of mostly obedient children. In these difficult times, however, both girls have had to grow up before they’re truly ready to do so—and this gives them the courage to stand up to Mother.

For Parvana, having had the experience of moving through the market independently as a boy makes her feel far more mature and independent. Now that she’s seen how the world actually works out there, it makes more sense for her to push back on Mother and advocate for something that she knows will help the family. In the same vein, Nooria sees exactly what’s going on at home and therefore can support Parvana in her request. Just as Parvana sees how much more lucrative selling off of trays will be, Nooria sees that the family needs the money, no matter what Mother says. Mother’s refusal is likely an attempt to hold onto her pride and to an idea of Afghanistan where people don’t need to dig up graves to get by—and while admirable in some sense, clinging to the past in this way isn’t helpful when it comes to the family’s survival.

Following Parvana’s horrifying experience at the stadium, where she witnessed Taliban soldiers cutting off prisoners’ hands, she decides to stay home for several days to recover from the experience. It’s important to keep in mind that while what Parvana witnessed in the stadium would be horrifying and difficult for anyone to process and move on from, it’s especially hard because of her youth and her innocence. Though she already saw the Taliban as oppressors who are violent and lash out nonsensically, seeing them make such a spectacle out of cutting people’s hands off is uniquely damaging for her—especially when Father is in prison and may find himself in the soccer stadium to be tortured.

The fact that Mother and Mrs. Weera already knew what was happening in the stadium speaks to the power of friendship and connections amongst people who aren’t related to each other. Having this kind of understanding doesn’t make the public torture any less horrifying, but it helps the women grapple with what’s going on in their world. And because they know what’s happening and even have eyes in the stadium, watching for them, they can make plans to expose these events through the magazine. Since Mother and Mrs. Weera are women, the Taliban would never expect this, so this becomes another way that the women can resist in this setting.

As she listens to Shauzia talk about leaving Afghanistan, Parvana understands why Mother never just left the family even though she desperately wanted to leave the country—she didn’t feel she could leave her loved ones behind. In this moment, Parvana realizes that while Shauzia prizes her independence and agency over everything else, Parvana’s true loyalty is to her family. And presumably, this is the case for the rest of Parvana’s family as well; this is, after all, why Parvana believes Mother didn’t abandon the family to chase a better life elsewhere in the world.

Alongside her independence, this shows that Shauzia also values her friendship with Parvana highly. She’s willing to share this secret with Parvana, even though wanting to abandon her family goes against everything that both Shauzia and Parvana have ever been told about how to think of their relationships and their responsibilities to their families. It’s a testament to how good and supportive of a friend Parvana is that Shauzia feels comfortable sharing this with her, even if Parvana’s loyalties do still lie with her family.

After Parvana spends two days on the toshak, grieving for the possibility that Mother and Nooria died in Mazar, Shauzia stops by and convinces Parvana to go back to work in the market. This speaks to the power of friendship to motivate people to keep going when times are tough. The possibility that her family is all gone is too much for Parvana to bear—but Shauzia’s appearance and plea shows Parvana that she’s not alone. She has friends, including Shauzia and Mrs. Weera, who are there to help her get through, even in the absence of the rest of her family. Though the Taliban, according to Father, encourages neighbors and friends to spy on each other, the effect that Shauzia has on Parvana makes it clear that it’s simply a matter of discovering those friends who are truly supportive. Shauzia chafes under the Taliban’s rule just as much as Parvana does, so she fully supports Parvana in her acts of resistance.

Here, Mother and Nooria ask Parvana to fetch water, even though she’s just spent a long day in the market. Since there’s no one else who can safely accomplish this task, it falls to Parvana. This speaks to the precarious state that women find themselves in under the Taliban. Mother and Nooria, as an adult and a young adult, can’t safely leave their homes alone to fetch water for their family, simply because they’re women. The Taliban may seek to protect women by mandating that they stay inside, but in practice, this only pushes families even deeper into poverty.

At the same time, children Parvana’s age, who aren’t policed as heavily by the Taliban, must take on many household duties that their parents or older siblings cannot do. It’s not legal or entirely safe for Parvana to leave the apartment alone to fetch water, but her chances of having a soldier stop her are much less than Nooria or Mother’s chances. All of this shows that the Taliban’s rules force children to grow up much faster than they would otherwise.

Parvana thinks about how lonely she is in her new home; all her other siblings tend to pair up with each other, leaving her alone—and Parvana can’t safely befriend any neighbor children either, since the Taliban encourages neighbors to spy on one another. This shows that the Taliban have created a culture of fear that discourages people from forming strong connections with each other and consequently makes them isolated and suspicious of outsiders. It forces people, in other words, to rely only on family. However, this is challenging for someone like Parvana, who doesn’t have any siblings her age and who is therefore on her own to fill her time. And by depriving people in Kabul of their friends, the Taliban essentially leave families to their own devices to survive, which the novel makes clear doesn’t work—after all, Parvana and her family survive largely thanks to kind friends and strangers. Here, Parvana is taking on chores that Nooria and Mother cannot do, and Father can only make so much in the market. Families on their own in this system are liable to fail as soon as disaster strikes or something changes, because there’s no one else for them to rely on.

