At this point, I am sure many of you have heard of Malala Yousufzai (yes, I’m linking to Wikipedia– just a good way to get an overview if you’re unfamiliar), the young Pakistani girl who was attacked and nearly killed because she sought an education as a young woman. Her story sparked an outcry through the Western world, and she has since become an activist for women’s rights and education justice. She has written a book, “I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban” and appeared as a guest on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In short, the Western media loves her. However, our class readings on the overlap of human rights, commodification, and life narratives has made me question some of the ways she is talked about. Before we continue: Malala is absolutely an extremely courageous and very intelligent person– it is absolutely not the intention of this post to attack her in any way. Rather, I would like to draw attention to the way her story and she herself has been “commodified”, as Gillian Whitlock would say, by the West.

In her book “Soft Weapons,” Whitlock discusses the power of life narratives to insight change by illuminating injustice. Shaffer and Smith also highlight this in their article “Conjuctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights”. Both, however, also detail the potential for life narratives to become a tool that simple supports whatever dominant concepts the West has about itself and other countries. In the case of Malala, I believe that many Westerners are using her story to support the “enlightened, morally upstanding West” and “backward, corrupt East” tropes that are part of what Shaffer and Smith would call our “national myths.” For a more in-depth assessment of this, I will direct you here.

While perusing an unnamed social media site, I happened upon a brief story about another young Pakistani girl named Nabila. She recently traveled to the United States to speak at a Congressional hearing on CIA drone warfare, and spoke about her grandmother, a civilian who was killed by U.S. drones in Pakistan (I haven’t seen it, but her testimony is available to watch here). Only five member of Congress bothered to show up to the hearing.  Meanwhile, Malala’s story has been covered by pretty much every major news outlet in the United States. (In the interest of full disclosure– Al Jazeera has also made this comparison, but it was after I started writing this so I’m just gonna finish. It’s available here, and is much more in-depth than this post.)

Malala and Nabila are both brave, they both have important things to say, and they both deserve to be heard. Malala’s story meshes well with the West-as-savior daydream that many Westerners (and Western foreign policies!) buy into. Nabila’s opinion is unpopular: she is challenging our biases and standing up, as one young girl, to the entire U.S. government– and they refuse to even acknowledge her presence. A just nation doesn’t cherry-pick injustices that it finds convenient to fight, it pays attention to injustice everywhere. We must be aware of when we are complicit in this silencing and amplification, and pay close attention to whose stores are told.