Greece: The relationship between epic and lament.
"Epic and lament both tell the story of dead individuals, but to very different ends. Epic, like the (traditional Greek) male funeral oration and after-feast elegiac poetry, tends to celebrate death as meaningful, and most of all, does not dwell upon the suffering of all concerned:
In "praising the hero at common meals--the purpose is to educate and exhort, and to celebrate the state. It is a patriotic and political ceremony" (Alexiou, 128).
"The male funeral oration for those who die in battle makes a virtue of death, provided it is death in service to the state.
This is in direct opposition to the lament of the female relatives, who, if we are to take the folk laments of Greece and other modern cultures as representative, mourn their personal loss in terms of emotional, economic, and social deprivation, and look upon death as the enemy. The tension between public and private burial can only be resolved when the state... convinces the families, particularly the mothers of soldiers, that the glory of dying for the fatherland outweighs private grief, and compensates them for their loss" (Holst-Warhaft, 5).
To the rising village middle class, or to those who have fled the village altogether
for the city, a mother or grandmother who still laments for the dead constitutes an embarrassing admission of primitivism" (Caraveli-Chaves, 130).
Lament is not done by isolated individuals, but by community members together.
In 1974, Margaret Alexiou wrote: "In most villages, lamentation remains a social duty for the whole community, to be performed for all alike. The bereaved family is not asked if it wishes for the dead to be lamented; the women simply come to the house and weep, first for whoever has died, then for their own dead" (Alexiou, 50).
"The purpose of ritual lamentation is a collective tribute to the dead from the whole community" (Alexiou, 44).
The passion of lament is evidently potentially highly contagious.
"The function of the invocation at the tomb is for the living, by their offerings and passionate observations, to enter into communion with the dead" (Alexiou, 46).
Lament is a "magic incantation designed to bring the dead back to life" (Alexiou, 134).
According to the public authorities, "A hero's death, it seems, should be marked by praise, not women's cries, that may 'wake the dead.' If their cries have such power, women must be capable of some direct communication with the dead.
There is an "underlying fear of laments as magic songs, songs which open up perilous channels of communication between the living and the dead" (Caraveli-Chaves, 130).
"Such a dialogue with the dead places a certain power in the hands of women... In a patriarchal society where women are consistently undervalued, lament gives women, who, both as child-bearers and mid-wives already have a certain control over birth, potential authority over the rites of death" (Holst-Warhaft, 3).
"It is woman's capacity for reproduction that also gives her firsthand access to the realm of the dead" (Caraveli-Chaves, 146).
"Laments bridge and mediate between vital realms of existence: life and death, the physical and he metaphysical, present and past, temporal and mythic time. The lamenter becomes the medium through whom the dead speaks to the living, the shaman who leads the living to the underworld and back, thus effecting a communal confrontation with death and, through it, a catharsis" (Caraveli-Chaves, 144).
"Men's power is restricted to the public, visible, and official realm.
Though it provides them with opportunities for social domination, it limits them to a temporal sphere of experience. Women dominate the rituals connected to the life cycle as well as irregular, secret rites such as magic and witchcraft. As midwives, matchmakers, singers
of bridal songs, and finally, as lamenters, they dominate the rites of passage, the perilous moments of transition from one realm to another. Such segregated domains of male and female activities render men socially but not culturally dominant, and establish a
complex network of balances within the community" (Caraveli-Chaves, 143).
"Open wounds, the open female mouth that screams and improvises moiroloi (songs of fate), and metaphors of birthing, form a symbolic continuum, the official cartography of the female body. These are thresholds, limens, points of entry and exit where the outside and the inside--fate, truth, and the social order--meet in disordering contact.
The presence of moira (fate) intensifies when the orificial imagery and functions of the female body intensify. In everyday social life, men associate this process with the polluting ambiance of the feminine." (Seremetakis, 121).
"The vocality of women, the signs of dreaming and warning, the signs of death itself, are wild. They come from the outside, and they are intrusive and transgressive. They must be subjected to domestication through silencing or low voicing" (Seremetakis, 57).
