Satire, Sound, and Swine: The 2009 Flu Pandemic Goes (Musically) Viral

A pink pig puppet in a black and white striped hat with a bucolic background

News flash: “Swine flu breeds in pigs,” says announcer Anderson Cooper on CNN, and we flash through five flu alerts (including one interview with a masked couple) as we listen to the opening chords of “The Swine Flu Song,” posted to YouTube by PutnamPig in April 2009. Before we even make it to the first verse, we’re aware of the positionality of its creator. News anchors have been modified to judder, their mouths shaking in a visual equivalent of a musical trill, yet their anxious words proceed undoctored – except for the underscoring, of course. The news here is suspect, its narrative in question, the packaging of global media shown to be an artificial manipulation of reality. It is, in other words, an effective intro for a pop song about a problematic world event, written within a few days of the topic becoming international news.

And when we do get to the verse, it quickly becomes apparent that this is a satire, mocking the concept of Swine Flu as a whole and, even more, to the public narrative about the threat. The bulk of the text is delivered by a puppet pig wearing a black and white striped hat and an FBI shirt (! standing for “Bald Innocent” !), singing in a whiny and nasal Elmo-like voice, the timbre of which may haunt your dreams. That, coupled with the obsessive melodic repetition – relying on a pentatonic scale (degrees 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6, a melodic language which avoids all the musically-directional half-steps) over and over and over again – creates a catchy-but-annoying landscape in which one’s brain knows exactly what to expect – and so slides its attention to the words.

Those words are quite remarkable too. From a textual standpoint, the song purports to be debunking the false claims leveled against the poor pig population. Pigs didn’t cause the swine flu, the song contends. It comes… from a lab. This is particularly funny if you happen to identify the musical inspiration behind the song – Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” The claim here is much the same: if we’re culturally are not at fault for everything going wrong in society, well, pigs aren’t at fault for the swine flu either. The parallel is amusing.

PutnamPig’s version of the song has three verse sets, each of which includes four short quatrains linked together in a parallel structure (a1, a2; a1, a3). These, per standard pop-song format, alternate with a chorus. Structurally, after the beginning clips which orient us to the newsworthiness of the song, there are two more intercut news clips with continued harmonic underscore: one between the pairs of quatrains in the first set, and a much shorter one between the two pairs of the second set of verses. The overall structure is:

    News+Intro, Verse 1a, News, 1b, Chorus, 2a, News, 2b, Chorus, 3a, 3b, Chorus, Chorus, Outro

Image of Toot & Puddle

The first set of verses (1a through 1b) names a whole series of wholesome childrens’-book characters  as their images flash on screen; none, points out the song, have any symptoms:

Miss Piggy, Arnold Ziffle,
neither has a little sniffle
Porky Pig and Pooh's Piglet,
No fever yet

Putnam, Gordy, Toot and Puddle,
Not contagious safe to snuggle
Ask Petunia Babe, Noelle
All of them feel well

The patter presentation, mostly presented recitationally, plus the regular rhyming and the attention-grabbing hiatus for Piglet at the cadential drop – “No fever yet” [pause] -- pulls us into children’s song landscape.

But we cut back to the news alert, “The World Health Organization says it appears to be spread from human to human.” That topic seems to inspire a shift of melodic structure, for the second pair of strophes of the first verse (1b) start out parallel to the first pair, but digress as the song starts to blame-storm. Instead of heading downward for the cadence as we did for Piglet, the melody (can we call the recited text a melody?) moves upwards to an anxious clangor: “Now it’s in the USA, No one's safe this day and age!” Hammered out in bad Elmo-esque whine with staccato 8th notes repeating the same pitch 14 times (with some intonation bending), we certainly get the idea of street-shouting, even though there is nominally only the single singer:

How it started I don't know
Stay away from Mexico
Now it's in the USA
No one's safe this day and age

Together, that verse 1 complex makes sense of an unfolding pandemic: everyone’s well, and when they’re not, well, perhaps intensification should be the go-to response:

But there is some relief, at least musically. That pentatonic melody from the beginning, that seemed really repetitive? By now we’re glad to have its multi-pitch variety return in as the music of the chorus. Having established a recitational style during the four quatrains of verse one, the contrast of style comes as a relief and enhances the chorus’s musical allure. 

The text context of the chorus, however, is firmly in the realm of conspiracy: “Pigs didn’t start the swine flu / Blame the laboratory / For this awful Story // Pigs didn't start the swine flu / No we've been betrayed /The strain appears man-made… “ With the punchline rhymes of “betrayed” and “manmade,” the song posits a nefarious origin rather than a porcine one.

The second set of verses also starts by shaping the melody to descend at the end of each quatrain, but as we approach the next blame-topic, we again elevate the pitch as we escalate the claims, again with the shouty reciting: “Run a temp and get the chills / Everyone run for the hills.” There’s truth buried in the text – no-one blames dogs, for instance. (That’s actually for good reason, though. For swine flu (H1N1), the transmission chain was human to dog, rather than the reverse, and normal canine influenzas, HDN8 and H3N2, don’t typically infect humans.)

The third set of strophes actually starts at the escalated and elevated pitch as if shouting rejection to its claims; instead of viewing pigs as “clean and pink,” the association of name with virus sticks in the mind. Of course, the same was true for the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968; there is a reason we have moved from location-based naming of diseases. As it happens, the World Health Organization’s guidance in 2015 – six years after the 2009 Swine Flu – suggested avoiding associative terms for new diseases, in part because they triggered the needless slaughter of food animals. The world is counseled to avoid:

    • geographic locations (e.g. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Spanish Flu, Rift Valley fever),
    • people’s names (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Chagas disease),
    • species of animal or food (e.g. swine flu, bird flu, monkey pox),
    • cultural, population, industry or occupational references (e.g. legionnaires), and
    • terms that incite undue fear (e.g. unknown, fatal, epidemic).

Putnam’s recommendations, it seems, were culturally resonant, and eventually acted upon!

As we move toward the end of the song, the third strophe’s second half follows the more familiar shape. It offers a lower first quatrain first, and then the by-now-familiar escalation, this time for the climax: “This disease it needs a name / Which animals should we defame / Nobody will likely mind / If we named it for an ugly swine.”

