We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World

by Malala Yousafzai

Overview

Nobel Peace Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author Malala Yousafzai turns the faceless statistics and endless news stories about displacement into real people—introducing a small fraction of the millions worldwide who have fled home in this powerful and "stirring" (New York Times) account. 

After her father was murdered, María escaped in the middle of the night with her mother.

Zaynab was out of school for two years as she fled war before landing in America. Her sister, Sabreen, survived a harrowing journey to Italy.

Ajida escaped horrific violence, but then found herself battling the elements to keep her family safe.

Malala's experiences visiting refugee camps caused her to reconsider her own displacement—first as an Internally Displaced Person when she was a young child in Pakistan, and then as an international activist who could travel anywhere in the world except to the home she loved. In We Are Displaced, Malala not only explores her own story, but she also shares the personal stories of some of the incredible girls she has met on her journeys—girls who have lost their community, relatives, and often the only world they've ever known. 

In a time of immigration crises, war, and border conflicts, We Are Displaced is an important reminder from one of the world's most prominent activists that every single one of the 68.5 million currently displaced is a person—often a young person—with hopes and dreams.

"A stirring and timely book." —New York Times

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316523653
Publisher:	Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Publication date:	03/02/2021
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	41,344
Product dimensions:	5.55(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Malala Yousafzai is a cofounder and board member of Malala Fund. Malala began her campaign for education at age eleven, when she anonymously blogged for BBC Urdu about life under the Taliban in Pakistan's Swat Valley. Inspired by her father's activism, Malala soon began advocating publicly for girls' education, attracting international media attention and awards. At age fifteen, she was attacked by the Taliban for speaking out. Malala recovered in the United Kingdom and continued her fight for girls. In 2013, she founded Malala Fund with her father, Ziauddin. A year later, Malala received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her efforts to see every girl complete twelve years of free, safe, and quality education. She is currently a student at Oxford University, pursuing a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics.

Table of Contents

Prologue vii

Part 1 I Am Displaced

Chapter 1 Life as We Knew It 3

Chapter 2 How Could This Be Happening? 9

Chapter 3 Internally Displaced 13

Chapter 4 Shangla 21

Chapter 5 Returning Home 27

Chapter 6 Caught Between Two Worlds 35

Part 2 We Are Displaced

Zaynab: Why Me and Not Her? 49

Sabreen: No Turning Back 69

Zaynab: Dream Big 81

Muzoon: I Saw Hope 91

Najla: Thousands of People, Just Like Us 99

Maria: Nobody Can Take Away What We Carry Inside 109

Analisa: Lucky 119

Marie Claire: A New Beginning 137

Jennifer: I Needed to Do Something 151

Ajida: At Nighttime, We Walked 163

Farah: This Was My Story 175

Epilogue 193

Afterword 199

Author's Note 203

Acknowledgments 205

How You Can Help 208

About the Contributors 210

About the Author 214

Editorial Reviews

6 Best Books for Teens of 2019, Parents magazine
School Library Journal Best Books of 2019
ALA Notable Books for Children 2019
ALA Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers 2019


Nobel Peace Prize winner Yousafzai, who famously survived being shot by Taliban soldiers as a teen in 2012, is a passionate activist for girls' right to education. Yet, in this profound volume, she sidesteps those aspects of her life to illuminate another experience: displacement - beginning with her family's forced 2009 evacuation of their Pakistani hometown in response to escalating Taliban violence. Comprising the bulk of the book are urgent, articulate first-person stories from displaced or refugee young women whom Yousafzai has encountered in her travels, whose birthplaces include Colombia, Guatemala, Syria and Yemen. ... The contributors' strength, resilience, and hope in the face of trauma is astounding, and their stories' underlying message about the heartbreaking loss of their former lives and homelands (and the resulting "tangle of emotions that comes with leaving behind everything you know") is profoundly moving.—Publishers Weekly

"A stirring and timely book that strips the political baggage from the words 'migrant' and 'refugee,' telling the deeply personal stories of displacement and disruption that were lived by Yousafzai and nine other girls. ... [In] all these accounts, hope emerges as a kind of belligerent reaction to pain and loss."—The New York Times Book Review

"While geared to mature middle and high school level listeners, this is an audiobook that could be listened to and discussed in a guided family or school setting. Anyone who wants to learn more about immigration and refugees will benefit from this telling."—School Library Journal, review of audiobook edition

From the Publisher

…a stirring and timely book that strips the political baggage from the words "migrant" and "refugee," telling the deeply personal stories of displacement and disruption that were lived by Yousafzai and nine other girls…In the girls' own words, we hear about escape, resettlement and the conflicting emotions that come with fitting into a new place when so much is defined by where they came from. The accounts are intimate, and strike me as honest. At times, it felt as if the narrator were sharing her story with a trusted new friend…Racism and discrimination are painful elements in the daily lives of minorities in countries torn apart by war and civil unrest, but also right here in the United States. This helps make We Are Displaced relatable and relevant to a wide range of readers. What makes it memorable, though, is that in all these accounts, hope emerges as a kind of belligerent reaction to pain and loss.

