Women’s Lamentations and the Ethics of War

Olga M. Davidson

The two texts that I compare in this presentation are epics. One of them is Persian and the other one is Greek. The Persian epic is the Shāhnāma of Ferdowsi, composed in the 10th century CE. The Greek epic is the Homeric Iliad, compositionally shaped in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE and textually solidified in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Each of these two epics quotes words of lamentation as performed by a woman. I start with the Greek and proceed to the Persian.

In the Homeric Iliad, the woman in question is Andromache, wife of the Trojan hero Hector. In the Persian Shāhnāma, the corresponding woman is Tahmina, mother of the Persian hero Sohrāb. The textual evidence of the Greek lament is straightforward, but the corresponding textual evidence of the Persian lament is complicated by the fact that editors disagree about the attribution of the lamenting woman’s words to the poetic efforts of Ferdowsi himself. But the fact remains that the actual words of lament as quoted in the Persian text are part of the overall Persian epic tradition.

The lamenting words of Andromache, Hector’s wife, occur in three different places in the Iliad, in Books 6, 22, and 24. In Book 6, her words preview the words of lament she will perform in Book 22 and Book 24, where she grieves over the death of her husband. Andromache’s lament in Book 22 takes place immediately after she catches sight of the corpse of her husband, who has just been killed by the hero Achilles. She has just witnessed Achilles dragging behind his racing chariot the body of her husband Hector. As for Andromache’s lament in Book 24, it is more formal, since it takes place at the funeral of Hector after his corpse has been returned by Achilles to the Trojans. Here I will concentrate on the second of these three laments, the one we find in Iliad Book 22.

As for the lament of Tahmina, it takes place immediately after the death of her son, Sohrāb, a hero who has just been killed by his own father, the super-hero Rostam. Rostam didn’t know that he had just killed the son that he had from a one-night-encounter with Tahmina. The lamenting words of Tahmina are the lens through which we can view the characters of both Sohrāb and Rostam, who resemble in many ways Hector and Achilles as viewed through the lens of the lamenting words of Andromache. In the Iliad, we can learn about the negative side of heroism — from Hector’s wife Andromache. So also in the Shāhnāma, Tahmina’s lament questions the heroism of the man who fathered her son — only to kill him when Sohrāb reached the bloom of manhood.

The overall thesis of my presentation is that any “quotation,” by the medium of epic, of a woman’s laments matches the “real-life” medium of women’s laments described by anthropologists who observe this genre as a living tradition. I have elaborated on this thesis at length in ch.7 of Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetry (Davidson 2000), a book that will soon appear in a second edition. In that book I concentrated on the lament of Tahmina in Persian epic for its own sake. In this presentation, by contrast, I concentrate on the parallelisms between that Persian lament and the ancient Greek lament as exemplified by Andromache in the Iliad.

The social institutions of lament can be defined as a way of expressing — by way of song — one’s grief over the death of someone, or over other such misfortunes. There are many different forms of lament in many different societies, but there is one salient characteristic shared by most of them: lament tends to be gender-specific, so that only women sing laments in some societies while in others they sing laments that are distinct in form or style from those of men.

In the case of living traditions of lament in Iranian societies, there is a wide variety of surviving evidence. Although the existing research on this evidence is limited, the results are most revealing. In this presentation, I highlight three relevant publications of research centering on Iranian traditions of lament, particularly women’s lament:

1) The research of Charles M. Kieffer (1975) on traditional laments performed by women in dari-speaking communities around the area of Kábul in Afghanistan. Kiefer also gives a most valuable bibliography on references to women’s lament in ethnographic accounts dating from the twentieth and even the nineteenth century (p. 322n36).

2) The research of Benedicte Grima (1992) on traditional laments performed by women in Paxtun communities extending from Eastern Afghanistan to Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (especially the villages of Madyan and Ahmadi Banda).

3) The research of Mohammad Mokri (1995) on traditional laments performed by professional women singers in Kurdish dialectal communities (especially in the Gurani dialect, in the Northern regions of the modern states of Iran and Iraq).

As we can see from the research of Kieffer, women who perform lament are “exteriorizing” their emotions (p. 313). There are conventional poses for the singing: for example, a group of lamenting women will hold each other by the elbow (p. 315) and will mix their singing with stylized sobs that prolong the words of lament, such as bačé-éééém u-hu-hu-hu-hu (or i-hi-hi-hi-hi) (p. 316). There are different formulas that are most appropriate for grieving over different categories of loved ones who died, such as a son, a daughter, a father, a husband (pp. 316–318); and there are important sub-categories, such as an infant son or a married son with children (p. 317).

The research of Grima extends the perspective on exteriorized emotions from the actual performance of lament to other forms of speech act involving not only the emotion of gham or ‘sorrow’ but even the emotion of xādi or ‘joy’. She makes it clear, however, that the primary emotion in the wide spectrum of speech acts traditionally performed by Paxtun women is still gham, and that the primary sorrow is over instances of death. Particularly well documented are instances of lament over the deaths of sons (p. 59). Two specific words that refer to such lament are sānda, which can best be translated as ‘lament’ (p. 59), and zharā or ‘weeping’ (p. 59). As Grima makes clear, the gham or ‘sorrow’ expressed by women’s lament has the effect of a “structured resistance” to the sufferings endured by women within the context of Paxtun society, and that this “resistance” is perceived by men as a potential threat to their own identity (pp. 140, 147). This model of Paxtun women’s “structured resistance,” as developed by Grima, is relevant to the model of “protest” as developed by other scholars in analyzing the traditions of women’s lament in other societies. At a later point in the discussion, I will examine further this model of “protest.”

As for the research of Mokri, it is confined mostly to the laments performed by professional female performers in the Gurani dialect of Kurdish. From the evidence collected by this researcher, it is clear that professionalism in the performance of lament is secondary to the non-professional lamentations of women who mourn their own loved ones.

It is also clear, as Mokri points out in passing, that the Iranian Shi’ite traditions of lament for the two Imams are another secondary development, as reflected by the specialized word nawḥa-gar (p. 464). There is no space here in this presentation for me to delve into the highly complex history of Shi’ite traditions of lamentation, and I must stay on track here by focusing on the main interest of Mokri, which is most relevant to the lament of Tahmina as quoted in the Shāhnāma.