After Father is arrested, Parvana remembers arguments her parents had about whether or not to leave Afghanistan; Mother wanted to leave while they still had the opportunity to do so, while Father insisted they had a responsibility to their country to stay. Here, Father is demonstrating the kind of resistance he wants his daughters to learn to engage in and appreciate. To him, staying rather than fleeing in fear is its own quiet form of resistance. By staying, he may have the opportunity to work for a better future in his home country, something they wouldn’t have as refugees or immigrants in another country. Mother, however, refuses to do her work as a writer and a reporter while the Taliban are in charge. Instead, she wants to be able to write about Afghanistan and its issues from afar. As far as Father is concerned, Mother doesn’t yet understand the value of standing up to the Taliban by writing now, when it’s illegal and dangerous to do so. As the novel unfolds, Mother indeed comes to see the value in this with help from Mrs. Weera.

When Nooria decides to send Parvana, disguised as a boy, to buy food in the market for the family, Parvana realizes she can refuse and force Nooria to go herself. Surprisingly, though, having this power over Nooria doesn’t feel very satisfying. In this moment, Parvana begins to come of age in a big way. She realizes that there are far more pressing and more important things in life—like feeding her younger siblings and Mother—than engaging in a petty fight with her big sister. She’s beginning to think of people other than herself, and decides to accept the responsibility she has to care for her family. Though family has always been important to Parvana, it’s gradually becoming the most important thing to her and, therefore, something she’s willing to sacrifice and do scary things in order to support.

It’s telling, though, that Parvana’s seemingly mature perspective might just come from exhaustion and hunger. The Taliban arrested Father for seemingly no reason, and in essence did nothing more than terrorize Parvana’s family and deprive them of their sole breadwinner. In a situation like this, Parvana really has no choice but to grow up sooner than she might otherwise and shoulder more responsibility. She must, if she wants to survive.

When Parvana returns home from the market with Mrs. Weera, Nooria is relieved and ecstatic to have another adult around to help her. This drives home the fact that though Nooria is 17 and in many ways is treated like an adult, she’s still a child. In this sense, she’s not all that different from Parvana—she just has different constraints on what she can do and how she’s expected to act.

With this, the novel highlights how war and conflict tragically robs children of their childhoods and forces them to grow up much earlier than they should. Over the last four days while Mother remained on the toshak, Nooria has had to manage the little ones, prepare meals, and make choices about how to allocate their dwindling resources. This is a lot to ask of anyone, let alone someone so young. Mrs. Weera, then, looks like a savior as she walks in the door. This, of course, has to do in part with Mrs. Weera’s confident, no-nonsense demeanor and her willingness to step in and commandeer a situation—but in this situation, that’s entirely a good thing, as it allows Nooria to feel like someone is caring for her again, something she clearly craves.

While Mrs. Weera attends to Mother and Ali’s dirty diapers, Parvana carries bucket after bucket of water from the tap to the apartment. It’s important to keep in mind just how treacherous of a journey this is—the apartment is on the third floor, and the steps going up are unstable and don’t have safe railings. Parvana has to work hard not just because the bucket is heavy, but because the path from the tap to home is so dangerous—although Parvana is a young girl and not technically a woman yet, a Taliban soldier could certainly take offense to her being out alone and stop her at any minute.

However, what’s more important to Parvana at this moment is caring for her family. She knows that Mrs. Weera can’t help them unless Parvana pulls her weight and gives Mrs. Weera what she needs to get Mother and the apartment cleaned up. At this moment, it doesn’t matter that her feet are bleeding or the buckets are heavy. What matters is getting her family to a place that doesn’t feel quite so dirty, desperate, and terrifying.

After Mother and Mrs. Weera propose their plan to turn Parvana into a boy to Parvana, Parvana is angry and terrified. At this point, Parvana’s hair is long. Though she described it earlier in the novel as stringy, it’s still a point of pride for her. It’s a symbol of her femininity, and she’s proud of how long she’s gotten it to grow. Because of this, it’s upsetting to be asked to cut it all off—it’s like being asked to cut off a major part of her identity. However, even more than being asked to give up her femininity, Parvana keys in on the fact that being turned into a boy means that the adults are also effectively asking her to give up her childhood. She needs to look like a boy so she can work and feed the family, something she cannot do as a girl. And for Parvana, this is both insulting and unthinkable. In her mind, adults and older children are supposed to care for those younger than they are, not the other way around. This is why she suggests that Nooria dress as a boy instead. But because Parvana is at a place in her development where she can pass as male and Nooria isn’t, the responsibility falls to Parvana, whether she likes it or not.

