At only 16 years old, he is a global icon against fundamentalism. The Taliban shot his childhood away from him. Without fear. No hard feelings. This is his story
She is tiny but has a round head, a head that stands out in the delicacy of her elf body. He wears brightly colored traditional Pashtun clothing and his face is framed in a pretty flower print shawl and gracefully positioned. His hair is visible, a very important detail in the tremendous hierarchy of Muslim headdresses for women, from the sinister, prison-like burqa to the skimpy hijab. She looks like a nativity scene figurine, a terracotta shepherdess.
“I'm going to tell you something about myself”, I tell him as soon as we sit in the ugly and bureaucratic private room of a Birmingham hotel, which is where the meeting is taking place. “You see, I've done a lot of interviews for decades, until four or five years ago I got fed up and didn't do any more. However, when they proposed his name to me, I immediately said yes. So you are responsible for my return to this journalistic genre…” Malala looks at me with absolute attention, with perfect concentration, a cautious and serious teenager in control. She starts to thank me, very politely, as befits what I just told her. She interrupted him: “Actually, I'm not saying that to flatter you, although I certainly admire you; I'm telling you this because I kept thinking about the enormous effect you have on so many people around the world. Aren't you weighed down by the expectations we all seem to have of you?"
No. I am dedicated to the cause of education and I believe that I can dedicate my whole life to it. I don't care how long it takes me. I focus on my studies, but what matters most to me is the education of every girl in the world, so I will commit my life to it and I am proud to work for the education of girls, and the truth is that it is a great opportunity to have this interview with you today. Thank you!
She answered firmly, confidently, and with such professionalism that the last word has been said in Spanish. I imagine her learning to say thank you in all the languages of her interviewers. A diligent girl. In her book I am Malala (Alianza Editorial) she gracefully tells a revealing anecdote: "My chemistry teacher [in Pakistan], Mr. Obaidullah, used to say that I was a born politician because, at the beginning of the oral exams, I always said: 'Sir, can I tell you that you are the best teacher and that yours is my favorite class?' Malala's level of self-control seems incredible to me: she is sixteen years old! But, as seen in her chilling and moving book, she has been living an extremely adult and abnormal life since she was ten. The Taliban failed to kill her or silence her when they put a bullet in her head, but they stole a good part of her childhood.
Is she already in good health?
I am very well, and this is because of the prayers of the people, and also because of the nurses and doctors in the hospital, who have treated me very well, and because God has granted me a new life. I do physiotherapy once or twice a month on the left side of my face because the facial nerve that controls movement on this side was severed by the bullet and therefore had stopped working, but they have already sewn up the nerve, and it has started to rebuild and is recovering very well. She has reached 88% recovery.
Have you received psychological help?
Yes, the hospital psychologists have helped me. They came and asked me a lot of questions and after two or three sessions they said, Malala is fine and she no longer needs treatment... Besides, she is very boring.
The bullet entered below her left eye and exited through her shoulder. She smashed her half-face bones, severed her nerve, and grazed her brain, which swelled so badly they had to remove the entire top of her head. For months she was with her brain exposed and with the piece of skull inserted, for her conservation, under the skin of her abdomen (in the end they threw her bone away and put a piece of titanium on it). She also spent months with half of her face collapsed: she couldn't laugh, she could barely speak, she couldn't blink with her left eye and the pain was terrible. In her speech to the UN on July 12, the day she turned sixteen, the consequences were more noticeable than now: rehabilitation takes its toll on her. She is still a pretty girl and only a slight shadow of imbalance remains on her face.
I'm asking all this because you've been through a very tough situation, and now you could take some time to recover. But no, she immediately took out this book, which forces you to give interviews again and to be on the front line again. That is a choice. And it looks tough.
Being on the front line is my life. I can't leave anymore
It is that this is already my life, it is not only a part of it. I can't quit. When I see the people of Syria, who are helpless, some living in Egypt, others in Lebanon; when I see all the people in Pakistan who are suffering from terrorism, then I can't help but think, “Malala, why are you waiting for someone else to take over? Why don't you do it, why don't you speak in favor of their rights and yours? I started my fight at the age of ten.
I know. When the Taliban came
At that time I lived with my father in Swat, it is our native region, and the Taliban rose up and terrorism began, they whipped women, and murdered people, and the bodies appeared decapitated in the squares of Míngora, our city. They destroyed many schools, they destroyed the hairdressers, they burned the televisions in huge pyres, and they prohibited girls from going to school. There were many people against all this, but they were afraid, the threats were very big, so there were very few who dared to speak out loud for their rights, and one of them was my father. And I followed my father.
Malala's book is not only about Malala but, to a large extent, about her father as well. A singular and undoubtedly heroic type, a teacher willing to conquer, through culture, a future of justice and peace in a world on fire. And a man who, furthermore, in a brutally macho society like the Pashtun, supported his eldest daughter and gave her the same freedom and confidence as a man. The father, Ziauddin, is also here, sitting on the other side of the table. Short, about forty years old, with something clean and almost boyish in his smile. Malala's gravity contrasts with Ziauddin's youthful lightness. But, of course, he did not lose his childhood nor did he have to fight against his entire world to be recognized as a person despite being a woman. At eleven, in the depths of Taliban terror, Malala began writing a blog for the BBC in Urdu. In the first entry, it said: “On my way home from school I heard a man yelling: I will kill you! I quickened my pace… but to my great relief I saw that he was speaking on his cell phone and that he must have been threatening someone else”. Although she signed under a pseudonym, everyone ended up knowing it was her. She also began to go to television and radio, along with her father, to protest the abuse. They were almost the only ones to do it.