In the case of Kurdish women’s traditional laments, a most characteristic theme is the sorrow expressed by the main characters in the story of Khosrow and Shirin. In other words, this sorrowful story is the inspiration, as it were, for the laments performed by women to express their own sorrow over the deaths of their own loved ones, or, in the case of professional female mourners, over the deaths of others. The Kurdish female mourners actually identify their own sorrow with the sorrow inherent in the story of Khosrow and Shirin, which in turn is expressed by many different versions of laments sung by the character of the beautiful queen Shirin herself over the deaths of the two male love interests in the story, Farhād the charismatic artisan and Khosrow himself, the queen’s husband. There are also many different versions of laments sung by Farhād over the false news of the death of Shirin. Such laments by Shirin and Farhād are lavishly quoted, as it were, in Kurdish oral traditions of women’s lament as studied by Mokri. And, in one case, the lament of Farhād over the false news of the death of Shirin is actually quoted in the classical version of the story as composed by the great poet Neẓāmi in the twelfth century. In the Khosrow and Shirin of Neẓāmi, the lament of Farhād over Shirin is actually embedded in the poet’s poetry, as if it were a direct quotation. And there is a wealth of further quotations of further laments by Shirin and Farhād in the body of classicizing Kurdish poetry as documented by Mokri.

It is in this connection that I come to a case of a lament that is quoted in the Shāhnāma of Ferdowsi.

It is a lament performed by Tahmina on the occasion of the killing of her son Sohrāb by Rostam.

It may be objected that such a lament is a mere representation of a lament, not a “real” one: after all, a character inside an epic poem seems to be merely speaking it. How can we trust the words that a poet puts into the mouth of a character from the remote heroic past of Iran? And yet, I will argue that both the form and the content of what Tahmina is quoted as saying corresponds closely to what is found in “real” women’s laments as attested in a wide variety of Iranian societies, as studied in the three publications that I have highlighted in this presentation.

As we have seen from the study of Grima, the expression of an emotion like grief by way of song does not make it any less an emotion, if we accept the anthropological argument that emotion is culturally constructed. It can even be shown, on the basis of ethnographic observation, that a given lament’s combination of singing and grieving can expand and enhance the actual experience of grief. Thus the performance of a lament is a matter of poetics, and I will argue that the poetics of Persian epic require the poet to observe the internal poetics of the laments that he represents. When Tahmina expresses her grief and anger over the death of her son Sohrāb at the hands of his own father Rostam, the words that epic chooses to express her expression are not just poetic words: they are the performance of a lament framed within the performance of the epic Shāhnāma. As I argue in ch.7 of the book I mentioned earlier (Davidson 2000), the poetics of protest inherent in Tahmina’s lament are thus “safely” framed within the overall poetics of kingly and heroic legitimation inherent in the overarching narrative of the epic Book of Kings.

When I say “poetics of protest” here, I have in mind a distinctive feature of real women’s laments. It is what Grima calls “structured resistance” — and what other researchers call simply “protest.” As we will see, this kind of protest is gender-specific: that is, it is a protest against one’s misfortune as a woman and against one’s destiny in general as a woman.

Let us now proceed to consider how an epic can frame a lament. For a close analogy, we may compare the framing of women’s laments in the ancient Greek epic tradition, especially in the Homeric Iliad as analyzed by Richard P. Martin (1989). For the study of oral poetics in general, Martin suggests that “we abandon the notion of ‘genre’ as a literary term and train ourselves in the anthropologist’s working methods.” As Martin argues, the outer narrative of the Iliad, “quoting” the embedded speeches of characters in the narrative is really representing the performance of oral genres. Such “embedded genres” include lament, prayer, supplication, commanding, praising, insulting, and narrating from memory.

Martin has demonstrated “the usefulness of considering every speech within the poem [in this case, the Iliad] a composition in its own right, a poem within epic, subject to conventions of discourse.” Thus the “quoted” speeches of characters in the Iliad “are in fact stylized versions of pre-existing, already stylized verbal art forms such as lamenting, rebuking, boasting”; in short, “the Iliad itself consists of various ‘genres’ within epic.”

The oral poet can “recollect the way contemporary men and women speak,” since “the diction of such embedded genres is most likely inherited and traditional; the rhetoric, on the other hand, is the locus of spontaneous composition in performance.” When we consider “the way in which the heroes speak to one another” we discover that they are “performing to fit the audience.” For example, the Iliad shows both Helen and Hecuba as “actually enacting laments” in Iliad Book 24, and they are “fulfilling an expected performance role, using a recognized genre … to create dramatic effect.” But the dramatic effect of the framed performance can be achieved only if the drama of the framing narrative is a performance in its own right: “any tale in oral tradition . . . makes sense only in performance.”

For Tahmina’s lament in the Shāhnāma to “make sense” as a woman’s protest, it has to have both an interior intent, as a speech-act of and by itself, and an exterior intent, as a component of the larger speech-act that is the whole performance / composition of the Book of Kings. In order to attempt a reconstruction of the interior intent, we must first look for various kinds of protest rhetoric as we find it in the real laments of real women in living traditions described by ethnographers. Besides the Iranian evidence that we have considered so far, we may also compare non-Iranian evidence. To engage in this kind of comparison is useful for achieving insights that are valid from the standpoint of comparative sociology. Whatever points of comparison we discover can be described as typological parallels — and here I am using a term that is most familiar in descriptive linguistics.

Among the typological parallels that are available for study, perhaps the most useful is the evidence of Bedouin Arabic lament traditions as studied by Lila Abu-Lughod and the Modern Greek lament traditions as studied by such anthropologists as Loring Danforth, Anna Caraveli, Nadia Seremetakis, and Michael Herzfeld. There are also important contributions by Classicists and literary critics, most notably those of Margaret Alexiou and Gail Holst-Warhaft.

I draw special attention to the concept of “protest” as developed in the work of Caraveli. Her study “has proved particularly effective in showing how laments may permit the subversion of authoritative orders, not through direct, frontal rhetoric but through challenges to normative articulacy.” As we can see, the work of Caraveli has influenced the work of Grima.

As for Seremetakis, she argues that women’s performance of ritual lament “publicly resists those male-dominated institutions and discourses that fragment the female practice and devalue the social status of women’s labor.” By implication, such “resistance” would express discontent not only with the lamenter’s here-and-now but also with male-centered traditions in general.