The song ends with two full statements of the chorus, and a long instrumental outro. Over the first part of the outro, Putnam speaks his final lines, which are, curiously, non-rhyming, conveying both a sense of intimate conversation (just him as speaker and the solitary listener listening to confidences that just happen to be picked up by microphone), and an authentic perspective after the highly stylized and structured main body:

The pigs are innocent I tell you / We didn't do anything wrong
We didn't start this disease / But we're taking all the blame.

With all that, have a listen to the whole song: 

PutnamPig, “The Swine Flu Song,” April 30, 2009

 

ORIGINS AND CONTEXT

PutnamPig (who goes only by that cognomen, even on Facebook and LinkedIn, leaving his/her/their actual identity private) is primarily a Minecraft account, and was set up a year before the swine flu pandemic. Even though coming to health commentary as a sidelight to their normal offerings, their swine flu song is remarkably well-aligned with sentiments of the time, and perhaps even prescient.

Two things strike me as particularly insightful.  First, the timeline of events, traced by Paul Shapshak et al. (2011) and Smallman (2015), shows that Putnam’s creator was actually quite forward-looking, writing about the flu before it was considered a global pandemic. The lyrics early on in the song point out that cases were now being found in the United States. This is a remarkably quick capture of the event that had actually justified the change of the disease’s status to stage 5, as the timeline shows. The song was posted just 8 days after the first national alert, and only four after the US declaration of a public health emergency:

• March 24-April 24, 2009: influenza infections in Mexico
• April 22: the Mexican government issues a national alert
• April 23: the US government announces 7 cases across Texas and California
• April 25: the Mexican government declares a public health emergency
• April 26: The US government declares a public health emergency
• April 27: H1N1 found in Europe
• April 29: WHO raises pandemic alert level to “phase 5” (with outbreaks at least two countries in one WHO region)
• April 30: Egypt announces a cull of pig herds
• APRIL 30: PutnamPig’s Swine Flu Song
• May 2, 2009 China suspended flights to Mexico
• June 12, 2009: WHO announces a full “phase 6” pandemic alert level
• August 10, 2010, the WHO declared an end to the 2009 influenza A/H1N1 pandemic

Or maybe that’s easier to see in the calendrical view – here, yellow is outbreak, blue is government action, and pink is the song’s debut:

A little more than a week from first government action to the song's debut

Likewise, the themes of the chorus – the purported laboratory origins and man-made release of the disease – align with many of the conspiracy theories Smallman (2015) was able to trace, including a cluster which called out Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s long-term involvement with Gilead Laboratories as a potential beneficiary of a global pandemic. They were, after all, the ones who owned TamiFlu. As they say, “Information” doesn’t have to be true to circulate widely on the internet. Smallman also implicates YouTube as a news source, finding that more than 15% of the 142 “news” videos examined from that first few months of the swine flu epidemic “called the outbreak a man-made conspiracy.”

PutnamPig’s “Swine Flu Song” stands as both a time capsule and a cultural artifact. Although it shares the relentlessly upbeat idiom of the Flying Fish Sailor’s confrontation with the past in “The Flu Pandemic Song” (which I wrote about last month), it differs in important ways, since the “Swine Flu Song” captures the anxieties, misinformation, and conspiratorial currents that swirled around the 2009 pandemic as it was happening. It is reportage, but reportage with a difference. Its rapid creation and viral spread underscore the speed with which music, satire, and digital media can shape public perception, particularly in moments of crisis. By setting news clips against an intentionally grating yet catchy melody, the song exposes the performative aspects of media-driven panic while, ironically, simultaneously participating in the same ecosystem of viral information. 

 

A decade and a half later, the song’s themes remain strikingly relevant, reminding us that the ways we frame disease – whether through news narratives or pop-cultural satire – carry real consequences for how societies respond to outbreaks, assign blame, and remember pandemics.

WORKS CITED:

Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” from the album Storm Front (1989), with the chorus “We didn't start the fire / It was always burning / Since the world's been turning / We didn't start the fire  / No, we didn't light it / But we tried to fight it...” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

Billy Joel, mocking his own melody for “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx3T8pbDcms 

Cynthia Cyrus, “Flu Music as Mockery: The Flying Fish Sailors and Pandemic Humor” [Blog Post], Silences and Sounds, Feb 26, 2025, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/02/flu-music-as-mockery-flying-fish.html
 

History of the H1N1 (“Swine Flu”) outbreak of 2009:

• McCauley, M., Minsky, S. & Viswanath, K. The H1N1 pandemic: media frames, stigmatization and coping. BMC Public Health 13, 1116 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-13-1116; https://rdcu.be/eckME
• Shapshak, P., Chiappelli, F., Somboonwit, C. et al. The Influenza Pandemic of 2009. Mol Diag Ther 15, 63–81 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03256397, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF03256397
• Smallman, Shawn C. “Whom do you trust? Doubt and conspiracy theories in the 2009 influenza pandemic.” Journal of International and Global Studies 6.2 (2015): article 1. https://digitalcommons.lindenwood.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1238&context=jigs

Phases of Pandemics explained: “Pandemic Influenza Preparedness and Response: A WHO Guidance Document,” National Library of Medicine, NIH, from Pandemic Infleunza Preparedness and Response, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK143061/

Visualizing Pandemics: “A visual history of pandemics,” World Economic Forum, Mar 15, 2020  https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/03/a-visual-history-of-pandemics/

WHO disease-naming guidelines: “WHO issues best practices for naming new human infectious diseases.” [Note for Media]. 8 May 2015.
https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-practices-for-naming-new-human-infectious-diseases

 

Flu Music as Mockery: The Flying Fish Sailors and Pandemic Humor

Image from 1919 of three men in hospital beds, two with a head bandages

Music is a multi-purpose tool, and I appreciate its role in public health as a vehicle for advocacy and education. But it also has a sharp edge, one that mocks, satirizes, and even ridicules. Today, I want to explore this opposite side, in which music pokes fun – at public health efforts, at public concern, even at the sufferers of the illness themselves – as a potent human response to pandemics. And the flu in particular has drawn the attention of some deeply creative individuals as a topic for mockery. (So did COVID, but that’s a different discussion).

