“Does America Deserve Malala?”
By Ayesha Siddiqi, originally published on VICE.com (2015)
Illustration by Deshi Deng
Long before she was known to Americans, or the Taliban that would target her, Malala Yousafzai was already being cast as a dead girl. When choosing a student to diary about life in Swat for the BBC in 2009, the commissioning journalist posited that Malala could be Swat's Anne Frank. That same year the New York Times contacted Pakistani journalist Syed Irfan Ashraf to help them produce a documentary on schools threatened by the growing influence of the Taliban, "We want it to play out like film," their email said.
Malala's eloquence as the daughter of the man who ran Khushal Girls High School and College had caught the attention of journalists before, appearing on Pakistan's Dawn channel, and Ashraf connected the Yousafzais to the Times' Adam Ellick. Malala's family and Ashraf thought the documentary would be about Taliban school closures more generally but instead it focused on Malala. From January to March, Malala also blogged for the BBC about life in Mingora, and the violence that was becoming routine. Despite her use of a pen name the media attention was worrisome, but everyone thought a child would be immune from the dangers other journalists risked in Pakistan.
Malala survived the assassination attempt, but the way those outside Pakistan celebrate her life almost presupposes her death instead. So shrill and uninformed is the call to be inspired by her that it's easy to imagine it all as a posthumous hagiography.
The preference for narrative is equally apparent in Davis Guggenheim's recent documentary He Named Me Malala, which closely follows the events that made Malala Yousafzai an icon. That Malala is named after a folk hero who also stood up against armed forces without fear of reprisal is a poetic symmetry the film enjoys lingering over. And so would I, if the story were in fact the children's folktale that the animated vignettes punctuating the documentary suggest, and not about living activists.
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