Her face is instantly recognisable. The same dark eyes have stared out from a hospital bed, a speaker’s podium at the United Nations’ headquarters in New York, the book jacket of a best-selling autobiography, photographs with heads of state and reports about the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize nominee – not to mention placards raised in protest against her.
Malala Yousafzai is both revered and renounced but, these days, the “education-for-all” campaigner is foremost a 17-year-old girl studying with furious intent at an independent girls’ school in Edgbaston, England. And trying hard like just every other young girl to fit in.
The smart Birmingham suburb isn’t far from the hospital where Malala was treated after the Taliban shot her in the head at point-blank range as she took the bus home from her Swat Valley school two years ago. The murderous attack in which two other schoolgirls were also wounded shocked the world and left its mark in the shape of Malala’s permanently crooked smile.
Fortunately, that day’s violence created another unintended legacy and, as children return to schools across the UAE tomorrow, frantic parents will be glad to know that Malala has collaborated on a second autobiography, this time for younger readers, and that Malala’s love of school and her fierce desire to earn top marks feature prominently.
Published this month, Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Changed the World has been written with Patricia McCormick, the prize-winning author of young-adult fiction. A former journalist, McCormick's popular novels help young teens tackle the most difficult of subjects: Never Fall Down tells the story of an 11-year-old Cambodian boy who survives the terror of the Khmer Rouge; in Purple Heart, an American teenage soldier agonises over the death of a young Iraqi boy; Sold gives a voice to young trafficked women in India's sex industry; self-harm and drug addiction are the subjects of Cut and My Brother's Keeper. As the author tells me: "I write about young people under extraordinary pressure doing extraordinary things." Surely an apt description of Malala as well.
McCormick’s recognised gift is for telling hard-hitting stories in a way that captures young and potentially vulnerable imaginations. “These topics that I cover can be pretty intense,” says McCormick, who’s also a parent. “I keep in mind that I am writing for somebody else’s children and that I don’t use graphic language.
“If you’re describing a girl who’s been sold into a brothel, you don’t use graphic language because that’s not what a 13-year-old character would use. She would be more likely to express bewilderment, confusion and hurt than the kind of things that parents would worry about their kids reading. And I think those things that express disillusionment, hurt and bewilderment are actually more poignant and affecting to the reader.”
McCormick is well-qualified to bring Malala’s story into children’s homes and classrooms. The author’s evident respect for her readership – Malala’s peer group – allows her to forge connections between a 15-year-old reader in Buenos Aires, for example, and a young, frightened Pakistani girl where most of us might expect to find a gulf in empathy or understanding.
"You can't be sure that [teenagers] will be interested in something so far outside their own experiences, but what I found is that kids like my books for the same reason that they like books such as The Hunger Games.
“They’re all wondering who would I be under extraordinary pressure? Would I be the brave person? Would I be the moral person? Would I be the coward? And so you take a true story about a boy whose society is overtaken by a bloodthirsty totalitarian regime … What choices did he make to survive?”
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“I’m constantly amazed when I go to see students whose lives could not be more different from Malala’s or the girl who is sold into the brothel, that they care very deeply.
“Teenagers get a bad reputation for being self-centred … but this generation is [also] very altruistic and very connected to their peers and want to know what their peers are doing in other parts of the world. Maybe it’s because of the internet they feel empowered to do something, to raise money, to raise awareness. This is a very activist generation.”
It's very fitting, then, that McCormick's latest project is a collaboration with the world's most famous young activist. Her Malala book follows in the footsteps of Christina Lamb's co-authored memoir I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban which grown-ups – in the West, at least – clamoured to read, but it retells the story in a more accessible, personal way.
McCormick greeted the news of her assignment with trepidation and a little excitement. “I wondered would I be intimidated?” she remembers. “Would I push her hard enough in the interviews to go beyond the things that she’s been saying in her many interviews with the media and speeches?
“The challenge was to ask her to go further than she has in other interviews and get her to talk about deeper personal things and reveal herself to her readers as the 16 year-old girl that she is and not the world figure that she has become.”
So poised in front of the spotlight of publicity, Malala made an intriguing first impression in private. McCormick describes her “blazing intelligence”. “[She’s] a powerhouse, but tiny – and deferential to the adults in the room.
“But once we got going and once we started the interviews, she could be fun and silly, just like any 15-16 year-old, worried over such things as ‘is my best friend mad at me?’ or ‘Am I going to get an A in my physics test tomorrow?’. She’s this really fascinating blend of extraordinary and ordinary.”