Why? In part, I think that this kind of “humorous take” is a form of catharsis. People process fear and loss in different ways, and graveyard humor is a useful presence in our lives. Musical humor is also, trenchantly, a tool for criticism, including political and social criticism. Through laughter (or at least inner grins), it gives us a space to contemplate the otherwise unthinkable. That people or policies were in fact horrid. That wisdom is not always the guiding hand on the decision tiller. That casual cruelty is sanctioned, and even rewarded. That suffering has been ignored – or even dismissed. “We sing about what we cannot talk about,” say the AIDS educators (McNeil). The same seems to be true in the context of other major medical disasters as well. We sing when we cannot agree. We also sing when we wish to revisit that which we wish to forget.

These humorous takes can have a strong downside, of course. They can reinforce stigma or ridicule those suffering, trivializing real harm. That they do so with a wink and a nod makes us complicit; as viewers, we give mental real-estate to the position that these songs take. And thus, we join the jeering crowds. Miguel Mera argues that “For an audience to find something funny, they must be complicit in this anticipation; they must expect what you predict them to expect.” As we take pleasure in the subversion – anticipation followed by the twist, the dislocation, the joy of the unexpected – we move beyond our own moral narratives to join in the fun. Until we don’t, or at least, until we wish we hadn’t. The line between satire and insensitivity is always thin, especially when illness is involved. Yet clearly “Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe they said that” can go hand in hand with our urge to share. (Waves hand broadly at the internet.)

I offer these observations with direct knowledge aforethought that I am about to partake consciously and deliberately in that ambiguous space of sharing the uncomfortable. I disapprove of the happy message, for instance, of “The Flu Pandemic Song,” a song written and performed by The Flying Fish Sailors from Houston, TX. The repeated cheery refrain, “And they died, died, died” should be nothing to smile at. Yet die they did, those victims of the 1918-19 flu in its various waves. (Old estimates of 20 million dead have been updated since the time that Greg Henkel wrote the song to reflect more geographically diverse parameters; current consensus suggests that the death count was closer to 50 Million dead.)

This song partakes fully in the Flying Fish Sailors’ motto "Happy Music For Happy People," unless, of course, one actually attends to the lyrics. Why am I smiling about millions of deaths? Ugh, but ugh with a guilty sense of pleasure. Warning: it’s an earworm... 

That jaunty chorus may well haunt me forever. The major key and simple harmonic structures, the plain and singable melody with its high sense of motivic unity, all combine to make for a kiddy-song feel far removed from the actual meaning of the chorus:

It was the flu pandemic
And it swept the whole world wide
It caught soldiers and civilians
And they died, died, died!
Whether they’re lying in the trenches
Or lying in their beds
Twenty million of them got it
And they’re dead, dead, dead!

Once you’ve heard it, you’re stuck with it, complicit in its knowledge, and complicit in enjoying the receipt of this knowledge. (“The Flu Pandemic Song” is “Infuriatingly catchy,” as Mera once said of “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers). Here we are together, grinning about the horrors of the past. And here I am, laughing along. Why?

I think that the very moment of discomfort that we experience in such songs is asking us to ask an important question. Why is it that we haven’t thought so much about the nature of this historical crisis? I mean, whether it was 20 million or 50 million dead, it isn’t the sort of thing we should go around forgetting, right? So the song serves yet another function beyond critique or catharsis: it reminds us that we need to be witness to the full scope of human experience, including the deaths – in the hospitals, the trenches, and the far reaches of the globe.

Perhaps that’s the ultimate function of songs like this: not just critique, not just catharsis, but confrontation with the past. These songs refuse to let us look away. To me, the persistence of musical mockery in times of sickness suggests that humor, even in its most irreverent forms, is a deeply human response to the chaos of disease. Whether it’s a medieval plague song, a 20th-century blues lament, or a 21st-century viral TikTok, music helps us laugh—even when (especially when?) we probably shouldn’t. 

WORKS CITED: 

• Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. New York : Viking, 2004. 
• Marrin, Albert. Very, very, very dreadful: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.
• McNeill, Fraser. AIDS, Politics, and Music in South Africa. Cambridge University Press, 2011. 
• Mera, Miguel. “Is Funny Music Funny? Contexts and Case Studies of Film Music Humor.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 14 (2002): 91–113. 
• The Flying Fish Sailors [Website.] https://www.flyingfishsailors.com/, consulted 2/26/25.

Singing Tubercular songs with Fader Movitz (Fredman’s Epistles 1790) (Feb 11, 2025)

Image of Fader Moviz playing the viol with text bubble, "Movitz, your Consumption, it pulls you into the grave..."

While those of you in New York City might be lucky enough to attend the book-launch for John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis (Mar 18, 2025), the rest of us are hanging around with “old TB” – its readings, its meanings, and its character.

Musically speaking, there’s a lot of literature on tubercular heroines (Violetta in La Traviata; Mimi in La Boheme; Antonia in Tales of Hoffmann)

• Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. “Famous last breaths: The tubercular heroine in Opera.” Parallax, 2:1 (1996): 1-22, DOI: 10.1080/13534649609362002

• Kasunic, David. “Tubercular Singing,” Postmodern Culture 24:3 (May 2014).

• Morens, David M. “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8:11 (Nov. 2002):1353-8.

If we follow artistic assertions, to be consumptive is evidently to be a soprano, since so many of the roles are in the Leading Lady idiom. And, of course, these narratives blend into those of the cautionary tale, where the fallen woman and the consumptive prove to be one and the same. That latter theme remains common, with an added whiff of poverty – just think of Fantine from Les Mis, or Satine from Moulin Rouge, not to mention Violetta herself.

TB / Consumption accounted for up to one in six deaths in France 

by the early twentieth century.

The prevalence of the disease made the it and its social consequences quite topical, of course. Though weirdly, not for men, at least not as artistic representation. There are hosts of deaths of artistic men from consumption – Boccherini, Chopin, Keats, George Orwell… But women feature in much of the music, both before and after the baccilus’s discovery in 1882.

Take, for example, this abbreviated list of tubercular characters. Lots of women, and our passionate consumptive Chopin.

