by Sarah Murray
Or the mournful lines of eleventh-century Sufi poet and mystic Baba Tahir, who produced words such as these:
’Tis Heaven’s whim to vex me, and distress,
My wounded eyes hold ever briny tears,
Each moment soars the smoke of my despair to Heaven,
My tears and groans fill all the Universe.
Other cultures have embraced lamenting, too. During weeping rituals in Hellenistic Greece, mourners would tear at their hair and rip their clothing in movements that were violent and agonized, yet choreographed to follow melodies played on a reed pipe. The traditions have proved surprisingly long-lived. Until the mid–twentieth century, ritual laments featured in the death rites of countries as diverse as Ireland, Greece, Russia, and China. Unrehearsed yet guided by a format familiar to everyone, mourners sang weeping songs and recited elaborate poems. Words and music gave expression to the inexpressible. As Steven Feld, the anthropologist and musician, puts it, “tears become ideas.”
The trick was balancing powerful emotion with ritualized control; standardized formats with improvised content. Stylization gave room for emotion, but set boundaries for the mourners, preventing unfettered anguish from being let loose. It was a form of grief that was formulaic yet skillful in its improvisations. At times, it was extremely beautiful.
Still, it didn’t always meet with state or religious approval. After Athenian statesman Solon introduced laws curbing excessive funeral rites in the sixth century BC, only close relatives or older women could follow the body and weep at the graveside. In nineteenth-century Ireland, the Catholic Church feared that loud wailing for the dead might give the impression they’d never rise again come the Resurrection. Classing laments as “abuses,” the church made various attempts to quash them, from refusal to deliver absolution to, in one instance, using whips to force wailing women off the coffin. In Russia, Peter the Great tried to ban funeral lamenting, while the Russian Orthodox Church was as censorious of the tradition as the Irish Catholic Church. Powerful public displays of emotion were, it seems, unsettling to the authorities.
They persisted nonetheless. And usually, it was women performing the ceremonies. In some places, the ability to sing or recite ritual laments was part of a feminine portfolio of skills, along with cooking, spinning, mending, and cleaning. In her book Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, Catherine Merridale explains how young Russian girls once acquired their proficiency in lamenting. “Children played funerals as readily as they played house, and little girls assisted the old women in the laying out of corpses,” she writes. “Girls were also made to learn and practise the improvisation of laments.”
In Ireland, too, women took on the task of public grieving. Their keening—improvised poems and songs—could have a dramatic effect. One nineteenth-century account describes “the deep, yet suppressed sobs of the nearer relatives, and the stormy, uncontrollable cry of the widow or bereaved husband when allusion is made to the domestic virtues of the deceased.” You might call it therapy through elegy.
Keens turned ordinary men into heroes. Arthur O’Leary, who died in 1773, was one such man—shot by a hired gun on behalf of a landowner to whom O’Leary had refused to sell his chestnut mare for five pounds, a price stipulated by a provision contained in a series of statutes known as the Penal Laws. Deeply moved by his death, his widow composed a famous keen now considered one of Irish literature’s great works.
The Lament for Art O’Leary uses stock metaphors—the tools of the keener’s trade—to establish a framework for the poignancy of the tale, creating something epic from what seems to have been an unglamorous death sparked by a quarrel over money. One stanza describes the terrible moment when Eileen O’Connell finds out about her husband’s death—through the return of his riderless horse:
My friend you were forever!
I knew nothing of your murder
Till your horse came to the stable
With the reins beneath her trailing,
And your heart’s blood on her shoulders
Staining the tooled saddle
Where you used to sit and stand.
And, after a dramatic section in which Eileen mounts the horse and races to where her husband lies dying:
Your heart’s blood was still flowing;
I did not stay to wipe it
But filled my hands and drank it.
Russian laments had a similar quality, expounding the heroic deeds of the deceased and emphasizing the suffering of those left behind. “Certain words would always recur,” writes Merridale. “Grief was always bitter, for instance, a dead son was always brave and handsome, and widows were always destined for inconsolable solitude and hard work.”