Still, as Herzfeld cautions, there are limits to the pursuit of this line of thinking: “A search for ‘the’ meaning of these texts … hardly improves on survivalist and nationalist dreams of finding ‘the’ origins, or on teleological analyses of ‘the’ functions, of such phenomena.” He goes on to ask the basic question: do laments really change anything? Referring to one particular lament that he collected in Crete as the “key text” for his interpretation, Herzfeld shows how this song, performed by a young woman mourning the death of her elderly husband, “bewails loss and destruction [here he has just given us a minimalist definition of lament], … but may also have initiated a process that allowed a young woman to redress her low social status.” Herzfeld’s point is that the words of the given young woman who is recorded in his case study as lamenting the death of her husband cannot be understood without taking into consideration not only the short-term but even the long-term effects that her lament had produced for the community that had heard her.

Herzfeld stresses the “indeterminacy” of performance, which helps explain “. . . why some events seem significant in hindsight even when — at the time — they may not have seemed significant at all.” In other words, performance creates meaning for the composition.

The lamenting woman whom Herzfeld recorded “did not resign herself to what others regarded as her ‘fate’ but rather, through her lament and subsequent actions, she took control over her ‘fate’.” In Modern Greek, in fact, the word for ‘lament’ is mirolòyi, meaning ‘words about fate’.

The idea of “managing fate,” Herzfeld argues, is a paradox only if we take “fate” at face value. Herzfeld explains it this way: when society blames the grieving person for his or her misfortune, with the attitude that it must have been brought on because of some moral flaw, then the grieving person can say that the misfortune was fated to be and there was nothing that could be done to prevent it: “The logic of fate and personality is clear: my failures and your successes are just a matter of luck, whereas my successes and your failures are proof of radical differences in ‘character’.” The inherent ambiguity, Herzfeld concludes, leaves open the possibility of future action.

Paradoxically, then, the more the lamenter blames fate and her inability to control fate, the more she takes her own fate into her own hands — in the eyes of those who hear her lament. Further, the more she involves others in her grief, the more power she has to protest her own fate. In order to achieve the fullest possible range of grief, the lamenter must make the view of her grief as public as possible. For example, in Modern Greek traditions a mother who has lost her son can most effectively achieve “the public view of personal disaster” by linking the passion of Christ with the death of her son: if a lamenting person can “evoke a sufficiently rich image of collective suffering, she will move others to tears because she has recast individual [experience] as common experience, her personal pain as a shared past and present.”

We have seen the same kind of linking in the Kurdish traditions of women’s lament, where the sorrows of larger-than-life figures like Shirin and Farhād are the fuel for expressing the sorrows of real women in performing their own lamentations over the deaths of their loved ones.

With these points of comparison in mind, let us proceed to a close reading of the passage from Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāma “quoting” the lament of Tahmina. She mourns the death of her son, Sohrāb, who has just been killed in battle by his own father, Rostam.

The following is a brief outline of the events that lead up to this tragic end:

Rostam goes on a hunting expedition completely alone (with the exception of his horse, Rakhsh) outside of Iran, into the Turanian wildland. After a large, solitary meal, he falls asleep, having let Rakhsh roam free without his bridle. Some Turkomans, seeing that Rostam is off his guard, use this opportunity to steal Rakhsh. When Rostam wakes up and finds that Rakhsh has disappeared, he is devastated. He goes to the city Samangān to find his horse and is invited by the King to stay with a promise of help. The king’s daughter, Tahmina, comes to him in the middle of the night and tells him that if he were to impregnate her she would get him back his horse. Rostam accepts her proposition and then, the next day, when they part, he gives her an armband with the instructions that, should she bear a son, she is to put this armband on the child so that his father could recognize him. A son is born and is named Sohrāb. He shares the same early characteristics that his father had, looking a year old when he is only a month old, using weapons when he is only three, and other such traits that distinguish him as a hero. When he learns from his mother who his father is, he leaves Turan, with a Turanian army of warriors, to find Rostam. He sets out on his search for his father with the intention that once he has found Rostam, the two of them could then overthrow the Shāh, Kay Kā’us, and put Rostam on the Iranian throne —and overthrow the ruler of Turan, Afrāsiyāb, and put Sohrāb on the Turanian throne. Father and son would then rule the world, in a manner of speaking, being such a powerful, combined force. Consequently, as he sets out to find his father he also sets out to invade Iran.

Afrāsiyāb, the king of Turan and enemy of Iran, is willing to have Sohrāb invade Iran because he hopes that, once pitted against his father, Sohrāb would overcome him, thereby leaving Iran completely defenseless, if it lost its pahlavān-e jahān. He plots that even if Rostam should kill Sohrāb, instead of the other way around, the guilt of filicide would consume him for the rest of his days. In this scheme, Sohrāb must never recognize his father or else he will not fight him.

As Sohrāb invades Iran, he wreaks havoc on the outskirts, fighting the “amazon,” Gordafrid, and wasting her territory. The Iranian throne panics and summons Rostam to help in this state of emergency. Rostam does not take any threat from Turan seriously, and he does not immediately obey the Shāh’s command, but feasts drunkenly for three days instead. When he finally does come as summoned, the Shāh, because of his delay, is furious with him and publicly dishonors him. Rostam withdraws in anger but, fearful of being accused of cowardice, he eventually agrees to fight Sohrāb, not knowing, however, that Sohrāb is his own son. Before the two meet for a one-on-one confrontation, Sohrāb terrorizes the Iranian host, forcing it to scatter and causing chaos. They then fight, first with weapons, then by wrestling, but draw apart when evening comes. On the second day, Sohrāb overpowers Rostam in a wrestling match and is about to finish him off when Rostam tricks him by telling him that it is Iranian tradition that one has to defeat the opponent twice before one can take his head. Sohrāb accepts this lie and runs off after an antelope. Rostam meanwhile, exhausted, asks khodā or ‘God’ to give him back his former strength, for he used to have such density that his feet would sink into rocks. Finally, on the third day, having tricked Sohrāb out of his victory, Rostam kills Sohrāb, only to learn afterwards the sad truth about his identity. Overcome with grief, he asks Kay Kā’us to restore his son’s life, but Kay Kā’us refuses on the grounds that two such outstanding champions might be a threat to the throne.

In the collection of passages below, [1] I give you my own translation of Tahmina’s lament, segmented into a series of stages.

Let us start with passage 1:

She said all at once: ‘O soul of your mother
Where are you now? Mingled with the dust?

When my eyes were fixed on the road I said
“Perhaps I will learn news of my child and Rostam.”

My gomān [“fancy” or “suspicion”] was thus, and I said, “now you are wandering around the world,

searching continuously, and now, having found your father,
you hasten to return.”’

