The Pride Of Pakistan Malala Yousaf Zai
Onlineindus News: Malala Yousafzai sits very still, a rainbow of colour in the corner of a vast, drab, empty room. Security personnel with earpieces and walkie-talkie equipment mill around downstairs; watching, patrolling. They spill out on to the street around us, a secret location on the outskirts of west London.
It’s a reminder, as if one were needed, that Malala, shot in the head on October 9, 2012, aged 15, on her way home from school in the Swat Valley, Pakistan, for speaking out against the Taliban and its ban on female education, is still under threat. She is guarded, at least for public events like today, the launch of a new documentary film about her life: He Named Me Malala.
Her mother, Toor Pekai, a beautiful woman with green eyes, prays for her every day, Malala tells me. “Please God, keep Malala safe today,” Pekai said this morning back in Birmingham, where the family have lived since Malala was shot. It’s a prayer just like those Malala used to say to protect her father, Ziauddin, back in Pakistan when he was the main campaigner in the family.
Once, they found a letter from the Taliban taped to the gate of the Khushal Girls High School, which he ran and Malala attended. “Sir,” it said, “the school you are running is Western and infidel. You teach girls and you have a uniform that is un-Islamic. ‘Stop this or you will be in trouble and your children will weep and cry for you.”
Ziauddin responded the next day in a letter to a newspaper: “Please don’t harm my schoolchildren because the God you believe in is the same God they pray to every day. You can take my life but please don’t kill my schoolchildren.”
Malala began speaking out about herself back in 2009 when she was just 12, first writing a blog for BBC Urdu under the name ‘Gul Makai’, and then finally stepping up, unbidden, to the microphone with face uncovered. “It is my own passion, my own choice that I said I will speak,” she says now of the subsequent accusations that her father made her a figurehead for his own message.
It is what led her to be singled out among her classmates, all of them clever girls committed to the cause, by the masked gunman. “Who is Malala?” the Taliban fighter asked. Then he shot her.
Everything she has done since has been in defiance of the attempt to silence her. Her book, I am Malala: the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban (2013), and its sister book for children, Malala: the Girl who Stood up For Education and Changed the World(2014), are responses to that deadly question: Who is Malala?
The Malala Fund, set up two years ago, campaigns for girls’ secondary education throughout the world. Last year, Malala was the youngest recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Malala is here today with her father, although I am to meet her alone. They are always together at her international speaking engagements, meetings (at the UN, White House) and trips (Syria, Nigeria, the US) – and so it is at today’s international launch of He Named Me Malala.
The film, directed by Davis Guggenheim, is a mixture of animation, old and new footage and voiceover; a subtle retelling of her life and attempted assassination that can – and should – be watched by children of 10 upwards.
It’s hard not to feel star-struck in the days leading up to meeting Malala. The security hoopla, to which she has become accustomed while meeting some of the most influential world leaders, only adds to a low-level stomach churning. What will she be like, this child/woman Nobel Laureate?
Malala is dressed in a salwar kameez of deep purple, with pink trimmings, her head covered with a purple scarf. Her hair is twisted over her shoulder in a low ponytail. She’s wearing high pastel-pink wedge sandals and her toenails are painted to match.
Her handbag, adorned with embroidered flowers, lies, by her feet. She smells gorgeous – she giggles when I compliment her – and says it is a scent chosen by her mother. “I do like nice clothes,” she says (although she’s not a ‘girly girl’ and her favourite colour has changed from pink to purple). “And my mother really takes care of me. She wants me to look good, and I don’t get the time to buy things myself.”
Malala’s intense relationship with her father is well known. He inspired her from infancy. As he says in the film, “We came to depend on each other, like one soul in two different bodies… It was attachment from the very first moment I saw her.” She remembers him telling her, “I will protect your freedom, Malala. Carry on with your dreams.”
“Don’t ask me what I did,” he says in the film. “Ask me what I didn’t do. I didn’t clip her wings.”
He added her name to the family tree; the first female to be included for 300 years. She worried about him constantly in Pakistan: that he would be targeted by the Taliban for his outspoken opinions, dragged away from the school he started, or their home, and killed.
She checked the gates and windows of their home every night. Her mother kept a ladder against the side of the house so he could escape if he needed to. After Malala was shot, and had lifesaving surgery on her brain, the first question she asked after waking up in hospital in Britain was, “Where’s my father?”
Pekai does not feature nearly as much in the film, but Malala is especially keen to talk about her, “It is really hard for a woman [from Pakistan] to think totally in a different way, but she did it… and now she has this passion [to learn],” she tells me.
In a way, the small details of Malala’s life are as gripping as the bigger picture: the way she prefers cupcakes to sweets; that she loves pizza; that when she was younger, she spent too much time fiddling with her hair; how she tried to lighten her skin with honey, rosewater and buffalo milk, so she could be paler-skinned, like her mother.
“Outside the school, I am this girl who is speaking to the world leaders but inside school, I stay quiet and I am very obedient. I really believe that whatever the teacher says, it is always right. I am really fond of them – and I am a bit scared as well.
“But they are very nice and supportive of me.” Sometimes, she says, they do grade her work a B and write, “Malala needs to focus more on this topic.” If Malala has any nagging worries, they are not about the Taliban but the prospect of getting a C at school. “I do worry about my grades! I mustn’t get a C.”
“Criticism and opposition are always there when you stand up for something big and when you want to bring change,” Malala says. “I usually learn from it. Sometimes they say the right thing and sometimes they say something that doesn’t make sense at all. So I think I have to carry on my journey. I have to carry on this fight.”
In a way, the small details of Malala’s life are as gripping as the bigger picture: the way she prefers cupcakes to sweets; that she loves pizza; that when she was younger, she spent too much time fiddling with her hair; how she tried to lighten her skin with honey, rosewater and buffalo milk, so she could be paler-skinned, like her mother.
Regards: Onlineindus
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