Like the noheh of Iran, traditional laments reinforce the pathos of death. Their archetypal patterns and familiar sounds seem to tell us that death is part of the rhythm of life—both ordinary and extraordinary. And by using art and artistry to transform death into a thing of beauty, they help turn the dull ache of loss into something more meaningful and, perhaps, ultimately acceptable.
Strangely enough, it was not only relatives who conducted ritual laments at funerals. Professionals could also be called in to swell the ranks. In an ancient tradition, hired mourners were paid in cash or in kind. In notes from his 1681 tour of Ireland, Englishman Thomas Dineley describes “poor mercenary howlers, who generally at Church or Church yard, encompass the next heire with an high note, who more silently laments, if he doth at all.” His words suggest that the professional mourners were there to provide enough visible grief to dignify the event—particularly when relatives seemed insufficiently moved to do it themselves.
Hiring professionals was often necessary for another reason—the emotionally exhausted state of the bereaved. “When they’re overcome with sadness, their bodies begin to weaken,” explains a seventy-year-old retired professional mourner called Li Changgeng in an interview with Chinese writer Liao Yiwu. “But for us, once we get into the mood, we control our emotions and improvise with great ease. We can wail as long as is requested.”
The point of bringing in ritual mourners was also their emotional distance from the deceased and the relatives. This was something anthropologist Loring Danforth noticed in 1979, when he was studying funeral customs in Potamia, a village in northern Thessaly. In his book The Death Rituals of Rural Greece, Danforth notes how groups of women—themselves bereaved but not close relatives—were usually present to sing laments at funerals, giving mothers, wives, and daughters a chance to do the real, unscripted sobbing. Breaks after each verse allowed those with the most intense anguish to cry out messages to the person they’d just lost.
Yet this more genuine expression of grief was only given limited voice. Eventually, these bereaved were expected to join the lament. “At a funeral in Potamia where the widow of the deceased was wildly hugging and kissing her dead husband,” Danforth writes, “her sister, in an attempt to restrain and calm her, spoke to her sharply: ‘Don’t shout like that! Sit down and cry and sing!’” The idea of public grieving, in other words, is to maintain control, not to lose it.
* * *
On the day of Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram, the mosques in Yazd are full and everyone is out on the streets. It’s a public holiday and schools and offices are closed. From community kitchens, great quantities of food are served free of charge to the faithful. Yet while some men and women are clearly mourning, Ashura is also a rare chance for social activities. I notice that many of the women shrouded in black are talking into mobile phones. Maryam translates the conversation of the young woman next to us. “She’s talking to her boyfriend,” she tells me. “She’s saying: ‘I’m on the corner of the street opposite the mosque—come over now and we can have a chat.’”
That afternoon, Maryam and I head out to a town called Mehriz, where we’ve been told a big Ashura procession is taking place. This turns out to be a variation on the religious play. Rare in a part of the world where visual representation of holy figures
is usually prohibited, these performances have provided a form of social entertainment at this time of year (and have, since my trip, been banned). Here in Mehriz, the drama is being acted out on top of great big trucks. One by one, great floats lurch through the entrance gate into an open enclosure. Each new arrival elicits screams of delight from the children, while parents take photos with their mobile phones.
On top of the floats, men in medieval garb (good guys in green, bad guys in red) act out the scenes. One shows merchants haggling in the bazaar on the eve of the Battle of Karbala. In another, soldiers in brilliant costumes engage in sword fights. Husayn’s riderless horse (a real one) arrives on one of the trucks. A few moments later, there’s the evil Yazid, sitting on his throne, dressed in crimson robes and a helmet with great plumes of feathers sprouting from it. Cigarette in hand, he knocks back slugs of “wine” from a large goblet (topped up from a bottle of Coca-Cola).
There’s also lots of fake pink blood. This is put to dramatic effect on one float depicting the decapitated dead on the battlefield. Covered in white sheets, the bodies on this truck are live people whose heads are hidden beneath sheets, replaced by severed sheep’s necks from which fake blood is dripping with the assistance of a small pump.