Tahmina both denies and accepts the death of her son. This ambiguity between angry denial and abject resignation corresponds to an ambiguous self-characterization. She speaks with the voice of a woman of all ages of life, be it a young bride who has just become the mother of a first-born or be it a bitter old widow who has known all along the cruelty of a world where men are fated to wage war. The universalized image of a grieving woman enhances the rhetoric of “the public view of personal disaster.”

Tahmina simultaneously plays two roles: she is trusting, but dumbfounded, a mother who cannot believe what has happened — and yet has suspected the truth all along. In denial, she addresses her lament to her son as if he were alive. She begins by asking him where he is. She then tells him that she has anxiously been waiting for him, expecting at least to hear about him. She depicts herself as any mother who is expecting her child’s return home, reassuring herself that she will soon learn of his whereabouts. She then says that it was her gomān, which can be interpreted positively as ‘imagination’ or ‘fancy’ and negatively as ‘suspicion,’ that Sohrāb, having departed in search of his father, is now hastening homewards. She is both imagining his coming home so that they can have a joyful reunion and recognizing that such a reunion is going to be only in her imagination, never in reality. Joyful expectation and the sad shattering of that expectation combine as one feeling.

Tahmina is like a sentinel, looking out to see what is coming down the road, picturing herself as expecting something that will never happen: the sight of her son coming home with his father, her husband. This image, of course, matches her vision of her son, who is in turn pictured as a sentinel, on the lookout, seeking his father throughout the world. This double sentinel duty of mother and son, with her staying ever on the lookout, with her eyes fixed on the road, while he keeps scanning the world, looking for his father, underscores the interplay of naive expectations and harsh reality — and yet it turns reality into expectation — upside down, inside out. If it is just her imagination that Sohrāb is looking out for his father, then the reality is that not only did he search for his father but he found him. Yet what she so confidently says she expects, news about Sohrāb and Rostam, perhaps even seeing the two of them coming home to her together, is a shattered hope. The shift of her ‘fancy’ back to the reality of what is at hand sets the audience up for the next stage of her lament:

Let’s look at passage 2:

How could I know, O son, when the news came
that Rostam would pierce your liver with a dagger?

She now gets straight to the point, mincing no words. This is not only the last thing she expected, but she sees no reason why she should have expected it in the first place. The abrupt switch — from her almost disbelieving that Sohrāb is really dead and her not even mentioning his father’s hand in the son’s death to her furious and irrefutable statement of fact — is cloaked in a rhetorical question that speaks in the voice not only of any woman of any age but of any man. What man, in his right mind, would deliberately kill his own child? Surely such a man is not human.

Here we turn to passage 3:

Didn’t he have regrets, sorrow or pity [darigh]
When he saw your face, your tall stature and hair?

Had he no pity upon your middle [gerdgāh] — that very thing which Rostam lacerated with his sword?

As Tahmina continues to express her misery at this outrage, she plays up the difference between her humanity and Rostam’s lack of it by pointing out how the father failed to recognize in his son what she as a mother knew so intimately. Tahmina expresses such pride — as she describes her son, whom she reared into early manhood, with the intimate detail of his hair, something that would not be seen by all, especially in battle, since Sohrāb would then be wearing a helmet. By mentioning his hair and then moving on to his gerdgāh, which not only means ‘middle’ but also ‘navel,’ she emphasizes her own attachment to Sohrāb, because only she as a mother, and she alone, was once physically connected to Sohrāb, as she nourished him in utero. There is a striking parallel in Kurdish women’s laments, where the interjection rō / rū is used frequently in the sense of ‘alas!’: this interjection is actually derived from the word rūd or rūda, meaning ‘umbilical cord’ (Mokri pp. 465–466). Her lament now turns to the audience, asking them how they could expect such a savage as Rostam to act otherwise. Rostam had only seen Sohrāb once in his life and that was in battle. She furthers her case with the image of Rostam tearing out Sohrāb’s gerdgāh. By ripping apart where the umbilical cord of Sohrāb once had been, that very means through which the mother had nourished the child when he was in her womb, the father Rostam has shown himself to be as viciously non-nurturing as the mother Tahmina is nurturing. He is the antithesis of what she is. She is Sohrāb’s generator, Rostam is his destroyer.

I give the text in passage 4:

I had nursed your body with tenderness
holding you to my breast during the long days and nights.

Now it is drowning in blood
a shroud has become the tattered garment covering your breast and shoulder.

Whom can I now draw to my side?
Who will forever be my confidant [ghamgosār]?

Whom can I summon in your place?
To whom can I tell my personal pain and sorrow?

Tahmina now shifts the attention away from Rostam and back to Sohrāb as she once again addresses him directly. She recollects her role as a young mother, cherishing the body, her nursling, and then bitterly declares it was all for nothing. She also contrasts her protective and continuous caring for her child with his present defenseless and sunken condition. Although Rostam is to blame for Sohrāb’s destruction, Tahmina now blames her own son, not her husband. By dying, Sohrāb has abandoned her. He has squandered her care. Now she is alone and has nobody. As she accuses Sohrāb of abandoning her when she asks him whom can she hold in her arms, who will be her ghamgosār, or confidant, who will sit next to her, and to whom will she tell about her pain and her sorrow, she is also blaming her son Sohrāb for not bringing her husband Rostam back to her — bringing him back to fulfill his role as a husband. Rostam should be the one to fulfill the role of a confidant to Tahmina — someone to fill her aching, lonely arms. She addresses her son as if he were her lover who had abandoned her. He was everything to her and she had given her life to him. How dare he leave her?

Let’s have a look at passage 5:

Alas for his body and soul, eyes and light
all stay in the dust, away from the palace and garden.

You searched for your father, O Lion, O Army Protector
in place of your father, you came upon your tomb.

With affliction you pass from hope to despair
you are miserably bent into the earth.

As she bewails his body, the very body that she had nurtured and that Rostam had failed to appreciate, she also bewails that his body now lies in the dust, not in the splendor to which it is entitled. The timbre is more general, and can apply to any young man, cut down in his prime, thereby inviting the audience to think beyond Sohrāb and about others in a similar plight. The awful truth that is peculiar to this story, that Sohrāb did actually find what he was looking for (his father) — and look what it got him (a dagger in the liver from his own father’s hand) — is reshaped to look like a failed quest that ended with the hero’s death. Her addressing him as a mighty warrior who found his death instead of his quest makes her personal loss everyone’s loss. He has turned from hope to hopeless despair (zār meaning lamentation as well) since he is sleeping in the dust, enveloped by a lamentable condition (zārwār). So too the audience is now completely enveloped by despair and grief.

