I am Malala | Chapter 1

[Music] hello and welcome back to micah reads today we are going to be continuing i am malala by malala yusuf yousafzai and with christina lamb so christina lamb helped with anyways part one before the taliban one a daughter is born when i was born people in our village commiserated with my mother and nobody congratulated my father i arrived at dawn as the last star blinked out we push tunes see this as an auspicious sign my father didn't have any money for the hospital or for a midwife so a neighbor helped at my birth my parents first child was stillborn but i popped out kicking and screaming i was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a sun while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children for most most past tunes it's a gloomy day when a daughter is born my father's cousin shahar sher khan yosaf sai was one of the few who came to celebrate my birth and even gave a handsome gift of money yet he brought with him a vast family tree of our clan the going right back to my great great grandfather and showing only the male line my father zio zardin is different from most pashtun men he took the tree drew a line like a lollipop from his name and at the end of it he wrote malala his cousin laughed in astonishment my father didn't care he said he looked into my eyes after i was born and fell in love he told people i know there's something different about this child he even asked friends to throw dried fruit sweetened coins into my cradle something we usually only do for boys i was named after malalai of maiwand the greatest heroine of afghanistan pashtuns are a proud people of many tribes split between pakistan and afghanistan we live as we have for centuries by a code called pashtun wali which obliges us to give hospital hospitality to all guests in which the most important value is nang or honor the worst thing that can happen to a pashtun is a loss of face shame is a very terrible thing for to for a pashtun man we have a saying without honor the world counts for nothing we fight and feud among ourselves so much that our word for cousin tarbor is in the same as our word for enemy but we always come together against outsiders who try and conquer our lands all pastor and children now grow up with the story of how malalai inspired the afghan army to defeat the british in 1880 in one of the biggest battles of the second anglo-afghan war malalai was the daughter of a shepherd in my wand a small town on the dusty plains west of kandahar when she was a teenager both her father and the man she was supposed to marry were among the thousands of afghans fighting against the british occupation of their country malalai went to the battlefield with other women from the village to tend to the wounded and take them water she saw their men were losing and when the flag bearer fell she lifted her white veil up high and marched into the battlefield in front of the troops young love she shouted if you do not fall in the battle of my wand then by god someone is saving you as a symbol of shame malalai was killed under fire but her words and bravery inspired the men to turn the battle around they destroyed an entire brigade one of the worst defeats in the history of the british army the afghans were so proud that the last afghan king built a maiwan victory monument at the center of kabul in high school i read some of sherlock holmes and laughed to see that this was the same battle where dr watson was wounded before becoming a partner to the great detective in malala in malalai we students have our very own joan of arc many girls schools in afghanistan are named after her but my grandfather who was a religious scholar and village cleric didn't like my father giving me that name it's a sad name he said it means grief stricken when i was a baby my father used to sing me a song written by the famous poet ramat shah sayel of peshawar the last verse ends o malalai of my wand rise once more to take pashtuns understanding the song of honor your poetic words turn worlds around i beg you rise again my father told me the story of malalai my father told the story of miloli to anyone who came to our house i loved hearing the story and the songs the songs my father sang to me and the way my name floated on the wind then when people called it we lived in the most beautiful place in all the world my valley the swat valley is a heavenly kingdom of mountains gushing waterfalls and crystal clear lakes welcome to paradise it says on a sign as you enter the valley in olden times swat was called udjano which means garden we have fields of wildflowers orchards of delicious fruit emerald mines and rivers full of trout people often call swat the switzerland of the east we even had pakistan's first ski resort the rich people of pakistan came on holiday to enjoy our clean air and scenery and our sufi festivals of music and dancing and so did many foreigners all of whom we called angrezin english wherever they came from even the queen of england came and stayed in the white palace that was built from the same marble as the taj mahal by our king the first wale or ruler of swat we have a special history too today swat is part of the province of khyber sure or kpk as many pakistanis call it but swat used to be separate from the rest of pakistan we were once a princely state one of three with the neighboring lands of chitral and deer in colonial times our kings owed allegiance to the british but ruled their own land when the british gave india independence in 1947 and divided it we went with the newly created pakistan but stayed autonomous we used the pakistani rupee but the government of pakistan could only intervene in foreign politics on foreign policy the wali administered justice kept the peace between warring tribes and collected ashore a tax of 10 percent of income with which he built roads hospitals and schools we were only 100 miles from pakistani capital of islam islamabad as the crow flies but it felt as if we were in another country the journey took at least five hours by road over the malac malakand pass a vast