• Fader Movitz (Freman’s Epistles by Carl Michael Bellman, 1790)

• Chopin dies of consumption, 1849

• Violetta Valery (La Traviata, Giuseppe Verdi, 1853)

• 1865 Jean-Antoine Villemin: proved TB was contagious (not heritable)

• Antonia (Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Jacques Offenbach, 1881)

• 1882: Robert Koch announces discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis

• Mimi (La Bohème,  Giacomo Puccini,1896)

• Lady Madeline (La Chute de la Maison Usher, Claude Debussy, [incomplete] 1918)

• Sister Benedict (Bells of St Mary's, 1945)

• Fantine (Les Misérables, 1980)

• Satine (Moulin Rouge, 2001)

   

 “In the 18th century in Western Europe, TB had become epidemic with a mortality rate as high as 900 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per year, more elevated among young people. For this reason, TB was also called ‘the robber of youth.’” -- Barberis et al (2017)

On the list, the odd man out – the odd MAN – is that 18^th century character, Fader Movitz. He, and his illness, features in Epistle no. 30: “Till fader Movitz, under dess sjukdom, lungsoten. Elegi” [To Father Movitz, during his illness, consumption. An elegy]. Fader Movitz might not be young, but he is definitely characterized as one of the 900 consumptives per year; we learn various of his symptoms, and know from early on inn stanza 1 that he is terminally ill, though in TB’s typical slow motion fashion. Unlike the ethereal soprano heroines of later operatic tradition, however, Fader Movitz is neither young nor transfiguring; instead, his illness is woven into a bawdy, bittersweet world of drinking songs and resignation.

The composer of the work, Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795), was a Swedish composer, musician, and lyricist. His song collection, Fredman’s Epistles, contains 82 songs. “To Father Movitz” is relatively typical of the song types; they mix themes of drinking with character sketches and scenes ranging from the pastoral to the poignant to the saucy. Movitz appears in 28 of the settings, so this isn’t his only appearance! He is a composer with a famous Concerto, we learn from the book’s character list.

Coming in the middle of the pack, “To Father Movitz” is clearly a song about his consumption (“Lungsot”). Death is coming, but there may be some time (line 4) – after all, TB is a slow-moving disease. Nevertheless, it is an active disease, one that “pulls you into the grave” (line 5). In fact, it’s so effective at drawing you toward death that the first part of the next line belongs not to the singer but solely to the instrumentalists. There’s a bit of a musical pun on the striking of the octave, and then we move upwards (finally) to sing about the fond memories one had.

Drink from your glass, see Death waiting for you,
Sharpen his sword, and stand at your doorstep.
Do not be alarmed, he only glares at the grave door,
Beats it again, maybe even in a year.
Movitz, your Consumption*, it pulls you into the grave.
- - - Strike now the Octave;
Tune your strings, sing about the Spring of life. : |||

(stanza 3): Heavens! you die, your cough scares me;
Emptiness and sound, the entrails make a sound;
The tongue is white, the saving heart hatches;
Soft as a fungus are late marrow and skin.
Breathe. - Fie a thousand times! what fumes are your ashes.
- - - Lend me your bottle.
Movitz, Gutår! Bowl! Sing about the God of wine. : |||

The song is strophic, but sets its mood effectively; all those descending lines, the minor mood, the simple harmonic language, the largely syllabic setting – we aren’t singing of triumph but instead of the inevitable outcome in the local cemetery. And the active agency of consumption is signaled musically by the shift from the predominantly step-wise treatment to the more dramatic leaping, as the illness personified pulls poor Movitz toward the grave.

The third strophe gets into even more graphic details: the cough, the disruption to the guts, the gradual falling apart of health into pallid skin and grotesque forms of mucus-coated tongue. Ick. But, think back on happier times, and toast the God of wine. The inevitable is, well, inevitable.

                           

“About 10 million people around the world do fall ill with the disease. And even though it is preventable and curable, about 1.5 million people die. So it is known as the world's top infectious killer according to the WHO.” -- AMA report, 2/5/25

In this current moment, TB has taken on special poignancy. We know that TB is still “the world’s top infectious killer” under normal circumstances. It doesn’t need to be; there are treatment courses that take 4 to 12 months, depending on drug and dosage. If it isn’t one of those (scary) resistant strains, it’s treatable. And yet people continue to die.

And some of them are dying today in America.

Today, we are experiencing the country's highest-ever TB case numbers over a one-year period. -- AMA report, Feb 2025 and Kansas Civic Alert, Feb 2025

With the Kansas City outbreak doing its best to set records, we should remember that an illness like TB is both PREVENTABLE and TREATABLE. 

Don’t be “that” character in song or story; redemptive endings and transfigured souls are all very well in fiction. But in real life, we’d rather spend our time like Fader Movitz, focused on wine and happy memories.

Singing & Change on World Leprosy Day (1/26/25)

Images from three Indian Leprosy awareness videos

Leprosy (now more properly designated Hansen’s Disease) is a disease of almost overwhelming stigma. It can cause disfigurement and is associated with poverty, all the more so now that treatment is readily available. It is a disease that also causes us to attend to our social response, highlighting the tension between charity and revulsion, inclusion and fear.

The work that goes on around the globe on World Leprosy Day seeks to create social change – to reduce stigma, emphasize treatment and inclusion in community, and break the inter-generational cycle in which leprosy leads to isolation leads to reduced education and livelihood opportunities leads to poverty which leads again to leprosy.

While it’s early yet to see what will be issued for THIS year’s world leprosy day, I’d like to take up three examples of the campaign from previous years which provide a glimpse into the power that music has in these socio-medical campaigns. It is, in other words, an example of music as public health, and one that I like to talk about with students in my Music, Pandemics, and History class.

EXAMPLE 1: A Leprosy Awareness song
“Gandhi’s dream: India should be Leprosy Free”

The song conveys straightforward yet impactful messages.

One theme is that of awareness. “It does not spread by touching”; treat early; it’s eradicable. Also, finish your course of treatment, “medicine has to be given till the end.”

A second is working toward a more inclusive society: “We should get a little more, we should get all the rights, we should get a sense of belonging in the heart, the society should accept us from the heart, leprosy has to be eradicated from the body, mind and thought also.” Likewise, eliminate discrimination and avoid stigma by adopting a caring attitude -- “Avoid grudges or bad mouthing”; “Keep the patient happy with a loving face.” 

A final message is the fact that we are all implicated in this work: “Through a joint effort we can all make India free from leprosy.”

The music reinforces this vision in several ways. It adopts traditional Indian idioms and instrumentation. The musical style is approachable, trending toward pop. The presence of a lilting, danceable percussive backbeat, for instance, gives the performance energy. There’s a good deal of musical and verbal repetition, and sections are marked with dramatic gestures such as a rising swoop in the strings. There is a chorus that comes in to add richness to the texture. Put together, these choices are signaling that theme of collective effort together; just as this is “our music,” so is its challenge “our problem.”

