I am the first to tell you that I am horrible at keeping up with the news. I don't have cable TV, the few times I have subscribed to newspapers, I couldn't keep up with reading them, and until I discovered the "news" app on my iPhone a few weeks ago, I never even attempted to navigate the overwhelming amount of news posted on the internet.
Therefore, the first time I heard of Malala - the girl who stood up for education and was shot by the Taliban - was when the movie came out in 2014. When I first heard of her, the thing that stood out to me was the fact that her father was supportive of her even though he came from a culture where women were traditionally subjects and men celebrated their sons rather than their daughters. I remember this quote from Malala's father, "In my part of the world most people are known by their sons. I am one of the few lucky fathers known by his daughter."
I was impressed by that line, and it was always on the running list in the back of my mind to one day read Malala's book, Malala's story; therefore, when I was in Half Price Books a few months back with my fiancee' and saw this book lying out on a display, I bought it. I was in angst about my own students' lack of appreciation for the education not only available to them, but basically shoved down their throats. I was contemplating the topics for their upcoming research paper, and I wanted lack of educational opportunities to be one of the topics. I figured the book could be used as a source for my classroom, as well as something I could enjoy reading for pleasure on weekends and evenings.
The cover of the book points out that Malala is a "Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize," and it also has a quote from the Washington Post comparing her story to that of the diary of Anne Frank, so I must say the bar was set very high before I even opened the cover. While the story does not disappoint, at times the story-telling does. It is easy to get lost among the many explanations of the strife in Pakistan among the government, the civilians, the Taliban, and the U.S. government. Sometimes there is too much telling of the story instead of allowing the reader to simply experience the action and the emotion of the story. For these reasons, it took me a few months to get through the whole book.
Perhaps I am wrong, but I have a hard time seeing my 16-year-old students sitting down to read the entire book, cover-to-cover, simply because of the facts mentioned above. However, next year, the first time there is grumbling about the mandatory education they are required to participate in, I will be reading them this passage from the book.
Aunt Najma was in tears. She had never seen the sea before. My family and I sat on the rocks, gazing across the water, breathing in the salt tang of the Arabian Sea. It was such a big expanse, surely no one could know where it ended. At that moment I was very happy. "One day I want to cross this sea," I said.
"What is she saying?" asked my aunt, as if I were talking about something impossible. I was still trying to get my head around the fact that she had been living in the seaside city of Karachi for thirty years and yet had never actually laid eyes on the ocean. Her husband would not take her to the beach, and even if she had somehow slipped out of the house, she would not have been able to follow the signs to the sea because she could not read.
I sat on the rocks and thought about the fact that across the water were lands where women were free. In Pakistan we had had a woman prime minister and in Islamabad I had met those impressive working women, yet the fact was that we were a country where almost all the women depend entirely on men. My headmistress Maryam was a strong educated woman, but in our society she could not live on her own and come to work. She had to be living with a husband, brother or parents.
In Pakistan when women say they want independence, people think this means we don't want to obey our fathers, brothers or husbands. But it does not mean that. It means we want to make decisions for ourselves. We want to be free to go to school or to go to work. Nowhere is it written in the Quran that a woman should be dependent on a man. The word has not come down from the heavens to tell us that every woman should listen to a man.
"You are a million miles away, Jani," said my father, interrupting my thoughts. "What are you thinking about?"
"Just about crossing oceans, Aba," I replied.
"Forget all that!" shouted my brother Atal. "We're at the beach and I want to go for a camel ride!"
Here, in just a short passage, the girl who stood up for education (in many different ways - you will have to read the book to understand all those ways) and was shot by the Taliban, gives us a succinct picture of what the lack of basic rights, among them education, does to the women in her country. This is what my students need to see - a wider perspective than their own. For the purpose of widening one's perspective outside of the too narrow world we exist in, for this I recommend this book.
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