bowl of mountains where long ago our ancestors led by a preacher called mula known by the british as the mad fakir battled british forces among the craggy peaks among them was winston churchill who wrote a book about it and we still call one of the peaks churchill's p churchill's pickett even though he was not very complimentary about our people at the end of the pass is a green domed shrine where people throw coins to give thanks for their safe arrival no one i knew had been islamabad before the troubles came most people like my mother had never been outside swat we lived in mingora the biggest town in the valley in fact the only city it used to be a small place but many people had moved in from surrounding villages making it dirty and crowded it has hotels colleges a golf course and a famous bazaar for buying our traditional embroidery gemstones and anything you can think of the marg the magazar stream loops through it milky brown from the plastic bags and rubbish thrown into it it is not clear like the streams in the hilly areas or like the wide river swat just outside town where people fished for trout in which we visited on holidays our house was in gu gulcata which means place of flowers but it used to be called butkara or place of buddhist statues near our home was a field scattered with mysterious ruins statues of lions on their haunches broken columns headless figures and oddest of all hundreds of stone umbrellas islam came to our valley in the 11th century when sultan mahmoud of ghazni invaded from afghanistan and became our ruler but in ancient times swat was a buddhist kingdom the buddhists had arrived here in the 2nd century and their kings ruled the valley for more than 500 years chinese explorers wrote stories of how there were 1400 buddhist monasteries along the banks of the river swat and the magical sound of temple bells would ring out across the valley the temples are long gone but almost everywhere you go in swat amid the primroses and other wildflowers you find their remains we would often picnic among rock carvings of a smiling fat buddha sitting cross-legged on a lotus flower there are many stories that lord buddha himself came here because it is a place of such peace and some of his ashes are said to be buried in the valley in a giant sapta or sorry in a giant stupa our butkara ruins were a magical place to play hide and seek once some foreign archaeologists arrived to do some work there and told us that in times gone by it was a place of pilgrimage full of beautiful temples domed with gold where buddhist kings lay buried my father wrote a poem the relics of butkara which summed up perfectly how temple and mosque would exist side by side when the voice of truth rises from the minarets the buddha smiles and the broken chain of history reconnects we lived in the shadow of the hindu kush mountains where the men went to shoot ibex in the golden cockrells our house was one story and proper concrete on the left were steps up to a flat roof big enough for us children to play cricket on it was our playground at dusk my father and his friends often gathered to sit and drink tea there sometimes i sat on the roof too watching the smoke rise from the cooking fires all around and listening to the nightly racket of the crickets our valley is full of fruit trees on which grow the sweetest figs and pomegranates and peaches and in our garden we had grapes guavas and persimmons there was a plum tree in our front yard which gave the most delicious fruit it was always a race between us and the birds to get to them the birds love that tree even the woodpeckers for as long as i can remember my mother has talked to birds at the back of the house was a veranda where the woman gathered we knew what it was like to be hungry so my mother always cooked extra and gave food to poor families if there was any left she fed it to the birds in pashto we live we love to sing tape two line poems and she scattered the rice and would sing one don't kill doves in the garden you kill one and the others won't come i like to sit on the roof and watch the mountains and dream the highest mountain of all is the pyramid-shaped mount alum to us it's a sacred mountain and so high that it's always wears a necklace of fleecy clouds even in summer it's frosted with snow at school we learn that in 327 bc even before buddhists came to swat alexander the great swept into the valley with thousands of elephants and soldiers on his way from afghanistan to the indus the swati people fled up the mountain believing that they would be protected by their gods because it was so high but alexander was a determined and patient leader he built a wooden ramp from which his catapults and arrows could reach the top of the mountain then he climbed up so that he could catch hold of the star of jupiter as a symbol of his power from the rooftop i watched the mountains change with the seasons in the autumn chill winds would come in the winter everything was white snow long icicles hanging from the roof like daggers which we loved to snap off we raced around building snowmen and snow bears and trying to catch snowflakes spring was when swat was in its greenest eucalypt's eucalyptus blossoms blew into the house coating everything in white and the wind carried the pungent smell of the rice fields i was born in summer which was perhaps why it was my favorite time of year even though in mingora's summer was hot and dry and the steam stink where people dumped their garbage the stream sink when i was born we were very poor my father and a friend had founded their first school and we lived in a shabby shack of two rooms opposite the school i slept with my mother and father in one room and the other was for guests we had no bathroom or kitchen and my mother cooked on a wood fire on the ground and washed our clothes at a tap in this school our home was always full of people visiting from the village hospitality is an important part of pashtun culture two years after i was born my brother ku kushal arrived like me he was born at home as we still could not afford the hospital and