Pervana — Telling Stories To Survive
“Stories remain in our hearts even when all else is gone”
‘The Breadwinner’, a 2017 made movie which I was able to watch recently at this year’s Istanbul Independent Film Festival, is adapted from Deborah Ellis’ novel. This charmingly animated film tells the story of a little Afghan girl in midst of Taliban’s brutal oppression, economic difficulties at home, and the beginning of a new war. Eleven year-old Pervana, the middle child of the family, has to fight all these obstacles, and she tells a story while doing it.
Pervana has learned to tell captivating stories by her father. However, she had not understood the use of these stories in the beginning. Only when her father is arrested by Taliban and things get difficult does she take refuge in stories. And with her story-telling, she protects her family, her friend, and most importantly, herself, from being paralysed by fear.
What little Parvana does is in fact a very natural and old human behaviour we all escape to when we are in need. Telling stories, fictional or factual, clearly has a healing element. This effect is not only true for the story-teller but the listeners as well. Listeners synchronise with the story-teller, and experience the story as if it was theirs. A study suggests that when we are truly engaged, our brains react as if what happens in the story is really happening to us. Maybe this also explains the principles of catharsis in the ancient greek tragedies, which has been used as means of therapy in modern times as well.
Further, it is more than mere escapism to read novels or to watch movies in days of void, or in times of difficulty, and be inspired or encouraged by them. After all, stories reflect our universal human condition. They put into orderly words or visuals what we feel, what we already host in our minds and hearts abstractly and chaotically. They may even guide us, as it happens to Pervana in the movie.
Maybe a quote by Ursula K. Le Guin explains it the best:
“Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want, too. If we never find our experience described in poetry or stories, we assume that our experience is insignificant.”
This is how I felt when I read Dostoyevsky, this is perhaps how you felt when you read your own favourite writer or poet. This is why we still read the Epic of Gilgamesh, and see the astounding similarities between the ancient man and us, the modern man. We are the same Homo sapiens indeed.
In the movie Breadwinner, Pervana is surrounded by destruction: her elder brother is dead, but his ghost lives among them. Her mother has lost a child and her husband is arrested, she has been beaten by the Taliban and she has to marry her elder daughter off to a cousin. Her mother’s pain is too big to hide. But Pervana, despite her age, is very skilled, and she has not given up on life, let alone on her father. While her mother tries to save the children by leaving the city of Kabul, Pervana insists that she will save her dad first. In fact, she cuts her hair and dresses as a boy in order to work and buy food for her family. She is incredibly energetic, brave and positive. The destruction of the society in which she is living and the bombs are not enough to break her. She is still a warm and loving child. The story she keeps telling in the movie is about a young boy who decides to find and fight a monster to save his entire village from starvation. Parvana identifies herself with the young boy in the story, and tries to act courageously like him and overcome the obstacles in her way. Her story-telling keeps her alive, gives her courage to carry on, perhaps a bit like we do in real life.
This film reminded me of an anecdote the renowned Turkish author Mario Levi once gave at an event: He was in Germany to introduce the German translation of his book, and a literary critic approached him and said “I liked your book, but I want to tell you something… You know Mr. Levi, I think of you as a male Scheherazade.”
“But why?” asked Mario Levi, “Scheherazade was telling stories so as not to die!”
“That is exactly what I meant.”
Are we all Scheherazades after all?
“To survive, you must tell stories”
— Umberto Eco
