By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

I am looking at “The Butt Song from Hell”, detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th-century triptych, “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, depicting a hellish chorus singing a song while the devil is inscribing the notes on the buttocks of a tortured figure in the hell panel. In 2014, Amelia Hamrick, a music student from Oklahoma University transcribed and recorded the sheet of music Bosch left, ”written upon the posterior of one of the many tortured denizens of the rightmost panel of the painting”.

Why all of a sudden, this detail in the huge painting captures my attention is more than curiosity. Bosch depicted our own hellish reality in his paintings, centuries ago. Some are just beginning to realize, but the majority are still lulled into singing the music created by our pain, inflicted by the powerful and corrupt.

I wrote this poem on 29 March 2017, on the occasion of the 29th anniversary of the Women in Development (WID) Foundation, at the height of women’s oppression under the Duterte administration. It was inspired by Bosch’s “The Butt Song from Hell”.

Singing

Do not tell me “boys will be boys”
Boys have been boys for too long

We are accepting
We have become accepting
of abuse and disrespect
No one is raising her fist
Not those who raised them
fiercely, once before,
on the streets, like you

Cowed to the core by power
awed by prophets of doom
magicians of domination
we have lost, our voices
we have ceded, our minds

We have succumbed
to a sinister fairy tale, where
every curse is a sweet lullaby
every threat, a reality
every blasphemy, a litany
from a “god”

Death is moving fast
with the stealth and silence
of hungry lions and vultures
thirsty for blood, chanting,
“Glory be to the Gory!”

And we sing, a song of praise

Today, our country is still in the same shithole, an aftermath of a systemic undermining of our institutions and our moral grounding. If we don’t come out of the rectum of corrupt leaders, we shall fossilize in history, a massive human feces, bigger than the “Lloyds Bank Coprolite”.