EXAMPLE 2: Sparsh Awareness Campaign (A governmental educational program)
Theme: United for dignity

This initiative was a government-sponsored campaign to use a festival model to facilitate education and awareness of the disease. The performances include skits, dance, and song, in between giving speeches about the disease. The (edited) example here comes from Vellore district, and condenses the cultural offerings to focus in on the speeches that convey this 2022 message:

“The disease will not spread through treated persons. Hence all cured leprosy persons should not be neglected or disliked. The WHO Theme for SPARSH Leprosy Awareness Campaign 2022 is "UNITED FOR DIGNITY". Therefore, let us strive to uphold the honour and dignity of leprosy cured persons.” (Excerpt of the YouTube description)

At the beginning of the clip, we again get singing, this time by a woman singing in the traditional Indian style, celebrating the local region, Tamil Nadu. The song depicts the importance of local culture and the importance of state initiatives. This is followed by a traditional circle dance to sung accompaniment which visibly expands to include the community gathered in an outdoor venue. 

This initial set-up emphasizing music and dance creates a bridge between cultural pride and public health awareness messaging that follows. There is the familiar sound of local musical practice. The performances, though polished, are not unduly professional; they seem to stem from within the community. This is reinforced in the dance, where the circle of women visually segues into the circle of the listening audience, many of whom bob and sway to the sounds they are hearing. We have been brought from the joys of cultural expression into community, “United for Dignity,” which shares its appreciation for such beauty. The implication is that they will share as well in the understanding from the day’s educational program.

There’s a bit of slippage here: enjoyment of song, and enjoyment of message are portrayed as somehow equivalent. This is an important public health messaging strategy that we see on a variety of fronts (see AIDS awareness in Uganda, for instance). Music, dance, and other cultural expression draws in the crowd, garnering attention and preparing them for the harder-hitting messaging about disease safety, treatment, and the need for change.

Here in the Vellore video, that stratey is made explicit. After these initial song and dance excerpts, we cut to a series of speakers each of whom speaks from a seat in front of a poster about leprosy awareness. The poster behind the series of speakers is busy delivering text. It mentions symptoms (“loss of feeling”) but also seeks to normalize the disease; we should “treat it like TB.” Lastly, it makes the point that clinics will provide evidence-based care, there is “no experimentation” (!) in delivering treatment for the disease. As a backdrop, the poster is a bit overwhelming; the amount of text and the array of type-faces and colors seem to function more like a flag backdrop than a conveyance of information. Tired eyes might prefer instead to focus on the speaker, and maybe that’s part of its purpose. It is “official” without being “interesting.” Reading is work; listening is easier.

Indeed, what IS interesting, in contrast to the poster, are the series testimonials from individuals who have had the disease. These testimonials make up the central portion of this “Leprosy awareness day.” The first [in a google translation based on a notta.ai transcript], reads:

My name is Shafuddin. I am speaking from Vellore. My body has been damaged since 2001, so I went to the hospital. They said it is leprosy. In the hospital they said it will be cured by treating it. I took similar medicine for two years. The body recovered to some extent. Hands and feet are very nerve affected, there is a lot of pain, so they said that by doing an operation the hands will be cured. After doing the operation it got cured. I do my work myself. I can eat. I do all the work myself. There is no problem. Feeling good. Leprosy is not a bad disease. If you take the right medicine you will be cured.

This shared personal experience helps the audience understand the multiple treatment options. There were the meds, and then afterwards a surgical intervention. The success of his treatment and his subsequent independence would be important to anyone who fears that they themselves might be suffering. Moreover, his story demonstrates personal resilience and also the societal support needed to uphold dignity for those affected by leprosy. Shafuddin’s journey from diagnosis to recovery directly embodies the campaign’s call to honor the dignity of those affected by leprosy. Likewise, his ability to regain independence challenges stigmatizing narratives. His message, as I see it, reinforces the hope embedded in the festival's music and dance.

Later in the video (1.59) there is a masked and costumed dancer and supporting chamber ensemble; the elaborate costume and intricate steps contrast with the packed-earth dance circle and the backdrop of cow and crops. A second and then third character come in to enliven the skit. This cultural offering too is followed by impassioned speakers.

Alternation of entertainment and education keeps the audience engaged. Such alternations also subtly suggests that there is a “whole-life” experience in illness treatment. Just as we (here the we of the community audience and its internet echo) enjoy the singing and dramatic action, we – the united “we” of community – should enjoy our support for these companions who have suffered with the disease, and for their invisible compadres.

The video ends with a medical overview of symptoms and treatments, and an emphasis that treatment is free. The government is working to support eradication, and anyone who has the disease should be treated.

Here, we see music as an attention-getter, valuable for its entertainment value, and providing a forum in which other socially-critical messages can be sent. We also see music as a community-building element, identifying the “united we” of the messaging campaign. The visual placement – an outdoor festival setting, with birds and other nature sounds – create an ironically “homey” atmosphere, in which you are hearing from neighbors and compatriots about what is possible. And throughout, the upbeat music goes along with the upbeat message: Leprosy can be cured. That message is worth celebrating.

In short, I think this approach – blending traditional cultural expressions with modern health messaging – creates a shared space for education, empathy, and celebration of civic progress in a significant public health initiative. Like “Gandhi’s Dream,” the message here is simple: just as we collectively respond to the music, we should collectively respond to the disease itself. Through its blend of traditional cultural forms and modern health education, the Sparsh Awareness Campaign demonstrates the potential of music and other performative arts to transform public health initiatives into inclusive, community-driven movements.

EXAMPLE 3 An Award-winning leprosy awareness short (from 2003)

Dungarpur Films' 2003 award-winning short, recipient of the Indian Documentary Producers’ Association (IDPA) Gold for the best public service film for leprosy awareness, delivers a powerful yet simple message: 

One intervention can make a difference. 

The film follows a woman and her son as they navigate the stigma surrounding leprosy and move toward the hopefulness of seeking treatment. It begins with the village headman’s stark declaration: “There’s no place in the village for leprosy patients.” This sets the stage for conflict, as the family’s diagnosis has sparked fear among the villagers, who seek to exile him and his mother so that the disease stigma doesn’t pass to the broader community.

