You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Laments—these “dangerous voices”—are songs for mourning the dead, created and sung mostly by women. They are found in all cultures, as documented by Rosenblatt, Walsh, and Jackson in their extensive comparative study across seventy-eight cultures. In the majority of these cultures, women express grief more often and in many different ways from men women weep longer and louder; their cries and songs are believed to reach the dead, and engage them in a dialogue
The gender difference in lamenting the dead is easily documented but not conclusively explained “Women express grief more frequently and more openly than men because they experience loss more deeply. Also, it has been speculated that these open manifestations of grief may reflect women's lower social status” (p. 25) Lamenting the dead in song and emotional ritual, it has been proposed, places a certain power over death in the hands of women. Such power, though, has been regarded historically as a potential threat to the state This threat is related to the fear that laments can be used to incite violence; they may interfere with the state's recruiting soldiers to defend the homeland, and, finally, “it leaves in the hands of women who, as child-bearers and midwifes, already have a certain control over birth, [the] potential of authority over the rites of death” (p. 3).
Holst-Warhaft points out that many of the major religions established in the Middle East are based on ritual lament “All of these lamenting religious cults focus on the unjust or untimely death of a young man or a god. In the later religions of Christianity and Shiite Muhammadanism, the dead Christ and the prophet Hussein are mourned not only by women but by a group of disciples” (p 24). These groups often show violent behaviour, as witnessed during the Ayatollah's funeral.
Laments, the author points out, should not be seen solely as a traditional female reaction to loss but, rather, as representing society's own reaction to death, in other words, a p