Malala Yousafzai Talks Immigration, Activism In Visit To Brooklyn

FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN — The world's youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai paid a visit to Brooklyn last week, stopping by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to discuss her latest book and answer questions from local high school students.

Yousafzai spoke to a crowd at BAM's Howard Gilman Opera House about everything from the United States' immigration policies to how she found the courage as a teenager to speak out against the Taliban in her native Pakistan.

“People are not welcoming refugees right now, there’s a negative attitude toward them," Yousafzai said, according to live tweets from the event. "It is important that we go and hear and share their stories.”

Her newest book does just that. In "We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World" Yousafzai shares the experiences of girls she has met in refugee camps and cities in her travels as an activist. The net sales proceeds from the book will go to her education nonprofit for young girls, the Malala Fund.

New York Times journalist Rukmini Callimachi led the interview for the "Unbound: Malala Yousafzai" event, which was co-presented by BAM and the Greenlight Bookstore.

Yousafzai also answered questions about how she deals with negative comments online — in that, she doesn't read them — and her own journey to becoming an activist at such a young age.

“It would have been worse if I hadn’t," Yousafzai said about her work in Pakistan. "If you don’t speak out, you have to live your whole life with that.”

The now-21-year-old became known around the world when she was targeted by the Taliban and shot in the head on her way home from school in 2012. Back then, Yousafzai had been writing for BBC Urdu about life under the Taliban under a pen name.

Since surviving the incident, she has continued her activism for education.

She won the National Youth Peace Prize in Pakistan in 2011, the International Children's Peace Prize, the Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award in 2013 and was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Photos by Michael Benigno, provided by BAM.