Yet, one woman raises her hand and calls to the mother and son. She speaks out against exclusion, commanding them not to leave the village, but rather to go straight to the health center. She reinforces this message by publicly inviting the mother’s touch, hand to head. Her intervention shifts the focus from judgment to action and the narrative from vague crowd mutterings to crucial public health information: “A disease-free body… Leprosy is completely cured with MDT [Multi-Drug Therapy]. And this MDT is available completely free at every government health center.”

The film ends with a resolution—the mother and son are welcomed at the clinic, where they receive treatment. The final frame features the National Leprosy Eradication Programme (NLEP) symbol: four connected stick-figure hands alongside the message, “Join hands: eradicate leprosy.” This visual reinforces the short’s central theme of connection and collective responsibility.

At its core, the film frames stigma as a more pervasive and damaging issue than the disease itself. We initially sit with the discomfort of an unhappy village; we are grounded in the reality that the ill one might be ostracized. The disease is contagious, but attitudes are even more contagious. The woman’s intervention not only counters this stigma but also demonstrates the courage and compassion needed to enact change. By touching and interacting with the family, she visibly defies the rumor and shunning which had seemed increasingly normative. Her actions embody the film’s call for inclusion and understanding.

This act of bravery is pivotal. It transforms a moment of potential exclusion and banishment into one of connection and hope. The journey to the clinic becomes a metaphor for the broader societal journey—from ignorance and fear to knowledge and action. The message is clear: intervention, grounded in education and empathy, can dismantle stigma and pave the way for healing.

Her intervention is successful; we follow these characters as they move toward the clinic, receiving crucial public health information. Leprosy is completely curable. Treatment is free at all government health centers. There is a solution. We end with an arm around the shoulder in support – connection, not stigma, will solve the disease.

The film’s music underscores this narrative journey, amplifying the emotional stakes and reinforcing the thematic arc. At the start, the suspenseful score reflects the villagers’ tension and hostility. There’s a traditional voice, and threatening intermittent and unpredictable drum. We hear discussion and crowd noise. This is the acoustical chaos of bad things happening.

Yet, after a woman intervenes, we move toward acceptance and a resultant shift of musical idiom. A more hopeful lyrical voice emerges, as well as more instruments playing in a coordinated and more predictable way. We have a reiterated drone pitch to provide a harmonic reference point, making the point that stability comes from seeking treatment. So does optimism, for a series of arched phrases accompany images of the journey to the clinic – the boat, a bike and walk into the clinic. The highest of these vocal phrases is delivered as our patient receives her packet of medicine, not only a climax, but a happy one. Throughout this section, there is also more complexity in the drum rhythms, accompanied with the tinkle of high bells – a brighter timbre, with more interesting patterns. This is music that we want to listen to. It is music as “accompaniment to action.”

The music of this 90-second short, in other words, tells us that inclusion and intervention are the right choices, the ones that will lead to a positive, major-key kind of place. We have, in the final frame, the joy of treatment with the final high arched phrase. Layered over that is the visual cut-in – the NLEP symbol, and four connected stick-type figures, with the words of the final message: “join hands: eradicate leprosy.”

Dungarpur Films’ offering blends narrative, music, and public health messaging together in order to inspire change. By addressing stigma through a compelling story of intervention – by illustrating the transformative power of knowledge and empathy – the film leaves viewers with a clear and actionable message: inclusion and education can eradicate both the disease and its associated stigma.

The music, serving as both a narrative driver and an emotional guide, amplifies the film’s impact. From the acoustical chaos of exclusion to the lyrical harmony of hope, the soundtrack underscores the journey from fear to acceptance. Storytelling and music here foster understanding and community-building. The film's call to “join hands” remains as resonant today as it was in 2003: just as we collectively respond to music, we must collectively respond to disease and its societal implications.

TAKE-AWAYS

As we have seen in these three examples of leprosy intervention, music plays a vital role in public health. It bridges the gap between complex medical messaging and community engagement. Its ability to evoke emotion, foster community, and reflect local cultural values makes it a powerful tool for reducing stigma, promoting awareness, and encouraging positive collective action.

Whether through traditional idioms, modern compositions, or community-driven performances, music transforms abstract health messages into relatable, memorable experiences. By integrating music into campaigns, public health initiatives transcend mere information dissemination; they build empathy, solidarity, and hope, empowering communities to confront challenges together. Music, in essence, resonates not just in sound, but in its capacity to inspire societal change.

THANK-YOU'S

For more on Hansen’s Disease, see Documenting Lepers’ Lives: The House is Black (1962)

I would like to thank Avagail Hulbert, whose seminar contributions on India’s leprosy eradication programs introduced me to these and other compelling examples of music in public health. I would also like to thank my colleague and friend Gregory Barz, whose work on medical ethnomusicology was my first introduction to the topic. Lastly, I’d like to thank all those many people – musicians, film-makers, dancers, educators – whose capacity for empathy and commitment to optimistic service is the active force for good that makes real change happen in the world.

#pandemic #leprosy #music #PandemicMusic #India #PublicHealth #advocacy #WorldLeprosyDay #HansenDisease #PublicHealthCampaign

News-as-Opera: Shenton/Steyer’s On Call: COVID-19 (2021) (1/17/25)

Image includes the 6-box screen of characters and their fictional names

Today’s contribution is a review of a pandemic opera – one that I’ve just taught in my Music, Pandemics, and History class. Since not a lot has been written about the opera yet, I thought this overview might be helpful to the interested reader.

In the middle of the pandemic, the creative team of David Shenton and Christine Steyer took on the lived experience of COVID-19 directly. They focused their three-scene / one-hour opera on the voices of healthcare workers. Their information was, as they explain, well-researched, “drawn from 200 articles about health care workers facing the pandemic.” While news as opera may seem surprising, questions of moral codes and strong emotion – especially tension, fear, and hope – emerge from the script as part of its  operatic landscape. By the end, we care for the characters, as one should, and have traveled their story arc – from angst to connectedness and from outrage to hope. It is, as critics note, an “operatic love letter to global front-line healthcare workers.” The opera was also deemed successful by judges, for the first production was the winner of the National Opera Association Production Award and garnered 3rd place in the 2022 American Prize for Opera Production.