Here we come to passage 6:

‘Before, when he drew forth his dagger
and sliced your silvery abdomen

why did you not show him that sign which your mother had given you? Why didn’t you make him mindful?

Your mother had given you a sign from your father.
Why did you not believe her?

Now your mother will remain a prisoner without you,
full of suffering and grief, pain and aches in the belly.

Why didn’t I fare along with you
when you turned your heart’s desire, the moon and the sun.

Rostam would have recognized me from afar,
(if you were) with me, O Son, he would have treated you humanely.

He would not have pitched a javelin at you,
he would not have demolished your bowels, O my son.

She concludes her lament by shifting inward again, away from public sympathy and away from public outrage to scolding her son for not doing as she had advised. She blames him for his death and blames him further for causing her such misery. Her temper is that of a mother scolding a child for being disobedient — and then pointing out the consequences of his irresponsible behavior. Now his death is his own fault because he could have prevented it if he had only listened to her. Finally, having blamed him, she blames herself. As any mother after the death of her child, she blames herself for not preventing it, even if there was nothing that she could have done about it. If only she had gone with him, then nothing would have happened to him. She fancies that Rostam would have recognized her from afar and embraced them both, instead of — and now she switches back to reality — what really happened, that Rostam stabbed Sohrāb, his very own son, in the liver.

After the epic finishes “quoting” her lament, it tells how Tahmina gathers up all of Sohrāb’s possessions and armor, takes his sword and docks his horse’s tail, and then distributes his possessions among the poor. In doing this, she in effect annihilates his accouterments by transforming them into something else. Instead of leaving his armor for someone to inherit, along with the heroic identity that is passed on from its previous owner, she gives it away as alms to the poor. And by docking the steed’s tail she has seemingly transformed Sohrāb’s war horse into a cart horse. In other words she turns swords into ploughshares.

These acts of Tahmina, performed after the performance of her lament, reinforce the words of protest expressed by the lament itself. They make explicit the threat that women’s lament implicitly poses to institutions that depend on the solidarity of men. Gail Holst-Warhaft describes this kind of threat in the ancient as well as present day Greek society:

Once any state has need of a standing army, it must condemn the negative, bitter pain of traditional laments; otherwise how will it recruit volunteers and keep their loyalty? Similarly, once a state has established courts of law, how can it tolerate the cycle of revenge such as the one triggered by female lamenters at the tomb of Agamemnon, or the threat of anarchy posed by laments like that of the widow Vrettis from Mani in the Peloponnese, who, when her only son was killed by neighbours, pulled out her knife in the courtroom, bit it and said threatening words.

I quote these threatening words for you in passage 7:

Mr. President,
if you do not condemn them
to death or a life sentence —
you see this dagger?
I’ll go to the upper quarter
and if I can’t find a grown-up
I’ll grab a small child
and slay him like a lamb —
for mine was an only child
and they cut him to pieces.

Such words are threatening not only because of what they say but also, even more important, for what they are: a song of lament. The agenda of protest in a lament may be quite explicitly threatening, as here, or only implicitly so, as when a mother’s grief over the loss of a child in a war demoralizes the host of fighting men.

The theme of demoralization is evident in the three laments of Andromache in the Iliad. As I said before, I will focus on the second of these three, which takes place immediately after Andromache catches sight of the corpse of her husband. The narrative of the Iliad prepares the audience for the lament by subjectivizing the morbid forebodings of Andromache immediately before she is confronted with the ghastly spectacle of her husband’s corpse. Let us follow the narrative in the translation I have given you in passage 8. Iliad 22.437–515 (tr. G. Nagy):

So she [= Hecuba] spoke, lamenting, but his wife [= Andromache] had not yet heard anything,
Hector’s wife: for no true messenger came to her
and told her any news, how her husband was standing his ground outside the gates.

I stop here at line 439. So we see that Andromache has not yet heard the news of Hector’s death at the hands of Achilles, and how Achilles is dragging behind his chariot the corpse of Hector outside the walls of Troy for all the Trojans to see. Hecuba, the mother of Hector and the mother-in-law of Andromache, is already lamenting, but Andromache has not yet heard anything. She is alone in her boudoir, weaving a web that tells its own story. I continue reading the translation where I left off, starting at line 440:

She [= Andromache] was weaving [ huphainein ] a web in the inner room of the lofty palace,
a purple [porphureē] fabric that folds in two [= diplax], and she was inworking [enpassein] patterns of flowers [ throna ] that were varied [poikila].

(As we know from other such scenes in archaic Greek poetry, the patterns of flowers that Andromache is weaving are a poetic substitute for a love song, which is morphologically parallel to the song of lament, as the work of Margaret Alexiou has shown. Let us continue where we left off, starting at line 442:)

And she called out to the attending women, the ones with the beautiful tresses [plokamoi], in the palace
to set a big tripod on the fire, so that there would be
a warm bath for Hector when he had his return [nostos] from battle.

There is a built-in irony here, because it was the task of womenfolk to bathe the body of fallen warriors who were near and dear to them. The narrative makes that clear in the lines that follow, starting with line 445. I resume my translation at line 445:

Unwary [nēpiē] that she was, she did not know [noeîn] that, far from the bath,
the hands of Achilles had brought him [= Hector] down. It was the work of Athena, the one with the look of the owl.
She [= Andromache] heard the wailing and the cries of oimoi coming from the high walls [purgos].
Her limbs shook, and she dropped on the ground her shuttle.

I stop here at line 448. I should note here that the cries of oimoi are cries uttered in songs of lament. Now let us continue with line 449:

And then she stood among the women-slaves attending her, the ones with the beautiful tresses, and she spoke to them:
“Come, I want two of you to accompany me. I want to see what has happened.
I just heard the voice of my venerable mother-in-law, and what I feel inside is that
my heart is throbbing hard in my chest right up to my mouth, and my knees down below
are frozen stiff. I now see that something bad is nearing the sons of Priam.

I stop here at line 453. We have just seen the narrative subjectivizing the feelings of Andromache. As we continue the reading, we come to the realization that Andromache must have been feeling her feelings of premonition even as she was weaving her love song, which was already modulating into a lament. She was simply trying to get away from hearing the spoken word of those who already knew the terrible truth. Now, in the lines that follow, she begins to recognize that truth in its terrible fullness. I continue reading, starting at line 454:

If only the spoken word had been too far away for me to hear. But I so terribly
fear for my bold Hector at the hands of radiant Achilles.
I fear that he has got him cut off from the rest, putting him on the run toward the open plain,
and that he has put a stop to a manliness that has gone too far, the cause of so much sorrow.

