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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. As remarkable as it is that my guest Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize when she was 17, there are remarkable ways she's been living her life since then. Let's start with the famous part of her story. She was born in 1997 and grew up in a remote region of Pakistan's Swat Valley near the Afghanistan border.
In 2008, after the Taliban invaded her town, terrorizing the people, they banned girls' education. She publicly spoke out for her right and the right of all girls to go to school. As payback in 2012 when she was 15, she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman. She was flown to a hospital in England where she continues to live. Her recovery was miraculous.
It's when I read her recent memoir, Finding My Way, that I learned how the bullet changed the course of her life, thrusting her into a new culture and changing her in ways that didn't quite fit her public image as an inspirational hero and top student, and sometimes even challenged her own self-image. When she was admitted to Oxford University, a dream come true.
She wanted to live the life of a teenager and find time to make friends, have fun, have adventures. including jumping from her dorm roof to the campus bell tower. She defied some of her culture's traditions and her parents' expectations, from how she dressed to who she married.
At the same time, she was experiencing PTSD and panic attacks for the first time, recovering from her multiple surgeries and continuing to raise money for the foundation she co-founded with her father in to advocate and raise money for girls' education in places where that is banned.
All this took time from her college studies, and she felt like a fraud, a symbol of female education who was barely passing some of her classes. Another thing I learned from her book and from hearing her speak is that she's very self-aware, introspective, and funny. I spoke with her last Tuesday evening in front of an audience at WHYY where she was given this year's Lifelong Learning Award.
Malala, it is such an honor to have you here tonight. I'm so excited to have the opportunity to talk with you.
It's so nice to be here.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Malala Yousafzai to advocate for girls' education?
Thank you so much. Thank you for the honor and good evening, everyone. It's always so nice to be in this beautiful, warm, welcoming city.
So you and I, we're different generations. We're from very different cultures. There's so much in your book that I really related to in a much more insignificant way than your life. But one of the things I really related to was if you're lucky enough to go to college and it's away from home,
you have a chance to figure out who you are, independent of your family, independent of the friends who knew you when you were a child. And you can grow and transform and take risks, try out different selves and figure it out.
But that can mean defying your parents' expectations, which I had to do in my own little insignificant way, and you had to do in a pretty major way, because you were in a different culture, and you were young, you were a teenager. And when you defy your parents, there's a price you pay.
You know, they're the people who love you most in the world, and you love them, but you're rejecting some of their values and going your own way. And you risk hurting them. You risk creating a rift that won't heal. I related to that. So my question is, which is more difficult, defying your parents or standing up to the Taliban?
I think it wasn't just the pressure of my parents. It was the pressure of this whole community that they feel they represent. Even though we were thousands of miles away from Pakistan, but they were still worried about what would our relatives think if they see me wearing jeans in college, if they see me with some friends enjoying some music in college or climbing a rooftop in college.
And for them, it was always this anxiety that when rumors start about women, it is like the biggest dishonor you can face in a community. Just to share one story, which is something I shared in the book. One day, I went rowing in college. I was trying new things. And I said, let's give rowing a try. That was my first and last experience trying rowing. Never went back to it.
But I was just wearing jeans and a nice bomber jacket. And somebody took a photo and uploaded it. And that photo went viral, and it caused this huge social media backlash where people were criticizing me from the Pakistani South Asian diaspora for wearing jeans.
They thought it was not Islamic enough, this was against our culture, that I wasn't wearing traditional clothes, that somehow I wasn't just an ambassador for girls' education, but I was also an ambassador of the culture, the faith, and everything else, that I had to meet everyone's expectation, that I was somehow upsetting everybody.
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Chapter 3: How did Malala's life change after she was shot by the Taliban?
And I told my parents, no, I'm not going to respond to this at all. I said that when my brothers moved to the U.K., they switched to jeans right away. Nobody had any problem with it. But as soon as a girl decided to wear a pair of jeans, it became a whole issue. So I said, the best way for me to respond to this is to keep wearing jeans.
And yeah, and it's also about women making choices for themselves. It should not be someone else deciding it for them.
And you also write in your book, and this is something I also related to, that you felt with your parents, if you didn't draw the line, that you would always be compromising and giving in. And I'm sure a lot of people listening to this relate to that as well. But again, we didn't have a whole culture attacking us for it.
Yeah, I mean, it was hard. And sometimes the best, you know, protection for me was that my parents were just not with me at college. You know, it's like, they just don't know. And that's the best thing ever. I loved my college time, because I was away from home. And this was the first time that I had been on my own. And I was so curious about life. And I know that these things sound
quite basic, like climbing a rooftop or hanging out with friends or staying up late. These are not like some big, crazy things. But to me, it felt like I was climbing a mountain, that this was something huge that I was doing in my life because I was making my own choices. And I felt that nobody was watching me. And that was such a relief.
But yeah, when my parents read the book, then they found out that there was quite a lot happening here.
So tell us a little bit about what your education was like, and I'll preface this by saying you describe your father as a feminist before he knew the word feminism. And he believed in girls' education, and he wanted to teach, so he created a school that started with three students. That's the school you went to when you were a girl. What was your education like?
Because you say that when you got to England and went to high school there and then college, that you were taught to memorize facts and not critical thinking, and suddenly you were being asked to do critical thinking. So what did you learn? What was your education like when you were young?
In Pakistan, it's very focused on sciences and then learning English and math. A lot of it is like Islamic studies, social studies, Pakistan studies. But that was about it. It's very textbook focused. So in Pakistan, by age like 15, I had only read eight or nine books outside my school curriculum. And it's only because somebody gifted those books to me.
