Review: We Are Displaced by Malala Yousafzai

Reviewed by Sophia Ihlefeld

We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World
Nonfiction by Malala Yousafzai
Little, Brown and Company
$12.50, 244 pp
ISBN-13: 978-0316523646

Malala is shot in the head by the Taliban on October 9, 2012 on her way to school. Zaynab flees Yemen with her sister Sabreen, for fear of a stray bullet in the streets. Sabreen watches as Zaynab boards a plane to America without her, because for reasons unknown Sabreen’s visa wasn’t approved. Muzoon, her city under siege for two years, runs from Syria. Najla escapes captivity in ISIS, just as she did her father when he tried to forbid her schooling. Maria, a true luchadora, flees with her mother and siblings from Columbia. Analisa travels on her own, away from oppression in Guatemala, all whilst thanking God for her blessings. Marie Claire seeks refuge twice, first from the Congo and then Zambia, before working tirelessly in America to graduate high school to honor her slain mother.

In Malala Yousafzai’s new book, We Are Displaced, Malala recounts her own notorious tale of displacement before handing the pen to eight other resilient young female refugees. We Are Displaced provides these women the opportunity to tell their stories like no media coverage ever could, to effectively communicate what it truly means to be dis-placed.

As in, out of place—out of the ground they used to walk every day, the air they used to breathe. “I feel the calm earth beneath my feet,” Malala writes, reminiscing about the childhood home she knew before the Taliban invaded Swat Valley. The ground itself is extremely communicative in this book: it is capable of instilling a sense of peace, a family’s love, home—or fear, as it quakes and rumbles with violence. Foreign ground is tricky too. Foreign ground can be shockingly cold, for feet that have only ever touched Middle Eastern soil, or empty, for feet accustomed to loved-one’s company.

The ground can be home, but even home can be the enemy. Terrorism and organized violence are not the only evils from which the narrators of We Are Displaced flee, and it is no coincidence that all the book’s narrators are women. In some of their communities, the girls are “displaced” just by nature of being female, discriminated against by the people who love them most dearly. Readers of We Are Displaced will learn of girls who burn themselves alive for fear of their fathers’ punishment, girls who run away from home because their fathers have forbid them from going to school, and girls who learn from each other—rather than their parents or communities—that marriage is not their only future. “‘You and me, we can be the ripple effect. If we go to school, others will follow,” a young girl tells Muzoon, clasping the other girl’s hands in solidarity. Each narrator works persistently to create her own agency and her own sense of home, despite the violence and oppression beating down upon her.

Malala cheers every one of them forward in the form of a thoughtful preface to each chapter. She reminds Muzoon, “‘If you lose your hope, you will be able to look at yourself and what you’ve already accomplished. You are already powerful.’” These words, written in simple but heartfelt and poignant prose, serve as a reminder to the book’s young readers as well. You are already powerful. To promote the power of all women everywhere, proceeds from the book will be used to support the Malala Fund’s work for girls’ education. We Are Displaced, timely and heart-wrenching, asks only for empathy for the thousands of girls fleeing across dangerous terrain towards freedom and school as you read these words.

Sophia Ihlefeld is Staff Editor at Directors Guild of America-Producer Pension and Health Plans. She graduated from Boston College with a B.A. in English with a Creative Writing Concentration. She is a Contributing Editor for the Los Angeles Review, and has interned for Red Hen Press and Post Road Magazine. Her short stories, essays, and articles have appeared in Silhouette Press, The Los Angeles Review, Pour Vida Zine, the Boston College Medical Humanities Journal, the Seething Medusa Zine, and the Odyssey Online. She also has a children’s book, Dophia and Delia Dare the Dune Devil, available for purchase on Lulu.com. See more of Sophia’s work on her website, sophiaeihlefeld.wixsite.com/website.