The Laughing Sickness

Lyrics

[Intro]
(one girl laughing — then two — then a room)
Tanganyika. Nineteen sixty-two. A mission school. Three girls.

[Verse 1]
It starts with a joke, or something like one, in a classroom,
and three girls laugh, and then cannot stop laughing,
and it moves along the row, and then along the corridor,
and within weeks ninety-five of a hundred and fifty-nine pupils
are affected, and the school is closed because it cannot teach,
and the girls go home to their villages, which is how it travels.

[Chorus]
The laughing sickness! It is not funny! That is the thing!
The reports describe crying as often as laughing, and pain,
fainting, rashes, breathing trouble, and a fear of being touched —
this is not a room of happy people, this is something in distress.
The laughing sickness. Fourteen schools closed. A thousand affected.
It ran for a year and a half and then it simply stopped.

[Verse 2]
It is the textbook case of mass psychogenic illness now,
taught in every course, and the standard reading is this:
these were girls in a strict mission school, far from home,
in a country three months into independence, under enormous strain,
with no permitted way to express any of it whatsoever —
and the body found one. The body will always find one.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And the thing that unsettles me is how ordinary the mechanism is.
It is not exotic. It is not historical. It happens now.
It happens in factories, in call centres, in schools this year,
wherever a group of people are under pressure they cannot name,
and it presents as whatever the group is primed to present,
and it is real — genuinely, physically real — in every body it touches.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the laughter, fading room by room)
Eighteen months.
And then it let them go.