At a premier girl’s school in Kuala Lumpur, young girls suddenly start to scream. It begins with one teenager at St Bernadette’s, and what follows is a wave of mass hysteria, with seventeen young girls breaking into blood curdling, uncontrollable screams within a single day. They later report seeing something that triggered them, but no one seems to know what they’ve seen, or why this is happening.
Young adult writer Hana Alkaf didn’t have to look far for inspiration for her latest novel The Hysterical Girls of St Bernadette’s. Her native country Malaysia has had a number of mass hysteria cases in the last decade, most taking place in girl’s schools in Kelantan, the most religiously conservative of the Malaysian provinces. There are reports of teenage girls screaming in schools as recent as April 2024. One first person’s report from 2012 tells of girls climbing trees at inhuman speeds while shrieking in tongues, possibly possessed by spirits mistakenly called at a séance. This reality is acknowledged by one of Alkaf’s two protagonists when she researches the incidents at her school and finds out that a “British expert” called Malaysia the mass hysteria capital of the world. “I wonder what makes him an expert,” thinks the young Khadijah.
Khadijah hasn’t spoken in months: She suffers from traumatic mutism, after what is hinted at as an abusive incident that took place at home. Though she’s back at school, she is not ready to speak yet, when her voice had been ignored for so long until the actual violence happened, but she is still fiercely protective of her younger sister, and when the screaming reaches her, Khadijah is adamant to find out what is going on.
Meanwhile high achieving star student Rachel is buckling under the pressure her mother has put on her to be perfect; what Rachel wants is more than just what her mother dictates and expects. And so Rachel lies to find a way to explore her non-academic interests, but that is just more pressure on an already crumbling girl, and Rachel’s façade begins to crack.
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The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s
Khadijah and Rachel’s fates are entwined, we are told by the blurb, but this doesn’t happen until much later. The story is told via alternating POV narratives by each of the girls, as they each navigate their personal lives amongst the continuous chaos at their school. St Bernadette’s has a dark secret, one that is rearing its ugly face again, and neither Khadijah nor Rachel can escape it. Khadijah chooses to dig deeper and investigate, but Rachel is pulled in forcibly, haunted by ghosts of unfulfilled potential.
In the novel, the screaming begins in a classroom “swampier than a sinner’s armpit in the depths of hell,” with a new student. The first scream is “not a pretty, perfectly pitched horror-movie scream. It is hoarse and low, and it shakes and skips, as if whatever is causing it is forcibly strangling it out of the screamer, shaking it out of them in fits and starts.” The girl’s eyes are “‘”wide and staring, gazing up toward a specific spot in the corner of the ceiling as if fixed on something only she can see, something she desperately wishes she couldn’t.”
But what is it that is triggering the screaming? When the girls are calm again, they report some sort of shadow lurking around the edges of their vision, so the school’s administration takes no chances and have the premises “cleansed” by a Muslim cleric, a priest and a monk, to “cover all the bases. Equal opportunity ghost-busting.” Is it mass hysteria? Is it a jinn, a ghost, a haunting of some sort? Something evil that the school is trying to bury… or had tried to bury a long time ago?
At times the two girls’ voices blur, though of course each character’s experience is different. The book’s pacing lags a little, and many readers will find themselves having guessed the final reveal, hurtling through a very delayed denouement, with conclusions eventually arriving rapidly. But it hardly matters in the end, because Alkaf creates a great local atmosphere, with no pandering towards English language readers or a specific intentional audience. The story is told as it would be in an English speaking environment in Malaysia, with plenty of local terms and Bahasa words utilised, with a fun use of metaphors in dialogue.
Behind all this lies a sensitive, astute exploration of trauma, and how it can manifest physically in young women. Alkaf subtly points out how so many girls and women suffer silently for so long before their experiences are believed, how the pressures to live up to parents’ expectations can break a teenager’s will and mind, how easy it is for the world to brand young women as hysterical, to write their fears and traumas off as overly dramatic responses to imagined situations, how those who are meant to protect you can not always do so, or worse—may choose not to, in order to protect their own reputations. That young girls are dispensable—therein lies the true horror in this narrative.
Ultimately, this is a story of sisterhood and bonds between teenage girls: When no one can help them, the girls of St Bernadette’s have to step up, help and heal each other and themselves. As Khadijah points out, “pretending it didn’t [happen] doesn’t help… if we can figure out the how and the why, we can stop it from happening again… That’s why I will do this now… Ask questions. Raise my voice if I must. My sister will not be that body. My sister will not pay for their belief. I will not allow it. That’s why. Because that’s what big sisters are supposed to do.”
The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s is published by Salaam Reads.