The same expression of powerful self-belief launches the reader into both McCormick and Lamb's versions of Malala's remarkable true-life story: "Who is Malala? I am Malala and this is my story". But just as quickly they diverge as Lamb strides confidently into the politics of Pashtun society while McCormick's heroine lists her love of cupcakes over sweets and her many special gifts, including brother-baiting and arm-wrestling. Then there's the crucial debate over whether Bella from Twilight is fickle and Edward just too boring.
As a narrative technique, it’s not particularly subtle but it makes a strong point – Malala the activist is also an ordinary girl just like any other. Well, almost. McCormick’s narrative paints a colourful and fast-moving portrait of everyday life in the Swat Valley, of her loving, highly moral family and of a girl, “the apple of her father’s eye”, who likes to ask questions.
Before long, the Taliban begins to exert its deadly influence over her hometown and her father, the founder and principal of the girls’ school that she attends, is threatened. Bombs fall, suicide bombers strike and Malala conjures the strange insanity of living in terror as the state wages a rather ineffective war against the Taliban. The chapters on how easily religious extremism can be spread and the role that education can play in combating its menace, should be made compulsory reading for young teens and world leaders alike.
Malala’s descriptions are engaging and vivid but McCormick’s skill is equally deft in reproducing her outspoken subject’s strong voice. Malala’s sense of outrage at the Taliban commander Fazlullah’s attempts to close all the girls’ schools in Swat and her palpable frustration with the adult world around her is laugh-out-loud funny. As the threats of the extremists ebb and flow, Malala’s profile in the western media grows and, after years of speaking her educated mind, she wins awards for peace and education activism before the Taliban’s merciless strike.
The second half of the book reports on her rather miraculous recovery and the family’s struggle with their exile in Birmingham. As Malala says of those early days, “It’s odd to be so well-known but to be lonely at the same time.” Away from the harsh reality of what Malala and her family have lost – their beloved homeland and the right to be just as they please – Malala ends on an upbeat note with a message of peace from a far-from-ordinary girl. “To see each and every human being with a smile of true happiness is my wish,” she says.
To best take down Malala’s story, McCormick made two extended visits to Birmingham and stayed with the Yousafzai family, visiting Malala’s school and “goofing around”. “We did a lot of fun things. We got fish and chips one day, we arm-wrestled, we did yoga, we did things to lighten up the mood. She’s been interviewed so often, seated in chairs with grown- ups, I think for her to feel like she was really talking to her peers, it was important to establish a different environment.
“I asked her to show me her childhood games, not just tell me what they were. We played a hopscotch game and that released a lot of little anecdotes and feelings about her childhood that she hadn’t talked about. All those things that mean you can see her growing up … and make her much more real and not this remote, impeccable world figure.”
Whereas Lamb's I Am Malala takes great pains to put the schoolgirl's struggle in the context of local politics, history and turmoil leading up to the Taliban's gun attack, McCormick's edit brings the personal to the fore. "Malala wants kids in Brazil or kids in Ohio or kids in Qatar, anywhere people read this book to be able to stand up for their rights. So the book [is] not so specifically about the particulars of what was happening in the Swat Valley," she explains.
Greater emphasis is given to religion, which acts as a constant guiding principle for the whole family, as McCormick explores Malala’s motives.
What did it take for her to summon up the courage to speak out? Was she really so afraid? So often the answer is her faith, McCormick says, “and her understanding of Islam as a peaceful religion that not only promotes education but requires constant self-improvement through study”.
Malala’s father, Ziauddin, an education activist in his own right who set up the 800-strong school that she used to attend, is usually cited as the greatest influence in his daughter’s life, but McCormick is careful to give Malala’s mother, Toor Pekai, her due. “Whenever Malala or her father Ziauddin were on the cusp of making a decision that would lead them further into danger or further into the limelight, they would turn to the mother and ask for her advice. And she, invariably, was the one who would turn to her faith and say, ‘You must speak out, God will protect you if you speak out’.”
Lamb’s Malala memoir received a rather mixed reception when it was published last year. While it flew off the shelves in the West, politicians were reported to have forced organisers to scrap a book launch in her home province of Peshawar and the book was banned by the All Pakistan Private Schools Federation for being “negative” and “contrary” to Islam. Here, bookshops have reported the copies of Lamb’s book have been hidden and turned over by disapproving members of the general public.
As the young-adult edition begins to be promoted around the world, McCormick hopes that critics will read it before casting judgement.
But whatever the verdict of those in authority, Malala’s altruistic and interconnected generation will find ways to share her powerful message, and that tiny powerhouse whom McCormick so ably describes, will not be easily silenced.
Clare Dight is the editor of The Review.
