Breaking The Unwritten

‘Blandine, the girl who hid books under her skirt.’ That's probably how the students and teachers in my school still remember me. I was quite a handful as a child, a little too curious and bold for the adults’ taste. A raging headache to both my teachers and parents, making beatings and scoldings an integral part of my childhood.

In my sixth class, I had a math teacher who was extremely strict and beat kids for even the smallest mistake. For every wrong answer, he would add one beating to our tally and give us all of the punishment together. By the time it's Friday, most of us will have a good number of beats ready to be received. With my notorious energy and curiosity, I would have collected around 50 to 60 beatings every week. There was no way that I would survive that many beatings, nor did I plan to, so I decided to play smart by wearing two uniform dresses under my current one, and even hid a couple of books inside my dress to fool the teacher. My plan was successful for a while, and things were going really smoothly for me.

But to my bad luck, on this particular Friday, when I was all prepared to receive punishment with my hidden books and two sets of uniforms, the math teacher had to leave the classroom for an emergency. Upon his instruction, another teacher came in to hand out punishment, who had a habit of grabbing the uniform dress in one hand before beating us.

So, when he grabbed my uniform, he could feel that the dress was unusually thick. When he tried to hit, it was like hitting a drum. Of course, as a teacher who has seen countless students trying to outsmart them over the years, he immediately caught on to what was happening. He asked me to take out the books, and took the second dress I was layering, tied it around my neck, and dragged me to the corridor where the p3 and p4 classes were. He made me stand in the corridor the entire day as punishment. He expected me to feel sorry and scared, but instead, I was just smiling and waving at the kids in the class. All of them looked out of the window to see what was going on, and kids started retelling this story from class to class, and soon it became a school legend.

People still laugh about this incident. At that time, it may have looked like just another stubborn act from a difficult child. But it didn’t come from nowhere. That instinct to resist, to improvise, to outsmart rules instead of quietly submitting to them, had been forming long before I ever sat in a classroom. It was shaped by the place I grew up, the lives I watched unfold around me, and the narrow paths I was told were the only ones available to me.

The Environment That Raised Me
During my childhood, I had briefly stayed over in refugee camps due to political instabilities in the country. I still vividly remember those days. Rows and rows of tents, big families with a bunch of children huddling together in a small place, and fathers leaving in the morning in search of a job that will feed their families. The mothers are sweating in the kitchen, cooking for everyone, and instructing their daughters on the art of homemaking, while the boys run around here and there.