We are displaced: My journey & stories from refugee girls around the world – Malala Yousafzai (with Liz Welch); Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Rs.399 Pages 212+xi Displacement — within and across countries — of large numbers of people, owing to political instability or civil strife, is a fact of contemporary life. UN statistics indicate that nearly 70 million people or 9 percent of the world’s population are displaced at present, of whom more than 25 million are classified as refugees. The human suffering such displacement causes — and the heroic way some affected individuals and groups overcome it to give humanity a message of hope in a sea of gloom, strife and pain — is usually ignored. This volume is a corrective in that regard. Malala Yousafzai’s personal story is well known. But in addition to the narrative of her own journey, she presents in this volume the stories of nine other young women from around the world, recounted in their own words, to give us a more complete picture of suffering and its sublimation. To sum up Malala’s story first, her father, Ziauddin, ran two schools in Mingora town of Swat Valley in Pakistan, one of which was for girls. It was from him that Malala first learnt of the Taliban, whom her father first thought of as “more of an annoyance than a real terror”. This viewpoint was soon changed by events. As Malala understood relatives. This is where Malala understood the true meaning of “internal displacement”. She was in her own country and with her family, “and yet I still felt so out of place”. At the local school, “I spoke too much and did not look down when the teacher entered the classroom. I wasn’t being disrespectful; I was just being myself, not shy in the classroom, but always polite. I asked questions, like all the boys, but was the last to be called on,” she recalls. When peace gradually returned to Malala’s hometown, her family still had to spend weeks in displacement before returning home. In the process, Malala realised that “to be displaced, on top of everything else, is to worry about being a burden on others”. She says she “knew, even as a 12-yearold girl, that the home I knew no longer existed except in my dreams”. It was to become obvious soon that the Taliban had not been destroyed. it, the Islam the Taliban wanted to enforce “was not our Islam”. Their radical fundamentalist ideology “attacked our daily way of life in the name of Islam… most of all, they tried to take away the rights of women.” Soon after they gained influence, they declared that educating girls was un-Islamic. When the Taliban issued a decree closing all girls’ schools and then began to bomb girls’ schools in the Swat Valley, 11-year-old Malala began writing a blog for BBC Urdu, and this helped get the story across to the outside world. She also joined her father in TV and radio interviews, which forced a…