Set as a zoom call, the operatic performance cleverly begins with that moment of recognition: “Please wait. The host will let you in soon.” Yes, we all came to know that phrase all too well during the early stages of the pandemic. Likewise, as we move into the first scene, the mood of melancholy set by the Overture gives way to a frenetically repeated piano, underscoring the urgency in which the characters have been immersed. We meet the various characters, especially Sandra, the RN who has convened the group out of near-overwhelming frustration and a need for connection.

In this first aria, Sandra describes the nominal perks accorded the frontline workers, including fancy hotels and invitations to jump the queue (!), but points out “it all comes down to nothing” because she’s not able to see her own family. She snapped, she tells us, when the hospital started talking about pay cuts because of the lack of elective procedures. Pay cuts? In the middle of a pandemic? So her frustration boiled over into the need for this call/this opera.

The opera is divided into three scenes set several months apart: “Of the Heart”; “Just when things couldn’t get Worse” and “Tell Me Something Good.” Within each scene, several of the six healthcare working characters will share some part of their COVID-related experiences; Paolo, in “Fratelli” (I.3 – 17:25) explains the Italian penchant for balcony singing and its historical grounding, Gordon uses a refrain aria to articulate the frustration with a lack of progress in “One step forward” (II.2); Jane questions what we are all inheriting as a society, and whether it’s actually the good place that she was raised to see (“I’ve always been taught to respect my elders,” II.4).

Elements of the contextual news for the pandemic also peak through – for instance, Gordon’s experience (II.2) with the Beirut explosions, and Rolanda’s with deforestation in the Amazon, and the spaces it left for graves (II.3). A concatenation of negatives layers up in the closing part of scene 2, where five of the six characters pile on with their anger and worries about the way in which the pandemic has unfolded, until Sandra calls a halt to it all. 

CLIMAX AND RESOLUTION (AN EXCERPT)

In fact, if you only have ten minutes to sample the opera, this climax and its resolution across the boundary of the entr’acte into scene 3 is the part of the opera that I think is perhaps the most worth viewing. This section follows Jane’s aria, previously mentioned, where she balances respect for her elders and dismay at behaviors that have led us to the current moment with its multitudinous ills (39:24). Ultimately, she tells us (40:07), she finds herself “unable to remain silent.” The Ensemble joins in for a group layering up of concerns: (41:00) “the World leaders protected from accountability… (42:29) deny responsibility and find a scapegoat…” The libretto goes on to distinguish problems from dilemmas: “problems have solutions; dilemmas don’t.” And the pandemic for many countries is a dilemma. This leads into the climax, which is where we pick up:

The excerpt itself features several returning lines. At the start of the excerpt (45:00), we hear how the virus “brought planet to its knees.” And that in turn raises the repeated question, “…how did we come to this?” The layers of concern, each character adding thoughts and observations into a cacophony of stress, reaches a climax, prompting Sandra to intervene (45:41), saying “Stop, please, please, enough!” These calls began, she reminds everyone, as “a space for me to share,” and after making a claim for the usefulness of connections, asks the other characters to “promise me you will tell me something good” when they return.

As the excerpt continues, we segue (46:56) into a keyboard entr'acte, designed to shifts our mood for the upcoming arrival of the new year. It’s “Hard to believe” (47:33) that it’s been almost a year, the characters observe at the start of Scene three. After toasting the new year with wine and water, the characters share positive updates. Sandra has just gotten a second dose of the vaccine so is able to return home to her family; Mario speaks to the legacy of learning that he has from his grandmother, whose advice helped get him through a difficult delivery (50:06). It is a different sound-world than the echo-chamber scapegoating at the end of the previous scene.

 

THE REST OF THE OPERA

I’ve ended the excerpt there with Mario and his grandma, but further positive news then continues to unfold across the third scene – the availability of vaccines, the recognized wisdom as a legacy of a beloved grandparent, volunteers helping with ventilators. Sandra perhaps sums it up best: “it all comes down to nothing if there’s no one to share.” The opera ends with an ensemble number from our main characters: “Microbes older than us” and its second part, “We are healers.” The close is provided in memoriam with a virtual choir.

OPERA OVERVIEW

A viewer-based (rather than score-based) summary of the opera’s structure looks something like this:

 

Overture

Scene 1: Of the Heart (early April, 2020)

1.      Sandra’s aria

2.      Mario: “We called her Lily”

3.      Paolo: Fratelli

4.      Jane: O what an awful blight

5.      [Gordon and Rolanda passim]

Scene 2: Just When Things Couldn’t Get Worse (early September, 2020)

1.      [Action: report on Beirut, Paulo]

2.      Gordon: “refrain aria” “One step forward…”

3.      Rolanda “Amazonia from above”

4.      Jane: I’ve always been taught to respect my elders

5.      ENSEMBLE: Scapegoat

6.      [Stop, enough.]   >>>

Scene 3: Tell Me Something Good (New Year’s Eve, 2020)

1.      Sandra: 2nd vaccination

2.      Mario: Hard delivery; grandma Lily

3.      Jane: Family & pictures of the hospital

4.      Paolo: sung to high A

5.      Rolanda: volunteers help with ventilator

6.      Gordon: y’all

7.      Sandra: it all comes down to nothing if there’s no one to share

8.      ENSEMBLE: Microbes older than us

9.      ENSEMBLE: We are healers

10.  In memoriam (choral)

THE OPERA'S CONTEXT

As A.A. Cristi noted in their initial review, the opera not only told a significant story, but also provided a “meaningful project” for the singers “who have been hard-pressed to find work during the pandemic.” To record the opera, composer and pianist David Shenton laid down the piano tracks, which the singers used as they recorded their own parts – safely, and at home. Those samples were then merged as a single soundtrack, at which point production turned to the video portion. The singers were asked to lip sync, pretending to sing on Zoom, as Schering captures in his news coverage of the premiere.

In fact, the executive producer situates this performance for us in the playbill: “We have yet to meet in person.” This counts as a “remote ensemble” production. The relatively small forces – the orchestra is a piano and sometimes violin, and six singers in gender-flexible casting – reflect the challenges inherent in all our various “safer at home” quarantines impacted music-making world-wide.

Overall, this one-act is a remarkably approachable 21^st century opera, and has proven an effective entre to the genre for the non-music majors I’ve taught. The musical structure with its occasional use of refrains and its clear accompanimental markers to distinguish one section from another is relatively easy to follow. There’s perhaps more arioso than aria writing, but this keeps the action and events of the story line at its center. The singing of this performance is wonderfully done; my students voted for Paolo as the singer they’d most like to hear again. (It also helps that we’d just finished a unit on balcony music, and here it was, brought to life!)

