My ‘Small Video Star’ Fights for Her Life
I
had the privilege of following Malala Yousafzai, on and off, for six
months in 2009, documenting some of the most critical days of her life
for a two-part documentary.
We filmed her final school day before the Taliban closed down her
school in Pakistan’s Swat Valley; the summer when war displaced and
separated her family; the day she pleaded with President Obama’s special
representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, to
intervene; and the uncertain afternoon she returned to discover the fate
of her home, school and her two pet chickens.
A year after my two-part documentary on her family was finished,
Malala and her father, Ziauddin, had become my friends. They stayed with
me in Islamabad. Malala inherited my old Apple laptop. Once, we went
shopping together for English-language books and DVDs. When Malala opted
for some trashy American sitcoms, I was forced to remind myself that
this girl – who had never shuddered at beheaded corpses, public
floggings, and death threats directed at her father — was still just a
kid.
Today, she is a teenager, fighting for her life after being gunned down by the Taliban for doing what girls do all over the world: going to school.
The Malala I know transformed with age from an obedient, rather shy
11-year-old into a publicly fearless teenager consumed with taking her
activism to new heights. Her father’s personal crusade to restore female
education seemed contagious. He is a poet, a school owner and an
unflinching educational activist. Ziauddin is truly one of most
inspiring and loving people I’ve ever met, and my heart aches for him
today. He adores his two sons, but he often referred to Malala as
something entirely special. When he sent the boys to bed, Malala was
permitted to sit with us as we talked about life and politics deep into
the night.
 |
| The author, right, with Malala Yousafzai and her father, Ziauddin. |
After the film was seen, Malala became even more emboldened. She
hosted foreign diplomats in Swat, held news conferences on peace and
education, and as a result, won a host of peace awards. Her best work,
however, was that she kept going to school.
In the documentary, and on the surface, Malala comes across as a
steady, calming force, undeterred by anxiety or risk. She is mature
beyond her years. She never displayed a mood swing and never complained
about my laborious and redundant interviews.
But don’t be fooled by her gentle demeanor and soft voice. Malala is
also fantastically stubborn and feisty — traits that I hope will enable
her recovery. When we struggled to secure a dial-up connection for her
laptop, her Luddite father scurried over to offer his advice. She didn’t
roll an eye or bark back. Instead, she diplomatically told her father
that she, not he, was the person to solve the problem — an uncommon act
that defies Pakistani familial tradition. As he walked away, she offered
me a smirk of confidence.
Another day, Ziauddin forgot Malala’s birthday, and the
nonconfrontational daughter couldn’t hold it in. She ridiculed her
father in a text message and forced him to apologize and to buy everyone
a round of ice cream — which always made her really happy.
Her father was a bit traditional, and as a result, I was unable to
interact with her mother. I used to chide Ziauddin about these
restrictions, especially in front of Malala. Her father would laugh
dismissively and joke that Malala should not be listening. Malala beamed
as I pressed her father to treat his wife as an equal. Sometimes I felt
like her de-facto uncle. I could tell her father the things she
couldn’t.
I first met Malala in January 2009, just 10 days before the Taliban
planned to close down her girls’ school, and hundreds of others in the
Swat Valley. It was too dangerous to travel to Swat, so we met in a
dingy guesthouse on the outskirts of Peshawar, the same city where she
is today fighting for her life in a military hospital.
In 10 days, her father would lose the family business, and Malala
would lose her fifth-grade education. I was there to assess the risks of
reporting on this issue. With the help of a Pakistani journalist, I
started interviewing Ziauddin. My anxiety rose with each of his answers.
Militants controlled the checkpoints. They murdered anyone who
dissented, often leaving beheaded corpses on the main square. Swat was
too dangerous for a documentary.
I then solicited Malala’s opinion. Irfan Ashraf, a Pakistani
journalist who was assisting my reporting and who knew the family,
translated the conversation. This went on for about 10 minutes until I
noticed, from her body language, that Malala understood my questions in
English.
“Do you speak English?” I asked her.
“Yes, of course,” she said in perfect English. “I was just saying
there is a fear in my heart that the Taliban are going to close my
school.”
I was enamored by Malala’s presence ever since that sentence. But
Swat was still too risky. For the first time in my career, I was in the
awkward position of trying to convince a source, Ziauddin, that the
story was not worth the risk. But Ziauddin fairly argued that he was
already a public activist in Swat, prominent in the local press, and
that if the Taliban wanted to kill him or his family, they would do so
anyway. He said he was willing to die for the cause. But I never asked
Malala if she was willing to die as well.
Finally, my favorite memory of Malala is the only time I was with her
without her father. It’s the scene at the end of the film, when she is
exploring her decrepit classroom, which the military had turned into a
bunker after they had pushed the Taliban out of the valley. I asked her
to give me a tour of the ruins of the school. The scene seems written or
staged. But all I did was press record and this 11-year-old girl spoke
eloquently from the heart.
She noticed how the soldiers drilled a lookout hole into the wall of
her classroom, scribbling on the wall with a yellow highlighter, “This
is Pakistan.”
Malala looked at the marking and said: “Look! This is Pakistan. Taliban destroyed us.”
In her latest e-mail to me, in all caps, she wrote, “I WANT AN ACCESS
TO THE WORLD OF KNOWLEDGE.” And she signed it, “YOUR SMALL VIDEO STAR.”
I too wanted her to access the broader world, so during one of my
final nights in Pakistan, I took a long midnight walk with her father
and spoke to him frankly about options for Malala’s education. I was
less concerned with her safety as the Pakistani military had, in large
part, won the war against the Taliban. We talked about her potential to
thrive on a global level, and I suggested a few steps toward securing
scholarships for elite boarding schools in Pakistan, or even in the
United States. Her father beamed with pride, but added: “In a few years.
She isn’t ready yet.”
I don’t think he was ready to let her go. And who can blame him for that?
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