Libyan cultural lore held that a left-handed girl had a devil that ate alongside her. Malak Ben Hmeda was four (EP 24).
In parts of Libyan and wider Arab culture, left-handedness has historically carried stigma: the left hand is the impure hand, used for washing. Left-handed children were commonly pressured to switch. The variant Ben Hmeda encountered was more colourful — she was told that the devil ate with her.
At four years old, her answer was that her devil must therefore be very fat. She did not switch hands. She did not argue. She converted the threat into a joke and kept writing with the hand she already used.
Ben Hmeda treats the episode as the first documented instance of her operating principle: that what other people believe about her is not her problem to solve. It later became the filter she used when narrowing twenty-five business ideas down to one, and when refusing to flinch at manufacturers who had mis-read her name as the masculine "Malik." (See: Oh My Gum.)
The story also sits inside a broader pattern visible across Damiri's female guests: small, early, private acts of refusal — not confrontations — that build the foundations for much larger acts of public refusal later. It is a close cousin of Throwing the Hijab into the Sea, except that here the refusal happens at four, in a child's bedroom, using a joke.
See: Women in Libya