These motor-driven tableaux vivant provide flourishes of color amid the crowds of spectators, who are mostly in black. And the carnival spirit is completely at odds with my preconceptions of Ashura as a dark and sometimes violent ritual. But, at this time of year, happiness is never very far from sadness. Seeing a Westerner in the crowd, a young teacher approaches me. In broken English and with an effort that’s deeply touching, she attempts to explain the story to me. “He was a very, very good man,” she says, with urgency in her eyes. “But they cut him (she slashes her finger across her throat) and killed him; brother, son, cousin—everybody dead. It is very sad day.”
For Shi’a Moslems, it’s the saddest day of the year, the most solemn in the mourning month of Muharram. The day of Ashura is the day when Imam Husayn and his supporters were murdered on the battlefield at Karbala. And on this day, the most important moment comes at noon, which marks the very instant Husayn succumbed to the arrows and swords that pierced his body.
In Yazd that morning, Maryam and I had participated in this moment, joining a crowd of people who’d gathered for the ceremony at the city center in front of the Amir Chakhmagh, an arched, open-fronted structure with two minarets that was once used for the performance of religious plays. Soon, members of the crowd were clapping hands to their chests and singing. From a nearby balcony, an old woman looked down on the crowd, arms crossed, patting her palms gently onto her chest in the ancient mourning gesture I’d seen used by the old men in the bazaar in Tehran. Women cloaked in black held their palms toward the heavens while a holy man wove his way through the throng, spraying everyone with rose water from a tank on his back, as if irrigating some heavenly garden where humans sprouted from the earth in place of flowers.
At midday everyone turned to face Mecca. As the crowd fell silent, I turned in the same direction and let my head hang down. I might have been in a foreign country, attending a mourning ceremony for an ancient Islamic prophet, but it was a powerful moment of sorrow. And for a brief instant, I felt as if I was attending the funeral we never held for my father.
* * *
Tears were once thought to come directly from the brain. In some ways, of course, tears of emotion do. But physiologically, it’s more complicated than that. Our lachrymal system has two mechanisms, one producing and the other draining away tears. A variety of lachrymal glands manage the different types of tears we produce, all of which contain varying concentrations of chemicals, hormones, and proteins.
We produce three types of tears—basal tears, which continuously lubricate our eyeballs to prevent them seizing up in their sockets; reflex tears, produced when foreign objects such as particles of dust get in the eye; and psychic or emotional tears, which respond to our psychological state. But if production of the first two types is relatively easy to understand, the reason for the third tear category is harder to explain.
That hasn’t stopped people from trying. René Descartes, the seventeenth-century philosopher and scientist, identified the fact that extreme emotions stimulated increased blood flow to the eyes, acting as a catalyst for the production of tears. However, as Tom Lutz explains in his book Crying, Descartes mistakenly based his assumption on principles of condensation. As hot blood came into contact with cool vapors in the eye, he surmised, the vapors were turned into tears.
William James, the nineteenth-century American psychologist and philosopher, had a theory that put the egg before the chicken. He argued that sadness was a physiological state. In response to some event, so his hypothesis went, we respond by producing tears—it’s the sensation of crying that provokes in us the emotion of sadness.
If the causal link between sentiment and tear production puzzled early scientists and psychologists, the effect of weeping was easier to understand. From ancient times, crying was considered cathartic. In Hellenistic Greece, Aristotle’s definition of tragedy used the word katharsis to refer to a calming of the audience brought about by exposure to a tragic drama and the portrayal of intense fear and pity. In other words, moving the audience to tears helped them leave the theater happier than when they arrived.
And if tears can be shown to serve a function, it’s no surprise that the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin wanted to find out why humans cried. In a chapter of his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin examined the workings of tears. After covering in exquisite detail the physiological process of crying, particularly in infants, Darwin concluded that crying was a way of alleviating suffering.