he was named kushal like my father's school after the pashtun hero kushal khan a warrior and a poet my mother had been waiting for a son and could not hide her joy when he was born to me he seemed very thin and small like a reed that could snap in the wind but he was the apple of her eye her ladle it seemed to me that his every wish was her command he wanted tea all the time our traditional tea with milk and sugar and cardamom but even my mother tired of this and eventually made some so bitter that he lost the taste for it she wanted to buy a new cradle for him when i was born my father couldn't afford one so they used an old wooden one from the neighbors which was already a third or fourth hand but my father refused malala swung in that cradle he said so can he then nearly five years later another boy was born a tall bright-eyed and inquisitive like a squirrel after that said my father we were complete three children is a small family by swati standards where most people have seven or eight i played mostly with khushal because he was just two years younger than me but we fought all the time he would go crying to my mother and i would go to my father what's wrong johnny he would ask like him i was born double jointed and can bend my fingers right back on themselves and my ankles click when i walk which makes adults squirm my mother is very beautiful and my father adored her as if she were fragile china vase never laying a hand on her unlike many of our men her name tor pikai means raven tresses even though her hair is chestnut brown my grandfather chan sir khan had been listening to radio afghanistan just before she was born and heard the name i wish i had her white lily skin fine features and green eyes but instead had inherited the sallow complexion wide nose and brown eyes of my father in our culture we all have nicknames aside from peace show which my mother had called me since i was a baby some of my cousins called me lachy which is pashto for cardamom black skinned people are often called white and short people tall we have a funny sense of humor my father was shown in the known in the family as caista dada which means beautiful when i was around four years old i asked my father abba what color are you he replied i don't know a bit white a bit black it's like when one mixes milk with tea i said he laughed a lot but as a boy he had been so self-conscious about being dark-skinned that he went to the fields to get buffalo milk to spread on his face thinking it would help make him lighter it was only when he met my mother that he became comfortable in his own skin being loved by such a beautiful girl gave him confidence in our society marriages are usually arranged by families but theirs was a love match i could listen endlessly to the story of how they met they came from neighboring villages in a remote valley in the upper swat called shangla i would see each other when my father went to his uncle's house to study which was next door to that of my aunt they glimpsed enough of each other to know that they liked one another one another but for us it is taboo to express such things instead he sent her poems she could not read i admired his mind she says and me her beauty he laughs there was one problem my two grandfathers did not get on so when my father announced his desire to ask for her hand the hand of my mother tor pakai it was clear neither side would welcome the marriage his own father said it was up to him and agreed to send a barber as a messenger which is the traditional way we pashtuns do this malik jansar khan refused a proposal but my father is a stubborn man and persuaded my grandfather to send the barber again john sarah khan's hoojra was a gathering place for people to talk politics and my father was often there so they had got to know each other he made him wait nine months but finally agreed my mother comes from a family of strong women as well influent as well as influential men her grandmother my great-grandmother was widowed when her children were young and her eldest son jan sir khan was locked up because of a tribal feud with another family when he was only nine to get him released she walked 40 miles alone over mountains to appeal to a powerful cousin i think my mother would do the same for us though she cannot read or write my father shares everything with her telling her about his day the good and the bad she teases him a lot and gives him advice about who she thinks is a genuine friend and who is not and my father says she is always right most pashtun men never do this as sharing problems with women is seen as weak he even asks his wife they say as an insult i see my parents happy and laughing a lot people would see us and say that we're a sweet family my mother is very pious and praised five times a day though not in the mosque because that is only for the men she disapproves of dancing because they say because she says god would not like it but she loves to decorate herself with pretty things embroidered clothes and golden necklaces and bangles i think i'm a bit of a disappointment to her as i am so like my father and don't bother with clothes and jewels i get bored going to the bazaar but i love to dance behind closed doors with my school friends growing up we children spent most of our time with our mother my father was out a lot as he was busy not just with his school but also with literary societies and jurgas as well as trying to save the environment trying to save our valley my father came from a backward village yet through education and force of personality he made good living for us and a name for himself people liked to hear him talk and i loved the evenings when guests visited we would sit on the floor around a long plastic sheet which my mother laid with food and eat with our right hand as our custom balling together rice and meat as darkness fell we sat by the light of oil lamps battle batting away the flies as our silhouettes made a dancing shadows on the walls in the summer months there would be often be thunder and lightning crashing outside and i would crawl closer to my