Lidija Haas in Harper’s Magazine:
One third of the way into Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel, A Separation, its narrator asks an elderly Greek woman to demonstrate a traditional funeral lamentation. This woman is a professional mourner (a “weeper”) who ululates on behalf of the region’s bereaved, people from whom, the narrator has heard, others “expect a good show.” Her services are needed because “the nature of grief” is such that “you are impaled beneath it, hardly in a condition to express your sorrow.” The weeper comes across a bit like a Method actor: “in order to really feel the songs, in order to trigger the emotion that you need to lament,” she says through an interpreter, she must draw on her own reserves of grief, which is why her performance has improved with age and the loss of her father, brother, and husband, among others. “You need to have a great deal of sadness inside you in order to mourn for other people, and not only yourself.”
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.