During the discussion about turning Parvana into a boy by cutting her hair, Mrs. Weera makes the point that Parvana has to agree to this plan or it won’t work. For Parvana, this makes all the difference. In this moment, then, Parvana begins to see that while being made to resemble a boy certainly will force her to mature more quickly, it will also give her more agency over her life. All she has to do is exercise that agency the first time, by agreeing to let the adults cut her hair.

Mrs. Weera clearly understands that they need Parvana’s blessing in order to make this work. This is why she appeals to Parvana’s feelings of being responsible to her family, and it’s also why she’s encouraging. She knows that Parvana is capable of acting the part of a young boy, and it’s important that Parvana hear that from someone she respects and trusts. This begins to illustrate the importance of friends—at times, friends can sometimes convince a person to make the right choice where their family cannot.

After Mother learns that Parvana earned a lot of money digging up bones in a graveyard, she insists that they don’t need that kind of money—but both Parvana and Nooria push back on Mother. In this moment, both Parvana and Nooria begin to assume more agency and responsibility than they have in the past. Both girls have, for the most part, deferred to their mother and acted the part of mostly obedient children. In these difficult times, however, both girls have had to grow up before they’re truly ready to do so—and this gives them the courage to stand up to Mother.

For Parvana, having had the experience of moving through the market independently as a boy makes her feel far more mature and independent. Now that she’s seen how the world actually works out there, it makes more sense for her to push back on Mother and advocate for something that she knows will help the family. In the same vein, Nooria sees exactly what’s going on at home and therefore can support Parvana in her request. Just as Parvana sees how much more lucrative selling off of trays will be, Nooria sees that the family needs the money, no matter what Mother says. Mother’s refusal is likely an attempt to hold onto her pride and to an idea of Afghanistan where people don’t need to dig up graves to get by—and while admirable in some sense, clinging to the past in this way isn’t helpful when it comes to the family’s survival.

Following Parvana’s horrifying experience at the stadium, where she witnessed Taliban soldiers cutting off prisoners’ hands, she decides to stay home for several days to recover from the experience. It’s important to keep in mind that while what Parvana witnessed in the stadium would be horrifying and difficult for anyone to process and move on from, it’s especially hard because of her youth and her innocence. Though she already saw the Taliban as oppressors who are violent and lash out nonsensically, seeing them make such a spectacle out of cutting people’s hands off is uniquely damaging for her—especially when Father is in prison and may find himself in the soccer stadium to be tortured.

The fact that Mother and Mrs. Weera already knew what was happening in the stadium speaks to the power of friendship and connections amongst people who aren’t related to each other. Having this kind of understanding doesn’t make the public torture any less horrifying, but it helps the women grapple with what’s going on in their world. And because they know what’s happening and even have eyes in the stadium, watching for them, they can make plans to expose these events through the magazine. Since Mother and Mrs. Weera are women, the Taliban would never expect this, so this becomes another way that the women can resist in this setting.

As she listens to Shauzia talk about leaving Afghanistan, Parvana understands why Mother never just left the family even though she desperately wanted to leave the country—she didn’t feel she could leave her loved ones behind. In this moment, Parvana realizes that while Shauzia prizes her independence and agency over everything else, Parvana’s true loyalty is to her family. And presumably, this is the case for the rest of Parvana’s family as well; this is, after all, why Parvana believes Mother didn’t abandon the family to chase a better life elsewhere in the world.

Alongside her independence, this shows that Shauzia also values her friendship with Parvana highly. She’s willing to share this secret with Parvana, even though wanting to abandon her family goes against everything that both Shauzia and Parvana have ever been told about how to think of their relationships and their responsibilities to their families. It’s a testament to how good and supportive of a friend Parvana is that Shauzia feels comfortable sharing this with her, even if Parvana’s loyalties do still lie with her family.

After Parvana spends two days on the toshak, grieving for the possibility that Mother and Nooria died in Mazar, Shauzia stops by and convinces Parvana to go back to work in the market. This speaks to the power of friendship to motivate people to keep going when times are tough. The possibility that her family is all gone is too much for Parvana to bear—but Shauzia’s appearance and plea shows Parvana that she’s not alone. She has friends, including Shauzia and Mrs. Weera, who are there to help her get through, even in the absence of the rest of her family. Though the Taliban, according to Father, encourages neighbors and friends to spy on each other, the effect that Shauzia has on Parvana makes it clear that it’s simply a matter of discovering those friends who are truly supportive. Shauzia chafes under the Taliban’s rule just as much as Parvana does, so she fully supports Parvana in her acts of resistance.