father's knee i would listen wrapped as he's told stories of warring tribes pashtun leaders and saints often through poems that he read in melodious voice crying sometimes as he read like most people in swat we are from the us yusuf yousafzai tribe we use sofsai with some people spell yusofsai or yusu anyways it doesn't matter originally from kandahar and one of the biggest pashtun tribes spread across pakistan and afghanistan our ancestors came to swat in the 16th century from kabul where they had helped timarid and emperor they had helped a timrid emperor win back his throne after his own tribe removed him the emperor rewarded them with an important position in court and army but his friends and relatives warned him that the youth suffsi were becoming so powerful they would overthrow him so one night he invited all the chiefs to a banquet and set his men on them while they were eating around 600 chiefs were massacred only two escaped and they fled to peshawar along with their tribesmen after some time they went to visit some tribes and swat to win their support so they could return to afghanistan but they were so captivated by the beauty of swat they decided to stay in there and force the other tribes out the yusuf sai divided up all the land among the male members of the tribe it was a peculiar system called wesh under which every 5 or 10 years all the families would swap villages and redistribute the land of the new village among the men so that everyone had a chance to work on good as well as bad land it was thought that this would keep the rival gangs from the rival clans from fighting villages were ruled by cons and the common people craftsmen and laborers were their tenants they had to pay them rent in kind usually a share of their crop they also had to help the khans form a militia by providing an armed man for every small plot of land each con kept hundreds of armed men both for feuds and to raid and loot other villages as the use of science swat had no ruler there were constant feuds between the cons and even within their own families our men all have rifles through these date though these days don't walk around with them like they do in other pashtun areas and my great grandfather used to tell stories of gun battles when he was a boy in the early part of the last century they became worried about being taken over by the british who were then who by then controlled most of the surrounding lands they were also tired of the endless bloodshed so they decided to try and find an impartial man to rule the whole area and resolve their disputes after a couple of rulers who did not work out in 1970 the chiefs settled on a man called as their king we know him affectionate affectionately as the bad shah sahib and though he was completely illiterate he managed to bring peace to the valley taking a rifle away from a pashtun is like taking away his life so we could disarm so he could not disarm the tribes instead he built forts on mountains all across swat and created an army he was recognized by the british as the head of state in 1926 and installed as wali he set up the first telephone system and built the first primary school and ended the wesh system because the constant moving between villages meant no one could sell land or had any incentive to build better house or plant fruit trees in 1949 two years after the creation of pakistan he abdicated in favor of his elder son myangul abdul haqq jahanzab my father always says while badesh sadib brought peace his son brought prosperity we think of jahan zeb's reign as a golden period in our history he had studied in a british school in peshawar and perhaps because his own father was illiterate he was passionate about schools and built many as well as hospitals and roads in the 1950s he ended the system where people paid taxes to the cons but there was no freedom of expression and everyone criticized the wally and if anyone criticized the wally they could be expelled from the valley in 1969 the year my father was born the wily gave up power and we became part of pakistan's northwest frontier province which a few years ago changed its name to khyber pakhtunkhwa so when i was born a proud daughter of pakistan though like all swati's i thought of myself first as a swati and then pashtun before pakistani near a center street there was a family with a girl my age called saffini safina and two boys similar in age to my brothers babar and basit we all played cricket on the street or rooftops together but i knew as we got older the girls would be expected to stay inside we'd be expected to cook and serve our brothers and fathers while boys and men could roam freely about the town my mother and i could not go without a male rep or male relative to accompany us even if it was a five-year-old boy this was the tradition i decided very early i would not be like that my father always said malala will be as free as a bird i dreamed of going to the top of mount a loom like alexander the great to touch jupiter and even beyond the valley but as i watched my brothers running across the roof flying their kites and skillfully flicking the strings back and forth to cut each other's down i wondered how free a daughter could be and that is the end of chapter one that was quite a long chapter but i think it did give you a pretty good look into her childhood pre-getting shot in the head um this is of course an elaborate breakdown of not even that in depth but a fairly in-depth explanation of how the valley that they're in the swat valley yeah the swati people of the swat valley so how the swat valley came to be and it came to be because people from afghanistan were betrayed by somebody that they had helped gain power and most of the leaders were wiped out uh two of the leaders weren't wiped out and on their way back to afghanistan uh like the valley of swat so much that they ended up settling here and given a long period of time where they had settled the valley and a bunch of tribes had formed within the valley um there was a several different kinds of like hierarchical structures that existed throughout