Quarterly of Lapham ’s
A thin, aged woman stands over a corpse and releases a terrible wail. Her knotted black hair obscures her face; her dark cloak conceals her coiled body; her hands pound at her sides. She convulses wildly and cries out in a tongue made foreign in its own home: “Och, och, ochón!” This image of consuming, unadulterated grief will be familiar to most who have heard of the Irish keen. Like any myth, it has a relation to the truth—but compressing a ritual with thousands of years of history into a single wail can only result in a somewhat flat portrayal of reality.
Though accounts vary over time and from one region to another, visitors chronicling their trips to Ireland have often included reasonably consistent descriptions of keening, usually perceived as peculiar, often as grotesque (a perception that, by the twentieth century, would be taken up by many within Ireland, including ashamed former keeners). The accounts tend to accord in some aspects with the mythologized version: the long-haired and cloaked keener was almost always a woman, often old, “or if she be comparatively young, the habits of her life make her look old,” as one such account puts it. This consistency could be that of a natural tradition. It may be a result of life imitating art, either in the form of direct literary depictions or related archetypes such as the banshee; the Virgin Mary, who tends to be depicted keening in Irish depictions of the Lamentation of Christ; and the sean bhean bhocht (poor old woman), as scholar Kathryn Conrad argues. It may also be a case of art imitating art, writers describing what they expected rather than what they saw. In any case, a cultural and literary tradition developed together, and with considerable congruity.
Today that tradition is all we can know about the keen. Essential to its modern mythology is that the keen has disappeared, that the song of mourning has itself been lost in the endless battle against invading powers. It can be heard in a few audio recordings by sociologists and seen in transcriptions of the words and melody of keens, but no more. Over the past few centuries, death in Europe (and the United States) has been hidden in hospitals and shipped overseas, and according to UN figures, death rates over the past seventy years have stayed relatively stable in Europe and until recently had been steadily decreasing in the U.S. Death rates for those under the age of sixty have significantly fallen, even in what the UN calls “less developed regions.” Mourning rituals like keening have become increasingly uncommon along with a rise in life expectancy that can feel like a scarcity of death. Funerals are often quiet affairs, and sorrow is to be felt in private. But no matter how much death may seem to retreat, as wars are fought by computers, one disease after another is cured, and Silicon Valley promises immortality, the illusion will always be broken. Death will inevitably reassert itself, whether it be in the form of “deaths of despair” and poverty, or a result of climate change and its many by-products, including natural disaster, famine, and plague. When death becomes public again, grief may, too.
