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ONE OF THE EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS I have from early in my childhood is that of the incessant funerals we used to have at our home. I think we used to have a funeral every few months, and always - without exception - it was of a relative far way back in Malawi where my parents come from, whom in almost all cases us children would not only never had met but usually would never have heard of let alone known.
I was a curious little child. Although I never indulged in the business of trying to find out the purpose behind all the funeral ceremonies, I distinctly remember that I always used to get absorbed in what was going on, to a point where up to now memories of the sights and sounds of funerals still remain among my most vivid recollections from my first two years in life and later.
Those dirges have certainly exerted an extreme influence on my current musical creations.
That strong background has only fed a further intrigue in this phenomenon. Now to a new point where I have spent some time ruminating on this recurrent and often-to-be-witnessed cultural event in our society. So - what is a funeral, why do we mourn?
Although I have mentioned that at the tender age of those early years I, being incapable of any adult analysis, merely wound myself at a wondering absorbption in funerals, I came to observe certain outstanding features of the proceedings, and identify a certain pattern of behaviour among mourners. These I shall outline now as they will be of much pertinence to what I shall discuss a little later on the subject.
There would always be a telegram to announce a funeral. Then the crying would start as soon as it has been opened. I do not remember particularly about anyone going to inform other relatives within the town, but almost always neighbours would be the first to come as soon as they hear the crying and see furniture from the sitting room being taken out into the yard.
News of death always travels fast. By evening there would be some swell of a crowd and the crying would be in full chorus. It was always of interest to me that the women would be quite dry-eyed as they are coming, only to screech into a wild peal of mourning upon reaching the gate to the yard. This would touch off a chorus of answering wails from inside the house from other women. It interested me to note that, even neighbours who not only never knew who had died but were not even of the same origin as my parents, would also cry, sometimes loudly.
Meal times interested me particularly. The cooking would begin with a few women lighting a wood fire outside at the back in our shed kitchen. As it progresses, more and more women from inside would join and the hottest, roariest gossip would erupt, accompanied by that loud and free-easy way our women laugh when extremely amused. Even this early, it never escaped my intrigue how people who had been crying just moments ago could change face so quickly and have so much fun, completely ignoring the background of wailing still going on.
In the evening, many of the women would go back to their homes only to return a while later with beddings and their men in coats and/or jackets for the night. The women always spent their nights indoors and the men outdoors. After the first day - usually from the second night - there would be a lot of singing, and this was always the part of the funeral I enjoyed most. And so did this other popular character known only as Kamuvoi.
Kamuvoi was an aged, slight-built red-eyed man, apparently with no family. He was a fun-loving self-appointed master of ceremonies at every Tumbuka funeral in Kalulushi. He loved to send wise-cracks flying around and lead the singing. He was hardly, if ever, to be found among fellow men as he dearly loved to be petted and heckled by the women. He enjoyed his funerals quite alright. And probably this was his main economic activity, or source of livelihood; I never saw him engaged in any other.
I have not said much about men. This is because they always played a rather peripheral role. Mostly dormant, they would sit sprawled in the sofas outside, either not talking or talking in low, quietly conversational voices. Most never stayed long. A few hours and they would be gone. Even fewer would spent the night. So this was nearly exclusively a womens affair.
I have, of course, been to quite a few funerals since in my more recent years, most significantly of the two elder brothers of mine that left us one in February 1991 and the other one in December 1992. Most of what I used to observe as a child is still much the same, bar for the additional procedures and behaviours associated with burial. But these I shall make mention of as I start treating of the subject of discussion in detailed analysis.
Funerals come about because of death. We mourn because we are sad about our loss of dear departed ones. But - are we really sad when somebody dies? If so, why do we mourn? And when we mourn, do we do it genuinely? These questions invite us to examine some of the terms we are using in this discourse.
Well, just two, really; death and mourn. Death is a state of being a human body enters when it ceases to function, when it becomes deprived of its life-force, or life. Mourning is a state of sorrow in which a person indulges in sad reflections over a departed other. This may either be concealed or - more usual and more conventionally - may be physically manifested by a matching facial countenance and wailing or other such external activity.
Death is and has always been held in awesome fear. Why?
It is one of the greatest mysteries in our experience. Whereas it is easy to understand grief over a dead person arising out of the sense of the still-living feeling eternally deprived of the company or other society of the deceased, it is scarcely easy to understand grief arising out of the fact of death itself as applicable to the dead. And maybe we could ask in passing, when people mourn, do they mourn the cessation of their interaction with the deceased? Do they mourn the imminence of their own death or is it both?
Complex questions. We shall attempt to answer some of them presently from observation and deduction.
We have stated what a steep mystery death has always been in society. The only familiar thing about death is its extreme contrast to life, its recurrence, its finality and - its certainty. Nothing more. This has made it an ironically unknowable thing that it has remained one of the biggest forces among those that control the thrust of human life since the beginning.
Religion has been born as part of an attempted explanation of (and, am tempted to add, pacification against) death among other equally puzzling phenomena in our experience.(This shall be treated of much more fully in a later essay). In general, most religion stamps death as a medium towards a higher spiritual existence, where there is further continuity.
The psychical world does not have a very different story. Death is held as a new beginning, a point of transmutation into the realm of spirit in which existence takes a different form. Scientifically, though, death, like its name, is a dead end; life ceases and matter decays, breaking down into various elements. This view, however, seems to lack the second dimension of the others as it restricts itself to the physical life-form only.
