Elizabeth Wickett has introduced to the curious Western mind a hard-to-grasp, but illuminating, poetic interpretation of Upper Egyptian funerary laments, which, the author reveals, have been inherited from Ancient Egyptians. Wickett found it difficult to interpret the half-sung and sometimes half-spoken laments in Sa'idi (Upper Egyptian) dialect, but this doesn't impede her interesting and sometimes eerie account. Nor does the endless cycle of looped rhymes and heterophonies, muffled sounds and truncated words dampen Wickett's enthusiasm for quenching the Western mind's thirst for this intellectual and social genre. For the Living and the Dead, originally a doctoral thesis, is enlivened by the author's lively description of places and persons, and her intimate writing style. With a bundled-up babe-in-arms, Wickett sets off on her intriguing journey, which leads her to extensively explore the funeral rights of Ancient Egyptians and their lamentations. Like the train, which, in 1979, ‘bounced up and rolled in the slow shunt from station to station' to carry her to Luxor, Wickett divides her quest into three stages. The first part recounts her experiences searching out noted lamenters and recording laments in and around this Upper Egyptian city. She stumbles on several popular naddaba (women lamenters), who include Tariyya, a widow, who laments at funerals and is given tea and sugar in return. The author also interviews a lamenter named Qomiyya. Wickett is told that when there is a wajib (literally ‘duty' among women in Luxor, as the word for funeral is seldom uttered), it is incumbent on every woman to come to the funeral and cry. "When each arrives, the gathered throng announces her arrival with a lament and she becomes integrated immediately into the collective mourning," the author notes. Wickett discovers that lament is also a vehicle for complaint and social protest. It happens that she attends a funerary lament led by Tariyya, when a brazen woman performer takes the opportunity to remonstrate against the Government's decision to raise the price of a sack of flour. The second part of For the Living and the Dead is devoted to the analysis of lament symbols and referents, the performers and the performance of lament, and the concordance of lament themes. She reveals that the ‘dramatis personae' of people to be mourned include the mother, the husband or father, the brother or blood brother, the young man (often called the bridegroom), the bride, the venerable old man, the man without heirs and the children. In order to characterise each persona, the author has to cleverly define the semantic domain or realm of metaphors assigned to each, analysing the mythical, qua-social person or archetype through its frame of representation and where relevant, parallel images from Arabic folklore and Egyptian mythology. Concerning the father/husband, Wickett discovers: "In some lament repertoires, the procreative role of the father is accentuated: he is the source of nourishment, the grains of wheat, the red [or ripened] wheat and, as a husband, the source of sexual pleasure". Lamenters also describe the husband/father as the protruding mound and the high river bank, which ‘will not be immersed in the waves of inundations'. Some lamenters induce widows to shed tears when they address affectionately the father/husband as the strong pillar ��" even pillar of marble ��" which has fallen and must be raised up. Wickett adds: "In some laments [the father/husband is described] as the phallic-shaped pigeon tower: O high pigeon tower on the oasis truck/When it toppled, the pigeons fanned out and were gone/ O high pigeon tower on the path to Quseir/when it toppled the pigeons fanned out in the night." Finally, the author explores Ancient Egyptian lamentation: the iconographic tradition, ancient funerary texts and laments, performance modes and the cosmology of the afterlife. In this third part, she tries to answer the intriguing questions: ‘How has the unbroken oral tradition of women's lamentation at funerals allowed the tradition of lamentation to flourish in Upper Egypt despite the lapse of millennia? How have ancient funerary beliefs and practices been translated into conceptions of deaths and the afterlife in the contemporary tradition?' In her exploration of the Ancient Egyptian lamentation, the author reproduces paintings and illustrations from the New Kingdom tombs in the Theban necropolis at Gurna (ca 1,546-1,237 BC), in which lamenters are shown in conventional poses on the walls of tombs, either standing, kneeling or crouched, with arms poised overhead. One of the most beautiful and evocative of these representations of lamentation is, Wickett asserts, in the tomb of the XVIIIth Dynasty noble, Ra'moza, in which female mourners are depicted with their hair unplaited and arms uplifted as they pursue the funerary bier, weeping and chanting lamentation. Ancient Egyptian women lamenters would address the husband both as ‘great' and ‘the father', as in the contemporary persona of the husband/father or patriarch. Mourning Ancient Egyptian women would start with highly formulaic cries, which the author says, resemble ritual wailing, and progress to more poetic laments, different in tone from the more intimate and mildly admonishing lament. Wickett's analysis shows that some of these Ancient Egyptian texts revolve around the idea that, as the dead person has been stripped naked to be washed, the lamenters rip their clothes in grief. The author of this interesting study was told that this act was regarded as a legitimate expression of the grief experienced in the loss of one's sexual partner.
For the Living and the Dead By Elizabeth Wickett Published by the AUC Press 307 pages LE120