Overall, the operatic takeaway is pretty simple: “kindness and compassion can be as powerful a tool as a vaccine and a ventilator.” Not a bad message for troubled times.

RESOURCES:

• Complete first performance of Shenton/Steyer’s On Call: COVID-19 (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDb70FfOSMc. This video can also be accessed through the Bellissima Opera website.
• Playbill: https://bellissimaopera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/On-Call-Playbill.pdf
• Bellissima Opera: https://bellissimaopera.com/covidopera/
• Cristi, A.A. "Working In Concert Premieres ON CALL: COVID 19 An Opera Love Letter To Health Care Workers." Broadway World, April 12, 2021. https://www.broadwayworld.com/chicago/article/Working-In-Concert-Premieres-ON-CALL-COVID-19-An-Opera-Love-Letter-To-Health-Care-Workers-20210412
  
• Nelson, J. R. and Leor Galil. "A new Zoom opera honors the health-care workers fighting COVID." Chicago Reader, April 13, 2021. https://chicagoreader.com/music/a-new-zoom-opera-honors-the-health-care-workers-fighting-covid/
• Schering, Steve. "New international opera by Oak Park librettist tells story of health care workers battling COVID-19 pandemic." Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2021. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2021/04/16/new-international-opera-by-oak-park-librettist-tells-story-of-health-care-workers-battling-covid-19-pandemic/

 

 

Documenting Lepers’ Lives: The House is Black (1962)

Two men in hats on a rubble heap, one playing a wall-attached string instrument

I watched the Iranian film “The House is Black” to see if it would be useful for my Music and Pandemics course. It has a couple of short musical examples, but they didn’t really have enough context to be useful for a teaching purpose.

And yet, I want to make a plea to you, dear reader, that you take the 21 minutes to watch this amazing film about a leper colony, a film created in 1962, the year before I was born. Feminist Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad made only this one film, but her documentary about ugliness and beauty and grace and humanity – and isolation – and disfiguring disease is truly transcendent.

Her film is a profound meditation on the resilience of humanity and the power of community in the face of disfiguring disease and social exclusion. Through stark and compelling visuals, poetic reflections, and moments of shared joy—a few of which are marked by music—the film challenges viewers to confront our own perceptions of beauty, grace, and shared humanity. The message of the film is that we humans are not limited to our disease-prone body; perhaps the most important things to all of us everywhere are the moments of joy, the beloved doll, and the connectedness one to another.

“On this screen will appear an image of ugliness, a vision of pain that no caring human being should ignore,” she warns us at the beginning of the film. Disfigured bodies, and the care that they need, are dealt with unflinchingly. Well, that’s not true. Farrokhzad may not have flinched from showing the care of a diseased foot, even returning to it, but I flinched. The hands, yes, pressing the hands to straighten them out makes sense. It’s even akin to the treatment that mom went through, though she had a different disease. But the dead flesh on the foot, yikes, that was hard to see. Why look? Because, as she says, we should care enough to know.

Superimposed over the glimpses of life in the leper colony, we get segments of Farrokhzad’s poetry. “Remember that my life is wind. I have become the pelican of the desert, the owl of the ruins, and like a sparrow I am sitting alone on the roof” (12:03). We watch members of the community at games, and Farrokhzad reminds us again that “Remember my life is wind, and you have given me a time of idleness, and around me the song of happiness...” (13:32). These poetic evocations help us to process what we’re seeing. They aren’t a narrative per se, but rather the evocation of meaning that goes in tandem with the visual element. More lyrical than prosodic, Farrokhzad reaches to us at a visceral level to command our engagement and provoke us into understanding of what we are seeing, and ultimately, it is to be hoped, into acceptance of the shared humanity of these scenes.

Music appears in a few segments of the film. It accompanies the scenes of play, work, grooming, and childcare (14:17-14:43). This is self-made music, internal to the community, not from outside, and not complex, but rather a simple thrumming of an instrument I don’t recognize. The community does, though: we see the dancing feet of a member of the community in time to the thrumming. “Let’s listen to the soul who sings in the remote desert,” says  Farrokhzad, “The one who sighs  and stretches his hands out saying: Alas, my wounds have numbed my spirit.” Numbed my spirit, perhaps, but not deadened it. There is still a capacity to dance, and to love.

We have a bit of singing at (15:09), but it is a momentary lead-in to visions of more personal grooming: a mother (one presumes) with her daughter, and a woman with deformed hands applying makeup to her eyes. These images are accompanied by an exhortation that vanity is in vain: 

“O the time-forgotten one, dressing yourself in red, and wearing golden ornaments, anointing your eyes with kohl, remember you have made yourself beautiful in vain, for a song in the remote desert, and your friends who have denigrated you…”

The question of beauty is particularly fraught, of course, in the environment of a leprosarium.

The third musical example of the film is a bit of ceremony, with drum (15:52-17:10) interlaced with singing mixed with murmurs as the crowd moves in what seems to be procession. The procession  segues directly into a chamber ensemble environment, with visual closeups of a strummed fretted string instrument (an Iranian Tar), a double reed, and a flute-like instrument, as well as the pervasive drum, shown toward the end of the section. This music is met with enthusiasm – the audience smiles, indulges in clapping along, and dances. The film seems to argue that music is integral to community, and I can get behind that sentiment! With music driving the gathering, we are led to see these people not as patients, but as engaged participants in an inclusive community.

We may know that this is a leper colony, but the film doesn’t make that point explicit until the gates close in on the inhabitants at 20:30. By that point, we have been so engaged with the life of these people that the closing gate – the separating out, the quarantine, the segregation – comes as a disturbing rejection of our shared humanity.

Which is probably exactly the message that Forough Farrokhzad meant to convey.


The House is Black (1962) by Farough Farrokhzad, available https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-house-is-black

Note: Nowadays leprosy is called Hansen’s disease to avoid the stigma associated with the terms “leper” and “leprosy.” I use the former term since it is the language used in the film’s translation. The disease is still relatively common; the CDC points out that 250,000 around the world are diagnosed with Hansen's disease each year. But it is also treatable, a point that Farrokhzad emphasized in her narrative.