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Chapter 4: How did Malala navigate cultural expectations during her college years?
kids here can actually see what it looks like. So when I would be in a biology class in the UK and in a chemistry class, and I could see these things happening right in front of my eyes, I just wished like more and more kids in Pakistan can also see that. Experiments and like, you know, it's like such a privilege.
So your mother didn't go to school. She went to school, I think, for one day and decided her friends weren't in school and she'd rather play with her friends than go to school. And she was illiterate. How did she feel about you becoming an education activist on behalf of girls' education when she never went to school herself?
Of course, my mother is very proud of the work that I am doing and that my father is doing.
Chapter 5: What challenges did Malala face while recovering in England?
And I do believe that it is her support and her strength behind us that helped both my father and I to keep on fighting. But I saw her real resilience and commitment to education when we moved to the UK, because now she was in a completely different country, a new culture, a new language, and she suddenly became a dependent.
on others if she had to call a cab if she had to see a doctor if she had to speak to somebody at the grocery store she needed somebody with her to speak in english and she felt very helpless so she started taking english classes and she's been learning english for the past seven or eight years and it's always such a beautiful moment for me at home when i'm helping my mom with her homework because
Because usually it is parents helping their kids. But in our house, it's a daughter helping her mother. And it's such a beautiful moment. She loves her education. I mean, she's like a role model to students out there. She never misses her homework. She impresses her teachers. And now she can call a cab on her own. She can go to a grocery store on her own. She can manage a doctor's appointment.
She's no longer dependent on any family member. And that's because of her education.
So, you know, your father, as I mentioned, founded a school. It was a school you went to. So he was passionate about education and passionate about it for girls. And when the Taliban came and took over your area, they had a deadline for when they were going to close down the schools.
It was the 15th of January, 2009.
And you attended school until the last day, even though I think you're only allowed to go up to fourth grade and you were in fifth grade.
Yes, and we were, you know, we would wear just our home clothes. We could no longer wear our school uniform.
It would give you away.
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Chapter 6: What does Malala say about the pressure of defying her parents?
You were silent, you were looking at that person, but you were not saying anything, and you just held my hand really tight, that I could feel the pain for days, and then you fell into my lap. They also went through a lot of trauma, because I was recovering from the Taliban bullet injury, It had caused facial paralysis, hearing loss, and swelling in my head as well.
So I had to replace the skull piece with the titanium plate. I had to go through a lot of recovery things.
And surgeries, many surgeries.
Many surgeries. But my friends actually saw what happened.
Your friend Moniba, who was the one sitting next to you on the bus, she later told you she was covered in blood after you got shot. And she really thought that she must have gotten shot too because there was so much blood on her. And she was traumatized. She had nightmares all the time.
And I could never compare the two. I was carrying the pain and they were carrying the memories. So I always talk to my friends. I ask her for the same story again and again, and I'm like, tell me what happened that day. And every time I hear it, I'm like, I can't believe we all saw it that day. So I also really admired their resilience.
We're listening to the interview I recorded with Malala Yousafzai last week at an event where she received WHYY's Lifelong Learning Award. Her recent memoir is called Finding My Way. We'll hear more of the interview after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. Your father has said, and there's a documentary about you called He Named Me Malala.
And in that documentary, he says that he felt like you and he were so close. It's as if you shared a soul.
And I'm wondering, as we were discussing earlier, when you tried to become independent, if it was especially hard to become independent of your father, knowing how profoundly close you were, so close that he felt that you shared the same soul, and knowing that he felt that way, for you to become independent of him, what you need to do when you grow up, not to stop loving him, not to have him stop loving you, but to be your own person.
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Chapter 7: What role did Malala's father play in her education and activism?
So I remember in just like a week or so... Because let me just say, you had donated your, with your Nobel Prize money, you and your father created a fund to support girls' schools. Yes. So you had to keep vigilant about that in addition to all the other stuff that I mentioned.
Yeah, so I remember that week and a half in college when one day I was in Lebanon with Tim Cook where they announced grants to support Malala Fund's work, which was very important because with those grants we could then help girls in Lebanon and Pakistan and Afghanistan.
and Nigeria, and then in a few days, I was at Davos, and I had shared the stage with Justin Trudeau, and from those conversations, we helped secure more than $2 billion for girls' education. It was a big commitment for financing for girls' education, and then a week later, it was another event where I was sharing my story and all of that.
So to me, it felt like all of these things were important, and I thought I could manage it. But when my teacher saw my performance, she was very concerned. She said, you are behind on your essays. You're not attending the lectures. And you will literally fail if you keep doing it like this.
So she wrote a letter to everybody in my circle and said, Malala will not be allowed to travel during college time. It's like, you have to be in college. Just because we don't take your attendance doesn't mean you can travel to Lebanon or all of these places. I also realized that there was a whole academic support system at college.
I was hesitant to consider it because I thought I might be the imposter here. I might be the only one who's getting it. But when I reached out, they told me that students have challenges because of different reasons, and it's completely okay to ask for help because this college is... is built to help you learn. So what do they do to help?
Like just help me understand how to better prepare for my essays, how to divide my time, how to do the reading in a way that's more efficient, plan the essay before jumping into the reading, all of these small tips that really helped me. And then I improved. I improved in my studies. I did not become like an excellent top students right away.
I didn't really become that student, but I was doing OK. And I was just happy with doing OK where I was having good time with my friends. I was socializing and I was also managing my studies as well. I was in the end very happy with that.
Did you accept the fact that you weren't in the upper tier of the ultra-smart academic students?
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