history um for a period there there was a lot of like redistribution of land and a lot of like exchange between tribes in order to kind of like mitigate some of the fighting that would be occurring there unfortunately it was not super effective and people would still raid the other villages and nobody was willing to build up a house build up land uh plant trees or anything like that because sorry because the land would likely get exchanged uh anyway so it's like why invest in something that somebody else is just gonna take from me and so nobody was really developing in any sort of way and i think um a lot of pre-history was probably like that with uh like hunter-gatherer tribes if you're constantly moving there's no reason to improve anything so anyways it wasn't until one man ended up taking charge of all of the different tribes um that the whole valley kind of just kind of like locked in and started to develop a little bit he didn't take their guns but he did establish forts all over and kind of develop kind of like a national even though it wasn't like a nation but like kind of like an army um kind of deal and because of that piece was kind of instilled in the valley and people were allowed to build things up and plant fruit trees and all this stuff and then he was an illiterate man but people loved him because he was able to bring peace and bring people together his son who took over after him his oldest son was educated and brought a lot of schools to the area and so education was seen as very important later pakistan was kind of created as a nation and their valley of swat joined in to this nation of pakistan but because of all of the history in this area and because of how the families work and how everyone associates each other um she felt that she was first hold on first a swati then pashtun before pakistani so eswati is in i don't know i said swati it doesn't matter swat swati is in i'm part of the valley of swat then pashtun which is the kind of tribe that she was a part of that came from afghanistan and then pakistani which is the nation that she lives within so the tribe of pashtun and specifically her branch of that tribe the yusuf zai which i'm probably mispronouncing she identifies with more than she does the nation of pakistan which is more of just a way for everyone to be to ensure peace and laws and all that kind of stuff is kind of that's the point of a nation is to provide stability even if it doesn't provide identity to a lot of people as much as something like a tribe or familial history would anyways she ends this chapter here with a description of how restricting it is even in their modern times i say modern times in quotations because this was probably like 30 years ago and i have no idea what the situation currently is however uh when she wrote about this or when she was a kid she always thought about how unfair it was for the girls relative to the boys because as a kid you're allowed to play on the street but as you reach a certain age the kids that are female have to stay in their house they're not allowed to leave the house they have to stay and serve the males of the family and they're only allowed to leave when a male is accompanying them even if that male is a five-year-old boy a woman woman cannot leave unless she has a male relative from her family taking her somewhere which i'd imagine is super unfair and obviously very restrictive um and so she dreams about going up to the top of the mountain and she also i breezed over this without mentioning it but uh her name malala comes from malalai who was a um female back in the day uh several centuries prior i think um no not centuries probably like one century prior when they were fighting the british in the afghan the anglo-afghan war which is the british versus the people of afghanistan those people from her tribe one of the um members of that tribe was a woman going out to assist the men who were injured she was going to help the wounded and feed them and all that stuff but she was seeing they were losing so badly that she stood up grabbed her white uh shawl whatever it's called uh and charged onto the battlefield saying uh if you aren't fighting to the death then you're not going to get the rewards that you get with death or something along those lines anyway she inspired the people to turn the fight around and um turn the battle in the favor of the afghanis now she her she was named after that warrior and later had a brother and then another younger brother um whom she ward with a lot at least her older brother she ward with a lot as far as like having conflicts um and a lot of this i would imagine is because of the culture they're in where she sees herself as an individual as in a person worth getting an education and worth being treated like an equal human being and i would assume her brother probably was more ingrained within the culture and felt maybe an allegiance to the kind of existing systems that were there then again i don't know when she's referring to the fights that she was having with her brother if they have anything to do with um the male and female position within society i think that is kind of uh left unclear at the moment and might be later elaborated on however i just thought it was an interesting uh chapter here um she she brings it home and says i wish she was uh i wish i was free and her father always said that malala will be free as a bird so her desire for education and to be free of the cultural norms of the time are are strong drivers for her character um and by that i don't mean like her as a character i mean like her internal character that makes up who she is um and we see that leads to her getting shot so that is very sad um but we will in the next chapter read my father the falcon however for now i appreciate you joining me and you will have to wait for tomorrow to see that yep thank you guys for joining me i will see you then goodbye [Music] you

Channel: Micah Reads

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Length: 33min 31sec (2011 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021