Chapter 3:
Prisoner of War
“Put your hand out.” My teacher said.
I look around at my classmates. On their faces, I see a mixture of delight, terror, and empathy for what I’m about to endure. There’s nothing worse than doing the exact thing you don’t want to do. I didn’t want to put it out. But I did.
I tried to keep as much distance as possible between myself and my hand. I braced myself. At that moment, my teacher truly felt like God. They were all-powerful, and I was as insignificant as could be.
This may have been a traumatic encounter, but it wasn’t rare. Someone got beaten almost daily. It would be rare for us to make it a week without someone getting theirs.
Think about how fucked up this situation was — so many people can relate to being bullied by other kids at school. But what about when the violence came down from the institution itself?
For this reason, I can honestly say that growing up in St. Lucia felt a lot like being a prisoner of war. I know this because I once watched a movie called Unbroken. At one point, there’s a whole section of the film where the main character is a prisoner of war. I watched him get beaten and tortured. I watched him shovel latrines. I watched his tormentor gleefully commit war crime after war crime. And I thought, how relatable.
The teachers took sadistic pleasure in causing us pain. Some of them gave their thick wooden sticks pet names. Like “Long Hot and Spicy”. Or… “Tickler”. This barbaric practice was only recently abolished, thank GOD. However, some people fought for decades before they were able to sway public opinion on the topic of corporal punishment.
Violence was so normalized that it would genuinely shake you to find out what kinds of brutal acts are commonplace in the country.
Everyone in the class got their ass whooped, so we bonded over it. I got it, so you deserved to get it, too. And, after growing up like that, most people here couldn’t wait to dump all of their rage, aggression, and hostility onto the next generation. You couldn’t convince them otherwise.
The tiniest bit of therapy would have gone such a long way, yet ironically, most people here look upon therapy the way Americans think about voodoo. It’s this scary and evil thing that never works. They were hardcore “spare the rod and spoil the child” types. It was all so fucked up. And it gets so much worse than what I’m describing to you right now…
The first strike would always be the worst.
My teacher cranked her arm back with her stick raised to the sky.
There was dead silence. Everyone held their breath.
Her arm comes down like an axe.
I jerk my hand back as a nervous reflex—an involuntary act of self-preservation.
“If you do that again.” She said. “I’ll make it worse.”
I put my hand out. This time, I have to force myself to keep it there. The stick comes crashing down. It makes a whoosh as it cuts through the air. The strike makes a crack that could be heard three classrooms away. Everyone in my grade would know what happened by the time it was over. It feels like hot lava. At that moment, my brain broke. I can’t believe this is happening to me. This is so violating.
I take eight strikes in total. My palm is swollen and blood-red.
Most boys my age could take the beating and pretend to be completely unfazed. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t one of those boys.
