Nobel winner Malala Yousafzai says bong hit at Oxford party resurfaced Taliban attack trauma

Nobel lauriet Malala Yousafzai has revealed her traumatic experience of smoking weed at an University of Oxford house party.

After taking two hits, the activist explained she passed out until the early morning and was carried back to her room before collapsing.

As she was struggling to regain control of her body, a “slideshow” of images played in her head, reminding her of the Taliban’s attack on her when she was only 15.

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She told The Guardian where her mind went to: “My school bus. A man with a gun. Blood everywhere. My body carried through a crowded street. Strangers hunched over me, yelling things I didn’t understand. My father rushing toward the stretcher to take my hand.”

“I had never felt so close to the attack as then, in that moment. I felt like I was reliving all of it, and there was a time when I just thought I was in the afterlife”, she added.

Malala rose to international fame in the early 2010s as a teenager through her persistent activism and defiance of the oppressive Taliban regime controlling her home of Swat Valley, Pakistan.

After years of fighting against gender discrimination, violence and oppression, the Taliban launched an attack on her by ambushing her school bus, shooting the then 15 year old in the head.

The attack led to widespread condemnation of the regime, and she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize two years later for her fight against the Taliban and activism in supporting girl’s education. Malala became the youngest recipient of the prize in 2014

The attack left her in a coma fighting for her life with a lacerated facial nerve, shattered eardrum and broken jaw among her injuries.

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In her upcoming memoir, I Am Malala,  she opens up about “erasing” the memories of the attack, but how the feeling of losing control of her body after smoking weed for the first time quickly brought the horrors back.

She recalls the event, which took place at a small get together in the gardens of Oxford University’s Lady Margaret Hall, where Malala met her friend, Anisa, and two other guys in “the shack”, a small gardeners hut on the grounds.

They were sat around an “unusual object” she described as a “clear glass container” with  a “smaller glass tube poking out at the base and looked like something nicked from the chemistry lab”.

Before telling her what it was, one of the boys picked it up and held his lighter over the small tube and disappearing “behind a cloud of smoke”, the smell of which answered her question.

After getting caught in a coughing fit after her first rip, she took a second which left her in a zoned-out state until the early hours of the morning, when she was walked back to her dorm by Anisa.

On her walk back, she started to lose control of her legs, saying her “brain was sending signals into a void.” This helpless feeling brought back the “terror of being trapped inside [her] body”, and the memory that “this had happened before”.

She remembers struggling with her own brain to wake back up, managing to call out to Anisa, saying: “I can’t walk! Please help me!”

Anisa was able to carry her back to her room, where she encouraged Malala to sleep it off, but in a state of panic, unable to breathe and with her head spinning it didn’t feel possible.

Together, with a friend who joined her, Anisa sat with Malala throughout the night while she struggled to combat the nightmares in her head.

After throwing up in the toilet, Malala decided to try to sleep again, saying: “I got in bed, but I didn’t sleep. I could still see a familiar world around me – her books on the desk, polo mallet in the corner, the waning moon shining through the window.

“If I closed my eyes, it would all be gone for ever. The nightmares would hold me hostage in an endless loop of terror.”

She recalled in her memoir that even though she had convinced herself that she hadn’t remember the shooting, telling people that “One moment I was at school and the next I woke up in Birmingham”, her experience in the Oxford shed proved that this wasn’t true: “I had seen it all, and the memories were still lurking in my brain, years later.”

Featured image via Google Maps and Instagram @malala