The book has a part that is like a horror story. You say: “I was ten years old when the Taliban came to our valley. Moniba [her best friend of hers] and I had been reading the Twilight books and we wanted to be vampires. And it seemed to us that the Taliban came in the night exactly as vampires"...
The important thing is that if you ask the children here what they are afraid of, they will answer that they are a vampire, Dracula, or a monster, but in our country, we are afraid of humans. The Taliban are human beings but they are very violent and do so much damage that when a child hears about a Taliban they are afraid, just as if they were a vampire or a monster.
It is a perverse and insane system; They banned music, and they banned singing...
-They forbade us everything and if they heard noise and laughter in a house, they broke in if you were singing or watching television, and they broke the televisions. Sometimes they just admonished people, sometimes they beat them or shot them or massacred them. They wouldn't even let us play hairdressers with the dolls.
You ended up watching television in a closet. It was the apotheosis of the absurd,
-Yes, and with the volume very low, so that no one else would hear it. With so much fear everywhere, life became very hard and we desperately thought about our future, about how we were going to live with that fear, about how dangerous the situation was…. And yet we still had some hope in a corner of our hearts.
Then the Taliban began to kill. First to the policemen, so they quit their jobs and put ads in the newspapers saying that they were no longer policemen, so they wouldn't get murdered…. Then they murdered the musicians, and the musicians also put up advertisements saying that they had given up the sin of music and that they were already fervent believers…. That thing about the ads impressed me. His own father, when they threatened him, put up an ad that said: "Kill me but don't hurt the children at my school, who pray every day to the same God you believe in."
Yes, and then there was the Taliban radio, they preached a piece a day. And they gave messages saying: “We congratulate So-and-so, who has let his beard grow and that is why he is going to enter paradise; We congratulate Zutano, who has closed his video store and has regretted it; we are pleased that the girl So-and-So has stopped going to school”... And the girls who went to class were insulted every day in a very ugly way and told us that we would go to hell.
In recent years you were convinced that your father, Ziauddin, was going to be assassinated. And they devised all kinds of strategies to avoid it... His little brothers wanted to build a tunnel...
Yes, and we also thought of hiding my father in a closet. My mother slept with a knife under her pillow, and we also left a ladder leaning against the back wall so my father could run away if they came looking for him. Sometime later a thief broke into our house thanks to that ladder and stole our TV.
In fact, -intervenes the father from the other side of the table, - we were very happy that he took the TV because if he had only taken the ladder, we would have been really afraid.
TRUE! So it was someone who, like you, wanted to watch TV!
Yes Yes! (Malala and Ziauddin laugh) Thank God he was a thief!
How could they endure that fear every day?
The Taliban, who had guns and explosives, were weaker than people with pencils and books.
Back then fear surrounded us. It was all so hard. We didn't know what the future held for us, we wanted to talk but we didn't know that our words would lead us to change, that we would be heard all over the world. We were not aware of the power contained in a pencil, or a book. However, it has been shown that the Taliban, who had guns and explosives, were weaker than people with pencils and books.
In the book, he tells that recently, in a shopping center in Abu Dhabi, he felt a sudden attack of terror. An understandable attack of anxiety. Has it happened to you again?
Yes, it has happened to me two or three times. When I saw the people around me in Abu Dhabi, all these men around, I suddenly thought that they were lying in wait, armed and that they were going to shoot me. And then I said to myself, why are you scared now? You have already seen the face of death, and you should no longer be afraid of it, it is seen that not even death wants to kill you; death wants you to live and work for education. So I told myself, don't be afraid, keep going, that God and people are with you. You have to die sometime in life.
But you are too young...
"Too young, too young," the father repeats painfully, like a Greek chorus.
There is another thing that seems very important to me about you, and that is that you are a believer. An Algerian intellectual told me years ago that the Algerian left had failed in its attempt to modernize the country because they had completely alienated themselves from their people and their society. They were secular, disruptive, too modern, and too Westernized to be accepted by the majority. You, on the other hand, continue to be perfectly integrated into your culture and your religion.
"I cry out for the rights of girls in the name of the same God of the Taliban"
I love God because he has protected me, and I think he is going to ask me on the day of the trial, "Malala, you saw the suffering of the people in Swat, you saw how the girls suffered, that they massacred women, that they murdered so many policemen. What have you done to defend their rights?” I felt it was my duty to cry out for the rights of girls, for my own, for the right to attend school, and I do it in the name of the God for whom the Taliban shot me.
When you were eleven years old and you were writing the blog, The New York Times made a beautiful television documentary about you and your father. I will tell you that when I saw you, I thought that your father was more idealistic and crazier and that you were sensible of the two. Come on, you seemed to me like your father's mother, and excuse me, Ziauddin.
(Both burst out laughing)
Did you see me like this? In Pashtun society, if a girl is very mature and starts talking about family things very early, say at eleven years old, they call her niyá or grandma.
Well, I don't know if you are a niyá, but she certainly has a great practical sense. The first two things she said in the Birmingham hospital, after a week in an induced coma, were: "Where is my father?" and “We don't have money to pay for all this”.
By then she was still very dazed, very confused. When a doctor was talking to a nurse, she thought she was asking him how we were going to pay for the hospital, and she thought I was going to be kicked out and would have to find a job.
In that same documentary, you said that your father wanted you to be a politician, but that you wanted to be a doctor and that he did not like politics…. She has now changed her mind.
