Aesthetics of Sorrow: The Wailing Culture of Yemenite Jewish Women

5. Melancholic Power

209 .5 . Melancholic Power Wailing strums the strings of melancholia in tones and metaphors of black. It is a gloomy dirge that grips its listeners and generates an inseparable mixture of melancholy and power.This chapter focuses on the audience’s response to the performance as though the performance were a stimulus. A simple temporal distinction may demonstrate the preference of the performance-stimulus model over the time-continuum model and establish something resembling a division of roles between performer and audience. This differentiation, as we have seen, aptly describes the relative passivity of an audience as against the activism of a thespian on the stage. Here, however, we will use it for analytical purposes only. It is inconsistent with theoretical outlooks that discuss a performance situation in which performer and audience are equal. According to these outlooks, the audience is not only influenced by the performer’s actions but also shapes the performance (Wilce 1998) and therefore should be considered a coperformer possessing a countering kind of power. The ethnography also presents an chapter 5 / 210 approach that considers the audience an active participant. The audience’s activism, however, will be shown to have been initiated by the wailer and to be expressive of her persuasive power. This approach views the wailer’s influence more broadly than in its direct manifestations,that is,the influence that the wailer applies when she addresses friends in the audience (Briggs 1993) and invites them,as well as dead people and other wailers,to take part in the performative process (Feld 1982) or is expected to lavish blessings and felicitations on leading members of the group of mourners (Seremetakis 1991).Burns (1972,26) expresses exactly the ethnographic sense that I propose in regard to the status of the audience in the performance: “In religious ritual other people are continuously involved in the ceremony although their roles may vary in importance. Everyone has some part to perform even if it is only singing the responses, clapping in time to a dance or weeping at appropriate points in the ceremony.‘Responses,’clapping and weeping are performed as part of the ceremony.They are not the reactions of outsiders.” The ethnography treats the audience’s weeping as a performed response in the wailing situation. I used the word “power” in the title of this chapter. For this reason, I should distinguish between the intentions of this chapter and those of the one that follows. Both chapters are divided schematically and imperfectly between describing the emotional power of wailing and the intersubjective dynamic of the performative situation,on the one hand,and discussing the implications of this power for the religious and gender status of wailing. The analysis in both chapters focuses on the interaction of wailer and audience .The combined weight of the analysis in studies on wailing cultures (Holst-Warhaft 1995; Aborampah 1999; Briggs 1992, 1993; Abu-Lughod 1986,1993) makes it seem that the division forces us into either/or situations that make the ethnographic seem coarse.The question is how to distinguish performative responses that carry emotional meanings that are also social. How can one isolate the weeping of an individual in a group ritual from discussion of the social role of the tears? The challenge in answering these questions, I believe, is worth tackling due to the knowledge that may be attained by maintaining the separation.Slamming the hammer of associative argumentation on the anvil of scholarship in order to separate aspects of a melancholic power / 211 phenomenon is not only a familiar strategy but is also crucial in any effort to make an interpretative contribution. Thus, the mission statement of this chapter is to decode the secret of the psychosocial power of women’s wailing—a power that combines psychological healing, unifying affective glue,and erotic temptation.Chapter 6 will describe how the affective power of wailing translates into social concepts about women’s grief work in canon mourning rites. What are the meanings of the power that resides in the episodic excitation that wailing creates? The literature discusses a range of meanings of the concept and the words associated with it. Some of them correspond to the frame of meaning that we will use in this chapter. According to one of the variations on Bertrand Russell’s approach, power is a person’s ability to influence others deliberately (Russell 1986...