In these lines, she is already second-guessing the failure of Hector. He should have been defensive, as his name implies, since Hector means Protector, but no, Hector just had to go on the offensive, and Achilles was too good for him. Here we see a most painful distillation of feelings of demoralization and grief over the consequences of Hector’s failure. And now, in the lines that follow, Andromache begins to blame Hector for his shortcomings, just as we saw in Persian epic how the figure of Tahmina blames both her husband and her son for their shortcomings. As we continue our reading, we see that Andromache elaborates on the shortcomings of Hector, how he simply couldn’t resist going on the offensive when he should have stayed on the defensive. She describes this urge of Hector as a fatal shortcoming that had a demonic force of its own. Here is how she says it, as we continue our reading, starting at line 458:

It was a thing that had a hold over him, since he could never just stand back and blend in with the multitude of his fellow warriors.
Instead, he would keep on running ahead of the rest of them, not yielding to anyone as he pushed ahead with his vital force [menos].”

I stop here at line 459. As Andromache finishes speaking to her handmaidens, she has not yet even started her lament. She has not yet even seen the corpse of Hector. But, somehow, she already knows. Now we continue at line 460:

So speaking, she rushed out of the palace, same as a maenad [ mainás ],
with heart throbbing. And her attending women went with her.

I stop here at line 461. We have just seen Andromache compared to a maenad, that is, to a woman possessed by Dionysus — a woman who has lost all her inhibitions in public. As we will see in a moment, her uninhibited appearance is manifested primarily in the fact that her beautiful hair, so perfectly coiffed, will come completely undone when she finally sees the horrific scene of her husband’s corpse being dragged behind the chariot of Achilles outside the walls of Troy. I continue reading at line 462:

But when she reached the tower and the crowd of warriors,
she stood on the wall, looking around, and then she noticed him.
There he was, being dragged right in front of the city. The swift chariot team of horses was
dragging him, far from her caring thoughts, back toward the hollow ships of the Achaeans.

As the terrible image is imprinted on Andromache’s mind, this image starts receding, along with the body of her beloved husband. With the receding of the terrible image, her consciousness also recedes. She experiences a blackout. I continue reading at line 466:

Over her eyes a dark night spread its cover,
and she fell backward, gasping out her life’s breath [psukhē].

So Andromache falls into a swoon — which is like death, because her breath of life is knocked out of her. And, at this point, her beautifully coiffed hair becomes completely disheveled. I continue reading at line 468:

She threw far from her head the splendid adornments that bound her hair
– her frontlet [ampux], her snood [kekruphalos], her plaited headband [anadesmē],
and, to top it all, the headdress [krēdemnon] that had been given to her by golden Aphrodite

I stop here at line 470. The eroticism of the undone hair is enhanced by the reference to Aphrodite, goddess of sensuality and love, whose metonymic presence is invoked by the memory of those happy days, back when Andromache was married to Hector on her wedding day. I continue reading at line 471:

on that day when Hector, the one with the waving plume on his helmet, took her by the hand and led her
out from the palace of Eëtion, and he gave countless courtship presents.

These escapist memories of past happiness set the tone for what Andromache will sing as her lament when she recovers from her swoon. I continue reading at line 473:

Crowding around her stood her husband’s sisters and his brothers’ wives,
and they were holding her up. She was barely breathing, to the point of dying.
But when she recovered her breathing and her life’s breath gathered in her lung,
she started to sing a lament in the midst of the Trojan women, with these words:
“Hector, I too am wretched. For we were born sharing a single fate,
the two of us — you in Troy, in the palace of Priam,
and I in Thebe, the city at the foot of the wooded mountain of Plakos
in the palace of Eëtion, who raised me when I was little
– an ill-fated father and a daughter with an equally terrible fate. If only he had never fathered me.
But now you [= Hector] are headed for the palace of Hades inside the deep recesses of earth,
that is where you are headed, while I am left behind by you, left behind in a state of hateful mourning [penthos],
a widow in the palace. And then there is the child, not yet bonded to you, so young he is,
whose parents we are, you and I with our wretched fate. And you will not be for him —
no you will not, Hector — of any help, since you died, nor will he be of any help for you.

I stop here at line 486. The lament of Andromache has captured beautifully the happy memories of the past and the terrible awareness of the present and future, with all the dangers that Hector has brought upon his loved ones. At this point, Andromache’s song modulates into a scene of terror and pity as she visualizes the dire fate of the son of Hector and Andromache. I continue at line 487:

Even if he escapes the attack of the Achaeans, with all its sorrows,
still, for the rest of his life, because of you, there will be harsh labor for him,
and sorrows. For others will take his landholdings away from him. The time of bereavement
leaves the child with no agemates as friends.
He bows his head to every man, and his cheeks are covered with tears.
The boy makes his rounds among his father’s former companions,
and he tugs at one man by the mantle and another man by the tunic,
and they pity him. One man gives him a small drink from a cup,
enough to moisten the boy’s lips but not enough to moisten his palate.
But another boy whose parents are living hits him and chases him from the banquet,
beating him with his fists and abusing him with words:
“Get out, you! Your father is not dining with us!”
And the boy goes off in tears to his widowed mother,
the boy Astyanax, who in days gone by, on the knees of his father,
would eat only the marrow or the meat of sheep that were the fattest.
And when sleep would come upon him after he was finished with playing,
he would go to sleep in a bed, in the arms of his nurse,
in a soft bed, with a heart that is filled in luxury.
But now he will suffer many things, deprived of his father,
our child Astyanax, as the Trojans call him by name.
That is what he is called because you all by yourself guarded the gates and long walls.

I stop here at line 507. In the end, Andromache’s son will be a disappointment to her because her husband had been a disappointment. And now, in a crescendo of terror and pity, Andromache evokes the image of the naked corpse that will no longer have the benefit of being clothed in the fabric of the love that she wove for him in her song of love and lament. I continue reading at line 508:

But now, you are where the curved ships [of the Achaeans] are, far from your parents,
and you will be devoured by writhing maggots after the dogs have their fill of you.
There you lie, naked, while your clothes are lying around in the palace.
Fine clothes they are, marked by pleasurable beauty [ kharis ], the work of women’s hands.
But I will incinerate all these clothes over the burning fire.
You will have no need for them, since you will not be lying in state, clothed in them.
But there is to be glory [kleos] (for you) from the men and women of Troy.”
So she [= Andromache] spoke, weeping, and the women mourned in response.

