Note from the Author: "The Sorrow Songs as
Lamentation" was written as my thesis paper for completion of my degree in
English Literature at Bosphorus University, and was presented at the Boğaziçi University American Studies Conference
"Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ethnicity, Race and Gender"
held March 6-7 2003 in Istanbul, Turkey.
Abstract
For DuBois, the early African American slave songs
and spirituals were “Sorrow Songs” of a denarrated people sighing
for rest and a hope in the ultimate justice of things. The songs sing true
of a people of exile, disinherited of their homeland, who openly lamented their
enslavement and strife in a way that brought them closer as a
community and strengthened their cause for redemption. The songs
are expressions of “deepest hurt and profoundest hope”, of a
culture formed in trial and persecution, where there was no reluctance to
commune and enter worship with pain, to cry out in lament.
Uniquely paralleled to the “Sorrow
Songs” are the ancient Hebraic psalms of individual and communal lament of
a people who suffered similar grief, oppression and alienation. In their stories
and journeys through deserts of despair to lands of promise, the Israelites
allowed a people many years later to find deep resonance with
their own cause for freedom. The “suffering of affliction” in the
lament psalms speaks too of a people who found the strength to sing
true in the face of strife with hearts of deep honesty and sincere hope.
“In modern history lamentation has no generic line”
and as a genre is not exclusive in form and meter. Yet the lament
of the ancient near east, exemplified in the Hebraic psalm, can still find
parallels in contemporary and near-contemporary settings like the songs and
spirituals of the pre-emancipation African-Americans. As lovers of
the literature of the past, we must learn from those who “not only
sang of sorrow, but lived lament until it broke loose into the freedom
of joy.”
