Grief for the Living: Appropriating the Irish lament for songs of emigration and exile

Abstract

Lillis O Laoire1 has shown how, as the Irish language today signifies identity less and less, Gaelic forms of expression have paradoxically come to signify more. Irish has come to occupy a liminal space where both Irish speakers and those who have only a few words at their command share a range of forms of cultural expression.2 In this study of some extensions of the Irish lament into English, such as songs of emigration and exile, I suggest that, in spite of the threat to Irish as an expressive medium of everyday speech, these songs can be regarded as important, and contemporary, examples of the 'lost voices' of feeling.The lament in Irish drew on a long tradition. In Classical Greece, emotional appeals to those who grieved [paramythia), consoling them for their loss, were part of the apparatus of traditional rhetoric. Patricia Lysaght says that in Ireland a lament was not simply a conventional performance but above all 'a means of expressing a sense of personal...loss, grief, love, sorrow and bitterness'.3 In addition, O Laoire has shown that cumha (grief, longing for what was lost) was part of a web of customs and beliefs accepted as entirely natural.4 The dead have often been described through metaphors of the journey such as 'the departed' and 'passing over'. Since those who left Ireland were often never seen or heard from again, songs of emigration and exile drew on these readily available discourses of grieving.Sigmund Freud distinguished between two responses to loss: melancholia and mourning; the former he saw as a pathological reaction to loss involving identification with the lost object, while the latter was a healthy condition of coming to terms with it.5 Keening corresponded to the second of these-the immediate response to a death. It was performed in the presence of the dead, since a folk belief maintained that the dead person could continue to hear mortals until earth had been thrown on the coffin. It often took a very simple form, since emphasis in the Gaelic tradition was laid not on improvisation but on accurate repetition, and, by spontaneously expressing cumha, providing a measure of release.6 It was not purely verbal, however, but a response to personal loss played out simultaneously through the space of the body and the space of the mind. In the words of Lauri Honko:[I]t is absolutely misguided to approach laments via a perusal of their texts. The reader who is unfamiliar with the vocabulary of the laments is left utterly bewildered after only a few verses: he can only vaguely make out the sense of the poem. One comes to the language of ritual lament with an entirely different attitude if one has listened to the wailings of a Karelian woman in an authentic performance environment, in a graveyard, at the foot of a cross, or in the house of a bride at the moment of her departure to the [bridejgroom's farm.7As is well known, in Ireland a death was often also accompanied by a quite different form of grieving: the often riotous nature of the funeral wake. Such behaviour was considered by outsiders (such as members of the English Ascendancy) to be quite inappropriate to the presence of death, but, in Roy Foster's words, 'the Irish affected to dwell in a different abstract world', where death was often referred to mockingly.8 In Bakhtinian terms, humour makes death easier to live with; in Freudian terms, it makes grieving a whole and healthy practice.9 At a moment when nature has asserted its supremacy over culture, it is the momentary return of the repressed. In the doubleness of humour and terror, we perceive the kind of ambivalence that is part of the process of confronting the prospect of one's own death.Laments in Ireland took many more forms than mourning a death: they were sung on conscription into the army, on the field of battle and during evictions, in addition to those sung on emigrating, which are the subject of this paper. In Eastern Europe, from Karelia to Greece, they were also sung to brides before their wedding: 40 000 such songs, known as dainas, have been documented in Latvia alone. …

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