We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories From Refugee Girls Around the World
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai, the girl from Pakistan’s Swat Valley, who was shot in the head by the Taliban when she was 15 years old, is inspirational. Her journey from near death to Nobel peace prize winner has challenge and strife written all over it.
The book, We Are Displaced is born from her own displacement and her longing for home. Yousafzai can travel the world – and she did before she wrote this book – but cannot go anywhere near her own country where she was shot for going to school. As an activist, who spread the message of the importance of education, Yousafzai met scores of young girls who were similarly displaced and cast away as refugees and migrants. The book tells the story of her and nine other young girls, all dealing with pain and loss, each one torn from home due to conflict. Told in the first person, the journeys are deeply personal and disturbing: each of the 10 characters speaks of how they escaped violence, how they tried to resettle and how difficult it was to leave everything behind, particularly your home.
Marie Claire, one of the 10 girls, speaks of how difficult it is to even find a new home. She was forced out of Congo but found herself in Zambia amid slogans of “Go back to your country.”
We Are displaced is an important work of oral history in which Yousafzai starts with her own experience but quickly moves on to tell other important stories. The experiences of the young adults are devastating but each journey also brims with hope and that’s what makes the book memorable. It was released in India in January 2019, but it is a book you could well end the year with.