Gail Holst-Warhaft - Dangerous voices: women’s laments and Greek literature

Mourning is universal, its rituals manifold. Among them, one of the most interesting and least understood is lament. When we speak of lament, we are speaking of many different genres. A lament is an expression of mourning, but it is not necessarily mourning for the dead. A whole class of laments, including those of the biblical book of Lamentations, are songs for the fall of great cities. In cultures where forced emigration is common, we often find laments either for those who have gone into exile or composed by migrs for the homeland and family they have left behind. In Finland, China and Greece, laments are sung by the brides family, and often by the bride herself, as she leaves to become a member of her husbands household.

The form laments take is just as varied as their subject. Anything from an elaborate poem to tuneful weeping can be classified as a lament. In this investigation I am particularly interested in laments for the dead, and since the two cultures I will be looking at closely are ancient and modern Greece, I will be looking at a variety of forms of lament, from the kommos of classical tragedy to the folk laments of Mani and Epirus.

What is common to laments for the dead in most traditional cultures is that they are part of more elaborate rituals for the dead, and that they are usually performed by women. In these cultures, as in our own, women and men are perceived and expected to mourn in different ways. Men and women may both weep for their dead, but it is women who tend to weep longer, louder, and it is they who are thought to communicate directly with the dead through their wailing songs. Frequently, in these cultures, laments are led or sung by a skilled, even professional class of women who are regarded as being especially gifted at improvising and performing songs for the dead. There is evidence, even in traditional societies, that it is more shameful for men to weep over their dead than women. When we come to lament as a western literary genre written mostly by men, we are reminded that women and men mourn in their own ways,and that while in early literary texts such as the Bible and the Homeric poems it was proper for men to weep and be wept over, it later became unacceptable:

There our murdered brother lies;
Wake him not with womens cries;
Mourn the way that manhood ought
Sit in silent trance of thought.