Book Review: Finding My Way by Malala Yousafzai

 

For those unfamiliar with her story, Malala Yousafzai lived with her family in an area of Pakistan that was overrun by the Taliban for a few years starting when she was 11. Even before the Taliban took over, many girls in the area did not go to school and tended to be married off by their families at a very young age. Malala was way ahead of her own tribe and was actively advocating for schools for females. This led to a member of the Taliban searching her out and then shooting her in the head. Luckily, she survived. Her family began to fear for their own safety and emigrated to England. After she recovered from numerous surgeries, she found that she had become a symbol for gender equality, particularly in education.

 

In this blog I have written extensively about cultural lag, in which the opportunities for individual expression apart from one's tribe (self actualization) has become more prevalent, but for various reasons some families don't keep up with the changes. In this situation, parents may be highly ambivalent about such things as gender roles, but can't admit it, and then give off mixed messages to their kids about what is expected from them. If the child guesses wrong, the parents decompensate in various ways. Because of an evolutionary process called kin selection, the children develop a strong tendency to sacrifice their own needs and opinions to stabilize the system.

 

I have mostly focused on how this process plays out in the Western world, but also wrote about how it plays out when a family from one culture moves to a place with a more individualistic outlook. This leads to the strange situation where the children in the family are somehow expected to play by the old rules while simultaneously serving as the family's ambassador to the new culture.

 

Malala's story is an amazing illustration of this process - as if seen in IMAX, technicolor, and 8 channel Dolby stereo sound. When she starts college at Oxford she tries to adjust to new rules on just about everything. For example, she starts to fall in love with a man but can't afford to be even seen in photo with him and certainly can't invite him over to meet her parents. In their original culture, women were not even allowed to be seen with a unrelated member of the opposite sex, let alone go out on a date. She knew of several examples of "honor killings." In one, a 15 year old girl was literally murdered by her own parents for looking too long at a boy on the street.

 

Malala continued becoming a spokesperson for women's education. She became famous worldwide and went to many conferences in England and overseas. The government provided her with 24 hour security both at home and abroad, because people like the Taliban continued to oppose her agenda and might strike out again.

 

When she talks about her interactions with her own parents over these things, she does not provide a whole lot of details about their reactions. My theory would predict that she had some covert, ambiguous validation for her political positions from them, or she would not have done what she did in Pakistan. If an outsider observed them interacting, however, the parents might seem more partial to their traditional culture than they actually were. They might of had to hide their true opinions because of the social stigma - even from each other. Again, I can't say that for certain based on the book descriptions, but I bet I'm right.

 

In fact, Mom was illiterate and did act traditionally - at least most of the time. She would occasionally say something about wanting to go to a beauty salon, which was extremely uncommon in her native village. She was also described as expressing reservations about her daughter's new behavior- perhaps half heartedly. But interestingly, she never seemed to move to actually try to stop her from doing what she was doing. And this pattern may have gone back more than one generation. Malala had been very close to one of her grandmothers, who appeared to her to be somewhat liberal. Obviously, I again wasn't there to observe this, but Malala's descriptions of her family's reactions to her is highly consistent with double messages being sent out.

 

When she had first come to Britain, she had put up with multiple surgeries, and had to learn how to walk all over again. At first she seemed to have no memory of her shooting. She had waken up from it in a hospital. However, soon she was overcome by images of it, and developed symptoms of PTSD and panic disorder. Of course, this made her transition to more feminist values even more difficult than it might have been otherwise. Psychotherapy was not acceptable to her culture, yet she found a therapist and worked hard. She persisted with her crusade. Her courage is truly amazing.

 

She's also an extremely talented writer. It was hard to put the book down.