Personal Sentiments and Polyphonic Voices in Warao Women's Ritual Wailing: Music and Poetics in a Critical and Collective Discourse

Ritual wailing performed during funerals provides Warao women with a vehicle for individual and collective expression and a crucial point of access to political processes. When asked about the significance of these musical and texted laments, women emphasize the importance of crying “right alongside each other.” This article examines the musical and poetic elements that enable wailers to produce a collective discourse while retaining the distinctiveness of individual voices. I argue that the polyphonic and intertextual character of laments plays an essential role in the cultural construction of women's social power; specifically, these performance dynamics engender special forms of subjectivity that enable women to produce a discourse whose “truth” and “strength” resist reappropriation.