"Some mourning women have even gone to the extreme of leaving their homes in the city, and living for a year at the graves of the dead"
(Alexiou, 33).
"The main effects of lamentation on the women of 'patriarchal' Greek village society are the establishment of a strong sense of bonding among them, and the reinforcement of social roles and modes of interaction which can best serve as strategies for survival (Caraveli-Chaves, 130).
Female lament enables "bonding through shared suffering"
(Caraveli-Chaves, 146).
"In Finland, China, and Greece, laments are sung by the bride's family,
and often by the bride herself, as she leaves to become a member
of her husband's household" (Holst-Warhaft, 1).
"Lives of women acquire meaning through the maintenance of
social relationships with other members of their families"
(Danforth, 138).
"Because of the marginal position of women in rural Greek society,
women are much more threatened by the death of a significant
other than men are" (Danforth, 138).
"Because a woman's identity depends greatly on her relationship
to a man, the death of this man deprives her of the crucial component
of her identity" (Danforth, 138).
"Because of the loss of social status and the virtual social isolation
plaguing the widow in the patriarchal milieu of traditional Greek villages,
widowhood is used in poetry as a synonym for death--in fact, as an
alternate form of death itself--a living death, as it were" (Caraveli-Chaves, 137).
"For these reasons, it is necessary for a woman to maintain the social
relationships she enjoyed with the deceased" (Danforth, 138).
"The song becomes a universal lamentation for all women within
the same world view, bewailing woman's hard lot and celebrating
the creative skills through which one can transcend this lot,
survive in it, or compensate for it" (Caraveli-Chaves, 146).
"It is ponos (plural, poni: pain, grief, suffering, sorrow) that maintains
the religious perspective toward death and enables the conversation
with the dead to continue" (Danforth, 141).
Lament involves the expression of irrational feelings in order "to effect some control over the disturbing and incomprehensible process of death" (Alexiou, 128). In lament, Death is integrated into community life through ritual; in modern culture, Death is feared as impure and so is kept at a distance (Holst-Warhaft, 9).
"Men and women may both weep for their dead, but it is women who tend to weep longer and 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" (Holst-Warhaft, 1).
"Men and women both weep in these societies, but it is women who seem to be able to turn weeping into a controlled, often contemplative lament: 'tears become ideas,' as Steven Feld puts it" (Holst-Warhaft, 20).
In many cultures, men's weeping tends to be inarticulate and violent.
Women's weeping, on the other hand, is in many cultures transmuted
into prolonged improvised singing (Holst-Warhaft, 21).
"The indigenous theory of catharsis is that in spite of the desirability of immersing oneself fully in the emotions of pain, grief, and sorrow, the ultimate goal is to rid oneself of these emotions through their repeated expression" (Danforth, 144).
"The ritual formality of the men, who enter in procession usually from the right with their right arm raised in a uniform gesture, contrasts sharply with the wild ecstasy of the women who stand around the bier in varying attitudes and postures" (Alexiou, 6).
In the olden days, "Since each movement was determined by
a pattern of ritual, frequently accompanied by the shrill music
of the aulos [reed pipe], the scene resembled a dance, sometimes
slow and solemn, sometimes wild and ecstatic" (Alexiou, 6).
Screams are seen as punctuations, not interruptions (Seremetakis, 117).
A famous couplet from a lament:
"'Ah mother, keeper of the home and mistress of embroidery,
You knew how to embroider the sky with all its stars.'"
(Alexandra Pateraki) (Caraveli-Chaves, 133).
Laments invoke the dead to rise again (Alexiou, 109).
The dead are praised and reproached--all is seemingly designed
to provoke the dead to respond. (Alexiou, 182)
Lamenters are also often "possessors of secret charms and miraculous potions" (Caraveli-Chaves, 145).
"Lament language is magical language seeking to remedy death and heal the living. By commemorating the past life of the dead person and using the community as a witness, poetic language is utilized as a weapon against death and as a vehicle for ensuring immortality for community members. Moreover, kinship ties are thus affirmed and the continuity of generations is ensured" (Caraveli-Chaves, 151)."
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