Despite all this demoralization, Andromache’s lament ends on a note of kleos or ‘glory’, which is the Homeric word that designates the medium of epic — the medium in which Andromache’s songs of lament are embedded. So the demoralization of the woman’s lament is counteracted by the glory of epic.

We see a comparable counteraction in the case of the Persian epic in which the song of lament performed by Tahmina is embedded.

In the case of Tahmina’s lament, of course, the potential demoralization is far worse, since the death of the child reflects the brutality of the father, who is Rostam, the paragon of Iranian warriors. In this case, the mother’s lament is a threat not only to the “army,” the aggregate of Iranian warriors: it is also a threat to the heroic status of the warrior who is the paragon of the “army” — and even to the epic that glorifies that paragon, the Shāhnāma itself. The lament of Tahmina, contained by the epic, is an implicit threat to that epic. The fact that epic frames the lament, however, can attenuate the threat, since the framework can reassert male solidarity that is threatened by the female voice of lament. This reassertion is done by the “quoting” of a male warrior immediately after the “quoting” of Tahmina. The dramatic occasion for the speech of this male speaker, Bahrām, is the anniversary of Sohrāb’s death. In this way, epic asserts the male voice after a “cooling off” period of one year. Although this heroic speech sustains some of the themes that pervade Tahmina’s lament, it reworks these themes to accommodate the dominant agenda of the framing epic.

So let’s look at passage 9.

Thus the eloquent Bahrām said
“Don’t befriend the dead.

You won’t stay here for a long time.
Be equipped and don’t fashion delay.

On a day your father gave you the drum roll (nowbat).
Is it all right if the drum roll comes to an end for you?

Thus his secret does not become manifest.
When in bewilderment, you seek, you will not find the key.

No one knows how to open the firmly shut door.
In this anguish your life returned to the wind.

However, when he passes on from the judgment
thus is the judgment from our Lord.

Don’t bind your heart to the ephemeral otherworld.
The ephemeral is not sufficiently profitable.”

It seems as if Tahmina’s rhetoric, in pretending that Sohrāb is not dead and still looking for his father, is maintained by Bahrām’s speech, but for different ends. Bahrām is in effect asking the restless spirit of the dead to stop looking for his father. In the upside-down and inside-out world created by Tahmina’s lament, it is the realm of the dead, not of the real world, that is ephemeral. Since Sohrāb continues to be addressed as if he were still alive, the ephemeral world of the living can be reassigned to the world of the dead. In this way, the words of Bahrām can unthink the implicit threat of revenge from the restless spirit of the dead son of Rostam. The threat conjured up by Tahmina’s words of lament can now be dissipated into the insubstantial shades of the dead.

Appendix

1. Shāhnāma ed. Mohl Vol. II, p. 188 lines 1407–1410:

She said all at once: ‘O soul of your mother
Where are you now? Mingled with the dust?

When my eyes were fixed on the road I said
“Perhaps I will learn news of my child and Rostam.”

My gomān [“fancy” or “suspicion”] was thus, and I said,
“now you are wandering around the world,

searching continuously, and now, having found your father,
you now hasten to return.”’

2. Shāhnāma ed. Mohl Vol. II, p. 188 line 1411

How could I know, O son, when the news came that Rostam would pierce your liver with a dagger?

3. Shāhnāma ed. Mohl Vol. II, p. 188 lines 1412–1413

Didn’t he have regrets, sorrow or pity [darigh] When he saw your face, your tall stature and hair?
Had he no pity upon your middle [gerdgāh] — that very thing which Rostam lacerated with his sword?’

4. Shāhnāma ed. Mohl Vol. II, p. 188-90 lines 1414–1417

I had nursed your body with tenderness holding you to my breast during the long days and nights.
Now it is drowning in blood a shroud has become the tattered garment covering your breast and shoulder.
Whom can I now draw to my side? Who will forever be my confidant [ghamgosār]?
Whom can I summon in your place? To whom can I tell my personal pain and sorrow?

5. Shāhnāma ed. Mohl Vol. II, p. 190 lines 1418–1420

Alas for his body and soul, eyes and light all stay in the dust, away from the palace and garden.
You searched for your father, O Lion, O Army Protector in place of your father, you came upon your tomb.
With affliction you pass from hope to despair you are miserably bent into the earth.

6. Shāhnāma ed. Mohl Vol. II, p. 190 lines 1421–1427

‘Before, when he drew forth his dagger and sliced your silvery abdomen
why did you not show him that sign which your mother had given you? Why didn’t you make him mindful.
Your mother had given you a sign from your father. Why did you not believe her?
Now your mother will remain a prisoner without you, full of suffering and grief, pain and aches in the belly.
Why didn’t I fare along with you when you turned your heart’s desire, the moon and the sun.
Rostam would have recognized me from afar, (if you were) with me, O Son, he would have treated you humanely.
He would not have pitched a javelin at you, he would not have demolished your bowels, O my son.

7. From a live recording of a lament sung by widow Vrettis from Mani in the Peloponnese:

8. Iliad XXII 437–515

Iliad 22 437–515 (tr. G. Nagy)

