Aesthetics of Sorrow: The Wailing Culture of Yemenite Jewish Women

1. Wailing: A Topic That Defies Research

43 .1 . Wailing A Topic That Defies Research The tension between covert values of continuity and life, represented by scientific investigation, and melancholy and dread of death, associated with wailing,transformed my research into a story of squandered opportunities. As a researcher, I was eager to attend places where a wailer would appear and perform. Accomplishing this proved to be a challenge and, at times, an impossible mission. Various behavioral manifestations evolved into clashes between doing and emoting. Informers came forth, expressing their willingness to tell me “at the right time,” that is, when a death occurred in the community, but they seldom kept their word. When I initiated communication, they sometimes vociferously tended to recall some tragedy that had occurred—oh, how sad it had been!—a few days earlier, a week or perhaps two weeks earlier, and to note how sorry they were for having “forgotten” to pass the word. Repeatedly I was told, “Oh . . . it’s a shame you weren’t here yesterday. A special wailer was here; you should have heard her,”“I wanted to record the wailer for you, but . . . ,” or chapter 1 / 44 “You would have learned lots from the wailers who were at the cemetery. . . . Yes, I really hadn’t heard wailing like that in so long.” When I asked them why they had not called me, they apologized, blaming a memory lapse or a negative emotional response to the death event. Sometimes they packaged these apologies with a promise to do differently next time, and round and round it went.Most of the cases that did come across at the right time—before the funeral or in the first days of mourning—related to the deaths of people who were less familiar to the informers or distant from them in geographic or kinship terms. Only in these cases could they give thought to esoteric matters that came to mind associatively and allowed me to progress in my research. Death rituals are also crisis rituals that challenge the strength of the illusion of ontological security that society is responsible for maintaining (Chidester 1990). The death of a familiar individual strikes with waves of anxiety not only the deceased’s relatives but also anyone who knows the deceased. I learned that the moment a death rumor in a small community spreads,members of the community need to adopt a degree of indifference, alienation, or strength to endure the task of passing the word. I discovered another kind of squandered opportunity that stemmed from the research topic when I visited mourners’ homes or the cemetery after receiving the coveted announcement. I found myself participating in observance of the religious obligations that belong to the rituals, that is, walking behind the deceased and consoling the bereaved. However, I was unable to observe the ultimate object of my research craving, the wailer. The rituals at cemeteries and in mourners’ homes sometimes took place without a wailer’s performance even though she was there, because the crowd of women consolers swallowed her up. When this happened, the informants expressed the squandering of opportunity in different ways: “That’s interesting, today of all days she isn’t opening her mouth to wail,” or “The mourners aren’t letting her. . . . They don’t want to hear wailing women.” These cases provided the very best evidence of the decline of wailing in the Yemenite Jewish community. One reason for the decline is that people in the community are repulsed by the emotional impact of wailing and have become acquainted with calmer mourning patterns.This wailing / 45 tendency illuminated another facet of the tension that existed between my research needs and the essence of wailing. Two cases demonstrate the sensitivity of wailing to changing circumstances despite the wailers’goodwill and their belief that it was important to help me in my research. In the first case, I sat among women consolers one morning and started up a conversation with an older member of the group. She told me with undisguised pride that she herself was a wailer and had regularly wailed since her days in Yemen long ago. Sensing my enthusiasm at that moment, she promised to go home and return in the evening to give the many consolers a really superb performance.To avoid the need to wait there for hours, I also decided to come back when it was “her time.”I returned but...