The African-American Sorrow Song and the Hebrew Lament: A Comparative Study

Barish Golland, Bogazici University, 2003.

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 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.”