On "Malala: My Story of Standing Up for Girls' Rights"

Malala: My Story of Standing Up for Girls’ Rights, a middle-grade, illustrated adaptation of the best-selling memoir I Am Malala co-authored by Malala Yousafzai and Patricia McCormick, is written with the generosity of a kindhearted child. Adapter Sarah J. Robbins brings Yousafzai’s inspirational life story to a younger audience—to youth who are at the age Yousafzai was during the events that led to her becoming the youngest person ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The book recounts important events that shaped Malala Yousafzai’s life up to 2018. The book is well-written and emotionally moving—so much so that at different points while reading, I felt Malala’s pain and cried. Joanie Scott's illustrations are a lovely treat too. In her relatively short lifetime, Yousafzai survived extremely dangerous circumstances: she lived through war, occupation, displacement, gender-based oppression, even attempted murder. The book weaves these extraordinary experiences with regular, day-to-day moments in her childhood. It creates a reading experience that feels altogether compelling, informative, and—surprisingly—relatable.

One important achievement of the book is that it uses easy-to-understand language to convey complex situations. In the book, the most complex issue in the book is girls’ rights to education under the Taliban. Malala gives young readers a clear window into what took place to lead to a horrible act of oppression like the closing of an entire town’s schools for girls.

Along with the narration, the book’s motto is also straightforward. It is similar to words I’ve heard from other people who, like Yousafzai, manage to be both extraordinary and humble: I, Malala Yousafzai, am a regular person just like you. What’s even more important and motivational is the message underlying that motto: There is nothing stopping you, reader, from being extraordinary too. This motto seems to guide the authors to write every part of Malala’s life in a way that is relatable to readers. For example, the paragraph about Malala’s unique name—she was named after a Pashtun girl warrior—is immediately followed by a description of a more common experience, her quarrels with her brother:

“I am named for a brave young Pasthun girl named Malalai of Maiwind in Afghanistan. In a battle of hundreds of years ago, Malalai inspired warriors with her courage. But I don’t believe in fighting. I say that even thought I argue with my brother Khushal all the time.”

It happens again when the Yousafzai family is eating dinner. Instead of listening to the radio blasting a mullah’s calls for violence, her family chooses to discuss “things of the mind,” things like “Einstein and Newton, poets and philosophers.” Instead of choosing thinkers from Malala’s region of the world, the writers exclusively mention European thinkers, Einstein and Newton. Maybe the family only talked about Einstein and Newton. Or, more likely, the authors mentioned those names because they are popular in the world and may be familiar to more people.

Written in this way, Malala, the heroine, is reaching to become a character that we can relate to and understand all over the world. But given that each person on this earth is different from anyone else, it is impossible to completely relate to or understand everyone; there will always be differences between us. So who is the “everyone” that the writers try to make Malala similar to? Judging by the examples I mentioned from the book of her name and the family’s dinner conversations, it seems like “everyone else” is people living in the global north; those lands where Einstein and Newton came from, and where people might think the name Malala is unusual.

While writing Malala this way helps make her story familiar, the authors risk going overboard by making her too much like everyone else and not enough like herself. I wonder how she would be written about if she wasn’t trying to be relatable. It also makes me wonder whether readers need to see themselves in Malala to relate to her story or be interested in it.

Maybe showing how an extraordinary person like Malala is the same as everyone else is not such a bad idea at first. But we have to think about the unequal ways that people of different races and cultures are treated to understand how it can be unfair and untrue to write Malala as the same as a girl reading this book in somewhere as different from Pakistan as the United States.

One odd choice is the illustrator darkened Yousafzai’s skin tone on the cover image. Yousafzai has a light, olive-toned complexion but is drawn with dark-brown skin. Is this the publisher’s desire to promote diversity or benefit from the recent rise in popularity of diverse literature? Or something else? I’m not sure, but it makes me uncomfortable.

Overall, Malala is an enjoyable and important read. As long as we remember that we can be extraordinary without losing the parts of ourselves that make us unique.

Rating: ★★★

MALALA: MY STORY OF STANDING UP FOR GIRLS' RIGHTS By Malala Yousafzai and Patricia McCormick. Illustrated by Sarah J. Robbins  | 176 pp. | Little Brown Books for Young Readers | $6.99