Review of I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb

Books like this are really tough to review. Sixteen years ago, I read Shake Hands With the Devil, and I was humbled. I Am Malala is a similarly humbling memoir. Malala Yousafzai went through a terrible ordeal that catapulted her into the world’s consciousness. More than that, however, the book she has written here with the assistance of Christina Lamb is a testimony. For Western readers like myself, it’s a crash course in the history of Pakistan, in the Taliban’s oppression of women, and how the legacy of British colonialism and American imperialism has allowed corruption and persecution to flourish. Against this backdrop, Yousafzai always brings it back to one thesis: everyone deserves education. As an educator, I can get behind that.

Most of this book is backstory. Yousafzai spends the first few chapters telling the history of her country and her family. She briefly explains Partition, and she discusses her paternal grandfather’s influence on her father, etc. Because she was only sixteen when she wrote this, much of the book is a retelling of what others have told her. She details her father’s attempts to bring education to Swat for all genders. She discusses the rise of the Taliban, the military coups that destabilize Pakistan and allow more hardline elements of Islam to gain influence, especially in rural regions like Swat. She explains how the character of her town of Mingora changes as the Taliban and other reactionary forces take power.

I’m reading this ten years later, on the eve of Donald Trump’s second presidency (!), a year into a genocide in Palestine (and similar genocides or cleansings ongoing in Congo, Sudan, etc.). Hearing Yousafzai tell us, in very plain language, about how her life gradually changed under the Taliban (and even afterwards), felt like a premonition of what might occur, perhaps in a slightly different form, as fascism rises again here in the West.

The power of this story lies in that plain language. That is not to say that Yousafzai and Lamb lack fluency or facility for telling a story, and there is plenty of beautiful description and prose here. However, it’s clear they made a deliberate description to keep this narrative mostly linear and very direct. In a world where conflicts in southwest Asia and the Middle East are often explained away as “complicated,” Yousafzai is determined to give Western readers no excuses to put this book aside or look away.

So as the DVD shops close, dancers go underground, and people’s houses are raided so their TVs can be apprehended, Yousafzai explains how some of her fellow townspeople started to comply in advance. She explains how the authorities were no help. She explains how even attending school as a girl became an act of defiance, and at one point, she has to hide her schoolbooks for safekeeping while she and her family evacuate their town for a time. She shares all of this as matter-of-factly as if she was talking about popping down to a shop for groceries—because when she lived it, that’s what it was like. This was her life.

Her point, however, is that this isn’t just her life. Malala Yousafzai has become, as her book’s subtitle acknowledges, known as “the girl who was shot for by the Taliban.” She has become known as an activist for women’s education. Yet she is far from alone in these experiences. Yousafzai was one of many, many people—many girls—who grew up in this situation. In this sense, she acknowledges towards the end of the book how she has become a symbol for something greater. She is understandably uncomfortable with this role, though I don’t think at the time she wrote this book she fully comprehended or was capable of exploring that yet. I would be curious to read more from her now, a decade later, about how she feels her role has evolved.

It is so easy for those of us who grow up privileged with education and safety to discount the stories we hear in the news or elsewhere as just that—stories. We have an obligation to learn. It’s not an exaggeration for me to say that even though I have done my best to learn a little bit about Pakistan and its complicated genesis, about Islam and its complicated relationship with the West, about the experiences of girls and women in Pakistan, I can’t really begin to describe how quickly I Am Malala put me in my place. Reading alone isn’t enough, of course. But it’s one way to avoid sticking your head in the sand. As Yousafzai has spent her life campaigning about: education is essential to our health and success.