Over this week’s reading I focused on Bauman and Lord’s essays and synthesized these materials by keeping in mind the Irish caoineadh, or keening. The caoineadh is a lament form produced by a soloist who employs a chorus. It is part of a death procession within a community and performed by women, usually a matriarchal figure in the family of the person who passed and occasionally someone within the village or region who is known for the craft. It is both poetry and chant.
I believe this easily suits the definition of a verbal art form for it requires knowledge of the deceased, the community in which they lived, and the ability to spin a narrative of their life. The call and response of the attending women who perform the duties of a chorus build on the soloist’s role. Young women in the community would apprentice for the position, which was one of respect. These laments could be coded to express frustration, anger, and pain at the hands of the deceased in life by disclosing their misdeeds and misfortunes, including domestic violence and alcoholism.
Performance is oral in this context, but it is also aurally interpreted and examined. The bean caoineadh perform their craft for the procession of the dead to the burial plot followed by the family and the community. This is not a means of communicating a loss or an event. This performance acts as a ritual of separation. “Performance,” according to Bauman, “involves on the part of the performer an assumption of accountability to an audience for the way in which communication is carried out, above and beyond its referential content” (11). Moving beyond “referential content” then is the goal of the keener in order to eulogize and process the loss within the community. The keener speaks to the inevitable nature of this kind of loss for all in listening distance.
Lord addresses the compositional aspect of performance. A keener may use associative epithets to root her audience and remind them of whom she speaks while she elaborates on the life they led and how they affected change and movement against or with others. She may utilize an epithet as a chorus or bridge, returning to it as a focal point within her composition to reiterate an aspect of the deceased.
Word Witch 