The catharsis hypothesis holds true today. In a study called “Is Crying Beneficial?” Jonathan Rottenberg, Lauren M. Bylsma, and Ad J. J. M. Vingerhoets asked more than three thousand people to recall recent weeping episodes. Sixty to 70 percent of respondents reported beneficial effects, ranging from a release of tension to feelings of relief.
The explanation may be both chemical and physical. Emotional tears contain manganese, which affects temperament, and prolactin, a hormone associated with depression. It’s thought that releasing these elements through tears helps balance the body’s stress levels, relieving tension. Meanwhile, in another study, Rottenberg, Vingerhoets, and Michelle Hendriks found that the cardiovascular rates of people rose while weeping but slowed after the crying episode ended, producing a calming effect.
So if crying is good for you, perhaps we don’t do it often enough. I wonder whether this phenomenon might offer a business opportunity for an entrepreneur to found a chain of “crying halls” for collective mourning. They could feature regular performances of doleful music or heartrending stories and charge a modest entrance fee. But, I’m forgetting—we have the movies.
* * *
During his physiological examination of tears, Darwin noticed that the English “rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief,” whereas in Continental Europe, “men shed tears much more readily and freely.” What Darwin had spotted was that the way we weep differs from culture to culture—whether that’s muffling our sobs or howling wildly. So is the way we cry something we learn or does it come naturally?
The truth is, cultural conventions and spiritual beliefs play a powerful role in shaping expressions of grief, prompting some to weep in situations others might think unlikely causes for tears.
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, an English social anthropologist, noticed this when he was in the Andaman Islands in 1906, observing that friends would wail violently together when reunited after a period of separation. He was surprised to find no difference between this type of crying, a show of joy, and the reaction of islanders to the death of close relatives.
On the other hand, some people don’t cry when you might expect them to. At funerals in central Thailand, crying is not part of the funeral ceremony, as it’s conside
red inauspicious for teardrops to fall on the body. In Bali, weeping at cremations is frowned on as it’s thought to prevent the spirit from reaching heaven. In Russia, women were warned not to weep too much after the death of a child, lest it damage the soul, preventing its ascent to heaven. Yet in other places, unfettered wailing is the most common reaction to loss.
I first noticed the existence of contrasting expressions of grief while watching television. On a running machine at the gym, I was staring absently at the ranks of TVs in front of me when I realized that the two screens opposite were both showing footage of people crying. On one, a young girl was talking to reporters amid subdued sighs and a few tears. On the next screen, another was bawling, unable to control her heavy sobs. I wasn’t listening to the soundtrack, but the subtitles told me these two women’s stories. The one weeping quietly was a Thai girl recalling the death of her father in the Asian tsunami. The one sobbing uncontrollably was an American on a reality TV show.
Occasionally, two styles of grief collide. Stewart Wallace, an American friend, recalls this happening at the funeral of his uncle, who died at the age of fifty-five. During the funeral, his grandmother, who came from a village in Ukraine, threw herself on the ground and started grasping at the earth and wailing violently for her youngest child. The rest of the family, who were born in America, stood around staring unhappily at the ground. “It had a ritualized quality to it,” Stewart told me. “I don’t know if it was something learned or something felt—or both. But it was pretty shocking to all of us.”
In his essay on contemporary African-American funeral customs, Hosea L. Perry describes a clash of mourning cultures that occurred after a mortally wounded teenager was admitted to a Midwestern American hospital. The boy’s relatives stood outside wailing so violently that hospital staff called the police, who sent in a riot squad to arrest them. “The hospital doesn’t understand how black people grieve,” said a community leader after the incident.
So in modern society why are we so squeamish about putting death and mourning on display? Death is a human experience that’s inevitable, universal, and inescapable. Yet we’d rather it were banished from sight. And while grieving is clearly a necessary reaction to this experience, we appear to want to hide the bereft from public view. Contemporary society has no place for traditional lamentation obsequies. Danforth notes that young Greek women of an emerging middle class “regard the singing of laments as a source of embarrassment, indicative of rural backwardness and superstition.”