One thing common in all explanations of death is that, inspite being apparently an end, it is actually a beginning to an after-life. It is only in the details of the nature of the after-life that the various explanations differ. Another similarity in values attached to the same: almost unanimously - bar for tiny reservations as embedded in the Christian faith - agree on an existence more perfect than our earthly one.
If, then, as we have established, death is generally considered not an end but a beginning, and that one to a better form of existence, we can consider ourselves as not in any way misguided to conclude that when people mourn, they certainly do not mourn the state of death. Or should we not discount it merely on that premise?
Sadness is always the central feature of any funeral. Indeed even those that send their condolences from a distance often say 'We've learnt with sadness about the passing on of....' And it is due to this sadness that we mourn. Or is it?
In arriving upon a plausible answer to the above, I shall proceed by method of presenting situations for elimination, so that those that may remain can be held as providing the answer. I, therefore, assert:
We cannot mourn the dead out of a contemplation of any kind of subjection to pain or whatever other kind of suffering to them, as we are fully aware that, firstly, they are beyond capability of any form of physical sensation and, secondly, by our social and/or religious belief they have passed on to a better existence. If we feel sad for this reason, then it can only mean that we do not believe in freedom from pain in death.
We cannot mourn the dead out of a contemplation of any kind of harm to ourselves arising out of their being in that state for, apart from knowing fully that they are incapable of any motion, we are, as already stated, party to the general consensus of a continued and better existence for all (maybe except for those whom we are sure are going to hell). If we feel sad for this reason it can only mean that we do not believe in the finality of physical death.
In summary, our sadness at the death of another human is not about them but about ourselves. We mourn because:
We see death staring us in the eyeballs when we either behold or contemplate the dead. Much as religion, spiritual or social belief may reassure us about the after-life, at the back of our mind we are still terrified as all attempts to explain it have never made it any less a mystery than it was when it became first known. The unknown always inspires fear as it represents insecurity, just like stepping out at night into an unlit and totally unknown area of the district. So is death. Unknown, unknowable.
Another reason - instinct. Anything that is an entity is recognisable as such because it preserves its being, or its status as a complete unit in itself. For the inanimate, this is achieved by having a solid shape and well-defined boundaries, e.g. a brick. But for most living things, and more particularly animals, and even more particularly humans, it goes beyond just having a certain shape and physical constitution. It goes to include in-built mechanisms to preserve the self not only from decimation but also from injury or any other real or imaginary danger.
Instinct is the strongest among the in-built defensive mechanisms. Instinct is easily triggered off by some invisible antenna we have whenever we are in a situation of uncertainty. This in turn triggers the very strong emotion of fear, which usually leads us into one form of sorrow or other.
With specific reference to death, it inspires fear in us because of the great mystery it is, the incomprehensible, irreversible, still finality. We imagine how we should stand to miss this or that of our earthly experience, or how we should burn in hell. This makes death tragic in our perception, therefore we are afraid and we grieve. The human instinct strives to keep us free of all danger.
So, since the route to death is usually by dangerous means, we cannot separate the two associated phenomena hence even more pronounced our sorrow in times of death.
Funeral practices have changed very little, if at all, since my childhood. It is indeed a strong tradition among our people. I shall now address myself to the question of proceedings at a funeral, with intent on high-lighting the logics side of the same in the light of the discussion we have just had.
In my account of childhood observations, I mentioned neighbours as always coming in in their large numbers to mourn with us. On analysis, I can only see two possible positions as regards them; either they shed crocodile tears (position 1) or they mourned under convenient cover (position 2).
POSITION 1: It is not possible to mourn for a person you do not know or, even less, have not developed any kind of attachment to. We can mourn only out of a state of attachment. Therefore, anyone who attempts to portray sorrow for that to whom they have absolutely no attachment acts a bold lie, for such a position is impossible.
POSITION 2: If a mourner is incapable of mourning the dead as we have illustrated (for any of the two reasons so far stated), then they can only be mourning for themselves, for the ugly picture that death stares into their eyes. Which then would mean that they are merely using the funeral as a convenient venue to give physical vent to the desperation arising out of their fear of the unknown.
What these two positions illustrate is the fallacy that goes with funerals as practised in our society, notwithstanding the huge scale a lot of them are given. Masses upon masses of people are seen drifting towards some funeral or other every day. Falsely, purposelessly. Indeed it has become a regular form of socialisation, and an officially stamped one too. I cannot imagine how much Zambian companies lose in millions of kwacha by allowing whole contingents of employees to hang around funerals and burials almost every day of the year.
Whenever I find myself in a situation where I am expected to attend a funeral either in the neighbourhood or at the home of an acquaintaince, I always opt for the alternative of staying away. My main difficulty is this: I fail to define my role at such a funeral.
In the first place, I am unable to see death as a sad thing in itself. And neither can it be sudden as it usually is stated to be, for it is knowledge common to all living beings that one day everybody must die. Death then, to me is a known eventuality that can not warrant the massive feeling of sadness - or play of sadness - made to accompany it. Maybe it would be more understandable In the first place, I am unable to see death as a sad thing in itself. And neither can it be sudden as it usually is stated to be, for it is knowledge common to all living beings that one day everybody must die. Death then, to me is a known eventuality that can not warrant the massive feeling of sadness - or play of sadness - made to accompany it. Maybe it would be more understandable if this sadness was for those whom the deceased may have been providing for or directly related to, but this is very unlikely, going by how much heartless property-grabbing is currently practiced in our society.
If I cannot be sad, then I cannot mourn, if the practice of sitting around a fire in the funeral-house courtyard can be referred to as mourning.
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