Book Review: The Hysterical Girls Of St. Bernadette’s by Hanna Alkaf

I am a longtime fan of Hanna Alkaf’s, so when I heard that she was setting her latest novel in one of the prestigious girl’s secondary schools of Kuala Lumpur, I absolutely had to get my hands on it. It isn’t just that I knew that, as with the rest of her books, the quality of the storytelling would be high and the descriptions faithful to our shared culture. What I most desperately wanted to see was how she would take on a phenomenon that one hundred percent haunted my own upbringing in Malaysia.

Full disclosure: I attended a private school in KL before finishing my secondary education at a remote boarding school in the north of the country. My sister, however, had a brief but formative stint at the very school that inspired the St. Bernadette’s of this novel. Both of us knew of the rumors of student possession or had run-ins with adjacent situations. So I went into this book both immensely curious and fully prepared to meet whatever interpretation of mass hysteria Puan Hanna would decide to portray in its pages.

The Hysterical Girls Of St. Bernadette’s revolves around two particular students of a secondary school modeled after the author’s own alma mater. Fourth former Khad survived something only referred to as “the incident”, after which she sank into a voicelessness that is mostly chosen. Aside from not speaking up in classes anymore, her academic life is fine. It helps that she has the unwavering support of her two best friends, Sumi and Flo. School, to a large extent, is Khad’s happy place, and is certainly better than her actual home.

When the screaming outbreak starts among the student body, Khad just wants to keep her head down so that things will go back to normal as quickly as possible. Her detached attitude changes, however, when she gets a front row seat to the onset of hysterical screaming in her own classroom several days after the first incidents:

In the background, Puan Ramlah is still going on in aggrieved tones [but] I’m not listening. I’m not even looking at her. I can only stare at Ranjeetha’s face. And for a second–for just one brief second–Ranjeetha looks back at me. And the expression in her eyes is one that I recognize. A look of pure terror, a look that begs, Save me. Please save me. Please. It’s going to happen and I can’t stop it. Please, Khad. Please–

 

And then her eyes glaze over and become wide and staring. And there’s absolutely nothing I can do but watch as Ranjeetha opens her mouth and begins to scream.

Feeling powerless is not something that Khad is comfortable with. Things get worse when her younger sister Aishah, also a student at the school, falls victim to hysterical screaming too. Aishah tells her afterwards that she doesn’t remember what happened, that she blacked out. Some of their fellow students murmur that evil spirits lurking in the school must be taking possession of the girls, but Khad isn’t convinced. St. Bernadette’s has always been a refuge for her. Something else has to be going on.

Meanwhile, fifth former Rachel is struggling with the pressures her demanding mother increasingly lays on her. It doesn’t help that the shy, awkward teenager doesn’t have any friends to confide in or relax with. When the screaming starts, she considers it just another life obstacle to be studied and overcome, despite her classmates’ superstitions and little antagonisms when she tries to be helpful:

Dahlia stares at me. “No shit, Little Miss Wikipedia.”

 

I shift uncomfortably in my seat. I don’t know why people look at me like this when I provide information they’ve been looking for. Like I’m weird or wrong for doing my research and knowing things. “What? I looked it up on the internet. You know. When it first started. Anyway, the point is, it’s never gone on longer than sixteen days. If it isn’t over by today, it will be in, like, two weeks.”

 

“I guess.” She nibbles on one of her perfect nails. “So, what causes mass hysteria, then?”

 

“Nobody really knows.” The Mother in my head sneers, They just want attention. What else?

As more and more girls begin succumbing to inexplicable fits of screaming, Khad and Rachel learn that this isn’t the first time that the students of St. Bernadette’s have fallen prey to mass hysteria. Worse, the last time it happened, one of the screamers subsequently disappeared. When one of their own schoolmates vanishes under impossible circumstances, Khad and Rachel will have to join forces to find her and solve the mystery of their school… or die trying.

This poignant examination of how girls are valued less as individual people and more as commodities is another strong addition to Puan Hanna’s oeuvre, blending the supernatural with far more mundane if just as heartbreaking crimes, up to and including murder. An evil force is preying on the students of St. Bernadette’s, and the only way that they know how to stop it–at least before Khad and Rachel get involved–is through the collective subconscious. I did think it a little odd that the word “rape” is never used in this book, with gentler euphemisms preferred, and I did wish that the ending had been a little less tidy. But the realism of the girls’ conflicted emotions–one choosing voicelessness in protest and punishment at having her warnings overlooked, while the other struggles to be more than the perfect little robot her mother wants her to be–are brilliantly depicted, as are the psychological states of the other young women involved throughout.