437 So she [= Hecuba] spoke, lamenting, but the wife [= Andromache] had not yet heard anything,
Hector’s wife: for no true messenger came to her
and told her any news, how her husband was standing his ground outside the gates.
440 She [= Andromache] was weaving [huphainein] a web in the inner room of the lofty palace,
a purple [porphureē] fabric that folds in two [= diplax], and she was inworking [en passein] patterns of flowers [throna] that were varied [poikila].
And she called out to the attending women, the ones with the beautiful tresses [plokamoi], in the palace
to set a big tripod on the fire, so that there would be
a warm bath for Hector when he had his return [nostos] from battle.
445 Unwary [nēpiē] as she was, she did not know [noeîn] that, far from the bath,
the hands of Achilles had brought him [= Hector] down. It was the work of Athena, the one with the look of the owl.
She [= Andromache] heard the wailing and the cries of oimoi coming from the high walls [purgos].
Her limbs shook, and she dropped on the ground her shuttle.
And then she stood among the women slaves attending her, the ones with the beautiful tresses, and she spoke to them:
450 “Come, I want two of you to accompany me. I want to see what has happened.
I just heard the voice of my venerable mother-in-law, and what I feel inside is that
my heart is throbbing hard in my chest right up to my mouth, and my knees down below
are frozen stiff. I now see that something bad is nearing the sons of Priam.
If only the spoken word had been too far away for me to hear. But I so terribly
455 fear for my bold Hector at the hands of radiant Achilles.
I fear that he has got him cut off from the rest, putting him on the run toward the open plain,
and that he has put a stop to a manliness that has gone too far, the cause of so much sorrow.
It was a thing that had a hold over him, since he could never just stand back and blend in with the multitude of his fellow warriors.
Instead, he would keep on running ahead of the rest of them, not yielding to anyone as he pushed ahead with his vital force [menos].”
460 So speaking she rushed out of the palace, same as a maenad [mainás],
with heart throbbing. And her attending women went with her.
But when she reached the tower and the crowd of warriors,
she stood on the wall, looking around, and then she noticed him.
There he was, being dragged right in front of the city. The swift chariot team of horses was
465 dragging him, far from her caring thoughts, back toward the hollow ships of the Achaeans.
Over her eyes a dark night spread its cover, and she fell backward,
gasping out her life’s breath [psukhē].
She threw far from her head the splendid adornments that bound her hair
— her frontlet [ampux], her snood [kekruphalos], her plaited headband [anadesmē],
470 and, to top it all, the headdress [krēdemnon] that had been given to her by golden Aphrodite
on that day when Hector, the one with the waving plume on his helmet, took her by the hand and led her
out from the palace of Eëtion, and he gave countless courtship presents.
Crowding around her stood her husband’s sisters and his brothers’ wives,
and they were holding her up. She was barely breathing, to the point of dying.
475 But when she recovered her breathing and her life’s breath gathered in her lung,
she started to sing a lament in the midst of the Trojan women, with these words:
“Hector, I too am wretched. For we were born sharing a single fate,
the two of us — you in Troy, in the palace of Priam,
and I in Thebe, the city at the foot of the wooded mountain of Plakos
480 in the palace of Eëtion, who raised me when I was little
— an ill-fated father and a daughter with an equally terrible fate. If only he had never fathered me.
But now you [= Hektor] are headed for the palace of Hades inside the deep recesses of earth,
that is where you are headed, while I am left behind by you, left behind in a state of hateful mourning [penthos],
a widow in the palace. And then there is the child, not yet bonded to you, so young he is,
485 whose parents we are, you and I with our wretched fate. Neither will you be for him,
no you will not, Hektor, of any help, since you died, nor will he be of any help for you,
even if he escapes the attack of the Achaeans, with all its sorrows,
still, for the rest of his life, because of you, there will be harsh labor for him,
and sorrows. For others will take his landholdings away from him. The time of bereavement
490 leaves the child with no agemates as friends.
He bows his head to every man, and his cheeks are covered with tears.
The boy makes his rounds among his father’s former companions,
and he tugs at one man by the mantle and another man by the tunic,
and they pity him. One man gives him a small drink from a cup,
495 enough to moisten the boy’s lips but not enough to moisten his palate.
But another boy whose parents are living hits him and chases him from the banquet,
beating him with his fists and abusing him with words:
“Get out, you! Your father is not dining with us!”
And the boy goes off in tears to his widowed mother,
500 the boy Astyanax, who in days gone by, on the knees of his father,
would eat only the marrow or the meat of sheep that were the fattest.
And when sleep would come upon him after he was finished with playing,
he would go to sleep in a bed, in the arms of his nurse,
in a soft bed, with a heart that is filled in luxury.
505 But now he [= our child] will suffer many things, deprived of his father,
our child Astyanax, as the Trojans call him by name.
That is what he is called because you all by yourself guarded the gates and long walls.
But now, you are where the curved ships [of the Achaeans] are, far from your parents,
and you will be devoured by writhing maggots after the dogs have their fill of you.
510 There you lie, naked, while your clothes are lying around in the palace.
Fine clothes they are, marked by pleasurable beauty [kharis], the work of women’s hands.
But I will incinerate all these clothes over the burning fire.
You will have no need for them, since you will not be lying in state, clothed in them.
But there is to be fame [kleos] [for you] from the men and women of Troy.”
515 So she [= Andromache] spoke, weeping, and the women mourned in response.

9. Shāhnāma ed. Mohl Vol. II, p. 192 lines 1452–1458

‘Thus the eloquent Bahrām said “Don’t befriend the dead.
You won’t stay here for a long time. Be equipped and don’t fashion delay.
On a day your father gave you the drum roll (nowbat). Is it all right if the drum roll comes to an end for you?
Thus his secret does not become manifest. When in bewilderment, you seek, you will not find the key.
No one knows how to open the firmly shut door. In this anguish your life returned to the wind.
However, when he passes on from the judgment thus is the judgment from our Lord.
Don’t bind your heart to the ephemeral otherworld. The ephemeral is not sufficiently profitable.”

Bibliography

Abu-Lughod, L. 1985. “Honor and Sentiments of Loss in a Bedouin Society.” American Ethnologist 12:245–261.

———. 1986. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley.

Alexiou, M. 1974. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge.

Caraveli, A. 1986. “The Bitter Wounding: Lament as a Social Protest in Rural Greece.” In Gender and Power in Rural Greece (ed. J. Dubisch) 169–194. Princeton.

Danforth, L. 1982. The Death Rituals of Greece. Princeton.

Davidson, O. M. 2000. Comparative Literature and Classical Persian Poetry. Bibliotheca Iranica: Intellectual Traditions Series no. 4. Costa Mesa, CA.

Grima, B. 1992. The Performance of Emotion among the Paxtun Women: “The Misfortunes which Have Befallen Me.” Austin.

Herzfeld, M. 1993. “In Defiance of Destiny: The Management of Time and Gender at a Cretan Funeral.” American Ethnologist 20:241–255.

Holst-Warhaft, G. 1992. Dangerous Voices: Women’s Lament and Greek Literature. London.

Kiefer, C. M. 1975. “Les formules de lamentation funèbre des femmes à Caboul: awāz andāxtan-e zanā.” Mélanges linguistiques offerts à Émile Benveniste. Paris.

Martin, R. P. 1989. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca.

Mokri, M. 1995. “Pleureuses professionelles et la mort de Chîrîn: Lamentations funéraires en Iran occidental (chez les Kurdes).” Contributions scientifiques aux études iraniennes 4 (Persico-Kurdica) 460–505.

Seremetakis, C. N. 1990. “The Ethics of Antiphony: the Social Construction of Pain, Gender and Power in the Southern Peloponnese.” Ethos 18:281–511.

Footnotes

[ back ] 1. Passages are numbered according to the collection of passages in the Appendix.

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