Boy Overboard

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

“There’s no smoke, or nerve gas, or sand-storms. I can’t even hear any explosions. Which is really good. Bomb wind can really put you off your football skills.”

Jamal, the 11-year-old Afghani narrator of Boy Overboard, clings to soccer fandom as a haven from the violence, instability, and persecution of his surroundings. The casual tone and juxtaposition of war imagery with an everyday concern—his soccer performance—highlight the normalization of trauma in his young mind. Exploding bombs and gas attacks, he suggests, are so frequent here as to have become almost minor nuisances, things that throw you off your all-important soccer game. This ironic understatement is an example of dark humor, which serves to mask the grim reality of living in a war zone. As often in the novel, what appears at first to be sarcastic humor reveals itself to be a simple, innocent observation by a child who is almost inured to the surreal chaos of his situation.

“It’s not what I thought. It’s not an angry man in black robes with a long beard and an even longer swishing cane. It’s something even scarier.”

The “angry man” alludes to a member of the Taliban, the despotic regime that enforced its extreme interpretation of Islamic law on much of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 (and, more recently, from 2020 to the present). The “swishing cane” is a weapon of torture used to punish Afghanis, especially girls and women, for supposed infractions, which can be as small as leaving one’s ankles uncovered.