The New York Times Book Review - Fernanda Santos

12/24/2018

Nobel Peace Prize winner Yousafzai (I Am Malala), who famously survived being shot by Taliban soldiers as a teen in 2012, is a passionate activist for girls’ right to education. Yet, in this profound volume, she sidesteps those aspects of her life to illuminate another experience: displacement—beginning with her family’s forced 2009 evacuation of their Pakistani hometown in response to escalating Taliban violence. Comprising the bulk of the book are urgent, articulate first-person stories from displaced or refugee young women whom Yousafzai has encountered in her travels, whose birthplaces include Colombia, Guatemala, Syria, and Yemen. Their often raw testaments encompass witnessing atrocities (a Congolese native whose family fled to Zambia watched a vigilante mob attack her mother) and harrowing escapes (as the military burns their Myanmar village, a Rohingya Muslim family flees by foot to begin an arduous journey to Bangladesh). The contributors’ strength, resilience, and hope in the face of trauma is astounding, and their stories’ underlying message about the heartbreaking loss of their former lives and homelands (and the resulting “tangle of emotions that comes with leaving behind everything you know”) is profoundly moving. Ages 14–up. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/01/2019

Gr 7 Up—While Yousafzai's autobiography, I Am Malala, describes her life in Pakistan culminating in her dramatic altercation with the Taliban, this book highlights some of the work Yousafzai has done since she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The first part provides additional information on Yousafzai's life in Pakistan with an emphasis on her experience as an internally displaced person and the later challenges of acclimating to life as a refugee in Great Britain. In the second part of the book, readers are provided with narratives from other refugee girls who met with Yousafzai in different stages of her work. These stories depict the lives of girls from all over the world, pushed from their homes for different reasons and yet, Yousafzai highlights consistent themes found in each one. From the Middle East to South America, Africa to Asia, these girls and their families faced the same challenge: leaving their homes and the communities they love. Yousafzai writes with gut-wrenching detail, showing readers the many complex layers of life as a refugee including the struggle of escape, the frustrations of bureaucracy in the face of mortal danger, and the painful goodbyes along the way. She shines a light on the personal side of this international crisis and pushes every individual to find a way to contribute to the solution. VERDICT Everyone should read this book.–Paige Rowse, Needham High School, MA

School Library Journal

Listeners will especially enjoy the foreword of this audiobook, narrated by Malala Yousafzai, in which she acknowledges that her well-known background will provide context for the many personal stories of loss that are told by refugee girls. Before each affecting story, listeners are given a brief introduction that recounts how Malala met the contributor. These intros provide consistency as the same narrator, Neela Vaswani, reads them. They include several passages that have been updated for the audio edition. Deepti Gupta delivers most of the interviews of the girls, and the occasional affectations and accents she uses to differentiate them can be distracting and take away from the stories, which are affecting on their own. Nonetheless, this is a painful and powerful listening experience that imparts current and historical events with emotional depth. E.J.F. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2019 - AudioFile

★ 2018-11-12

In this uplifting work Yousafzai shares the survival stories of female refugees from around the world.

Before she was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Yousafzai was displaced. When she was just 11-years-old, the Taliban forced Yousafzai and her family to leave their idyllic home in the Swat Valley and join the ranks of Pakistan's Internally Displaced Persons. Yousafzai recounts the agony of leaving behind her books, friends, and pet chickens and the disappointment of interrupted schooling. She also vividly describes the horror of seeing schools reduced to rubble as a result of bombings, an experience that both politicized her and forced her family into exile in England. The author devotes only about a quarter of the book to her own story, the remainder is a collection of oral histories from displaced women and girls from countries ranging from Yemen to Colombia to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Each refugee's tale of survival is equal parts devastating and inspiring, and the narrators do not shy away from the complex, contradictory experiences of fleeing a homeland. The narratives are filled with emotionally specific descriptive details that render each voice powerful and unique. In the prologue, Yousafzai specifically states that her purpose is to transform refugees from nameless, faceless statistics into who they really are: humans whose identities are more than just their displaced status.

A poignant, fascinating, and relevant read. (author's note, background information, biographies) (Nonfiction. 13-adult)

Kirkus Reviews