We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories From Refugee Girls Around the World by Malala Yousafzai

In this powerful and emotional New York Times bestseller, Nobel Peace Prize winner and activist Malala Yousafzai shares various stories of displacement, including her own. We Are Displaced introduces readers to some of the incredible girls Malala has met on her many journeys and lets each tell her story – girls who have lost their community, relatives and often the only world they’ve ever known, but have not lost hope.

Longing for home and fear of an uncertain future binds all of these young women, but each is unique. In a time of immigration crises, war and border conflicts, We Are Displaced is an important reminder that every single one of the 79.5 million currently displaced is a person – often a young person – with dreams for a better, safer world.

We Are Displaced tells the stories of girls forced to leave Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Guatemala, the Congo, Myanmar and Uganda. It tells stories of girls who are internally displaced in Iraq and Colombia, not forgetting that Malala herself was at one point internally displaced in Pakistan.

Each of their stories is remarkable in itself. But what is even more remarkable – and sobering – is that this group of stories does not even scratch the surface of the vast number of refugees who have made the same heartbreaking decision to leave their homes for fear of their safety, and embark on a dangerous journey, crossing their fingers and hoping that wherever they are going is safer than where they have left.

The stories are not simply about their journeys. The girls describe the associated feelings: the anguish about leaving their homes, possibly forever, even though they know their lives are at risk if they stay. The knowledge that they are expected to be grateful to the country that has ‘rescued’ them juxtaposed with the guilt they feel for still missing their home country. The fact that their old lives simply cannot be recreated: Malala says that even when her mother makes the same recipes as she used to in Pakistan, it somehow lacks the taste of home. The girls learn new languages and new cultures, trying to strike an impossible balance between fitting in and clinging onto their original identities.

As this is a book by Malala, there is naturally a focus on education. Many of these girls’ educations have been disrupted by wars in their countries and they tell of their determination to go back to school, or even to find ways to study in refugee camps, with the aim of empowering themselves, especially those who are from countries where women’s education is not prioritised.

Finally a comment on refugee propaganda. The British news (if not other countries’ news) tends to paint refugees in a negative light. They are scroungers; why have they come here rather than settling somewhere else in Europe? To me, the fact that many of them quite literally risk their lives to come here – in small boats across the Mediterranean or the Channel, or paying their life savings to an unknown people smuggler to assist them – shows the desperation with which they are leaving their home country and how hopeful they are for a better life. Whether they aspire to be an Olympic swimmer like Yusra Mardini, or simply to find a peaceful existence, we need to know their stories so that we can better understand and solve the problems in the world.