Boy Overboard

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and gender discrimination.

The action of Morris Gleitzman’s novel Boy Overboard alludes to real events in 2001, roughly five years after the extremist Sunni faction known as the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan. An extreme fundamentalist group, the Taliban gutted the country’s semi-Westernized liberties and culture, banning music, movies, TV, and many forms of recreation. Women and girls were forced into purdah (seclusion) in their homes and denied education and many other basic freedoms. Non-Sunni sects and ethnic minorities were subject to special persecution. In the novel, Jamal’s family, members of an unspecified minority population, see their generations-old home firebombed by the Taliban’s “morality police,” who also sentence Jamal’s mother to death by firing squad because she has broken the law by teaching girls.

The family’s subsequent attempts to flee the country and settle in Australia closely mirror a series of harrowing events that, in 2001, fed into Australia’s heated political discourse regarding immigration. In August of that year, a Norwegian freighter rescued over 400 asylum seekers, many of whom were of Afghani Hazara origins, from a sinking boat headed for Australia. The refugees, mostly women and children, were hungry, dehydrated, and deeply traumatized by their long ordeal; nevertheless, Australian Prime Minister John Howard refused to allow the rescue ship to enter Australian waters.