Boy Overboard

Cultural displacement refers to a sense of being uprooted—typically from one’s home or native country, often leading to a traumatic loss of one’s self-identity. The family in Boy Overboard, like many in their country, have suffered at least two displacements, of increasing severity and brutality. The first occurred within the country itself: In the 1990s, the subjugation of most of Afghanistan by the fundamentalist Taliban regime ushered in a period of radical cultural erasure. Virtually all forms of consumer culture, including music, movies, television, sports, hobbies, and even photography, were subject to prohibition, along with the celebration of most holidays. The Taliban’s extreme interpretation of Sharia law was particularly hostile to girls and women, forcing them to seclude and cover themselves and forbidding their education. This sweeping erasure of personal and communal identity left many Afghan citizens feeling like exiles within their own land, severed from both their heritage and their future. Thus, many Afghanis, though still physical residents of their country, felt themselves adrift in an utterly foreign cultural landscape, one denied most of the freedoms, traditions, activities, and qualities of life that they once took for granted. In this new, joyless terrain, littered with mines and stalked by the “morality police” (the “angry” men with swishing canes whom the children fear), Jamal and his friends furtively play soccer, all the while praying that Bibi will not be recognized by the authorities as a girl.

Jamal’s parents have tried to keep alive a small vestige of the old times, back when girls were allowed to be schooled, by running an illegal classroom out of their home. This comes to a cataclysmic end when the government discovers their trespass and demolishes their house with a bomb. Their clay-brick cottage, home to generations of the father’s family, was their strongest physical link to the past and to the rich cultural heritage that has been, for years, increasingly under attack by the Taliban. The destruction of their home represents not just the loss of shelter but the obliteration of history, education, and personal freedom—foundations that once defined their existence. The family’s status as members of an ethnic minority makes this loss all the more catastrophic. With the destruction of their home, schoolroom, and antique oven—which had been Jamal’s great-grandfather’s—as well as most of their possessions, their way of life has ceased to exist. After Mum’s near execution by the morality police, the family becomes outlaws and must finally leave the country itself. 

Yet displacement does not end with exile—it follows them even in the lands where they seek refuge. To raise the money, Dad sells the possession that, aside from his oven, has long been the source of their livelihood: his taxi. Jamal’s mother, however, makes the ultimate sacrifice, selling her ancient candlestick—passed down for hundreds of years—which was, for all of them, a profound cultural totem that linked them with the proud legacy of their people. Knowing, as all refugees do, that life itself is more important than objects or land, the family flees abroad, with little more than memories to keep the old ways alive. In the vastness and freedom of Australia, they hope that they can perhaps rekindle a spark of the cultural identity that the Taliban sought to destroy.

The family knows, setting off, that living in a foreign land, however free, will be vastly complicated, with great barriers of language and custom. What gives them hope is that Australia, with its schools, movie theaters, record stores, and sports arenas, will be closer to the relatively modern, Western lifestyle they enjoyed before the coming of the Taliban. Unfortunately, as Andrew explains to Jamal on the refugee island, some Australians, have also gone to extreme lengths in the name of cultural purity. The winners of the recent election, he says, campaigned on an anti-immigration platform, vowing to safeguard Australia’s way of life from foreign influences. Jamal, finding himself trapped between a regime that condemns his family for their Westernized ways and a Western nation that shuns them for their Eastern ones, cannot understand why Australia does not “want” them. This realization—that they are seen as “other” no matter where they go—highlights the cruel paradox of displacement: to be severed from one’s homeland yet unwelcome in another.