Urim songwriting workshop: Arts in ritual

The weekend was time off from the workshop, and it worked really nicely to have that break, for the participants and for me. We'd covered a lot of content those first two days.

Ever since my first day with the Urim, I'd been hearing about an immanent "cultural event." As near as I could tell from the descriptions of what was going to happen, it would be some kind of funeral celebration in honor of two women who had died. Part of the observance would include hitting the garamut (wooden slit-drum). That's all I knew. 

Soon after I first heard about this, I saw people walking down the path that led right by the house I was staying in, and the people were obviously in mourning. The women were doing the kind of wailing and crying that they only do as part of mourning. I assumed that this was also related to the funeral event I'd heard about. But strangely, days passed and that event didn't happen.

On Saturday morning an Urim man informed me that the cultural event he'd told me about was going to happen that afternoon. And that's when I learned that I was actually in the middle of two separate events. The mourners walking down the path were going to the burial of a man who had died just that week. But the event I'd been told about was in honor of two women who had died not recently, but some time before. The current death is what had postponed the other observance.

In the late afternoon on Saturday, someone came to take me to the area where the cultural event was happening. When I got there, I first saw two long line-ups of piles of food. Food exchange is often a part of "big days" and events in Papua New Guinea. 

People had brought yams, sago, and pig meat, which was being distributed into even piles. Food wasn't, however, the most important thing that people wanted me to see. Instead they guided me over to a tall post standing in the ground at the end of the lines of food. 

They explained to me that this event is a celebration of the achievements of the people who had died. All Urim people keep lengths of bamboo in their houses, and when the people do anything significant--such as killing a pig or cassowary--they stick a sharpened sliver of bamboo into the tube to mark their accomplishment. When a person dies, you can look at that bamboo and see how much they did in their lives. 

When the families of the women stood up this post, placing items of significance on the post--such as a hoop that shows the size of the pile of yams that was collected--along with the bamboo counters, it brought the community together to remember the deceased and enjoy time with one another. 

The husbands of the women gave speeches, as did a local government official. Then a man walked down the line of food, stopping at each heap and calling out the name of the family it was for. Representatives of each family came to their food, put it into baskets, and headed back to their homes to eat.

After the food was distributed, a group of children ran up the path to another house and pulled the garamut from that house to the site of the celebration.

The final part of this event is hitting the garamut to mark each of the accomplishments of the deceased. If, for example, a man had killed 105 pigs in his lifetime, the garamut would be hit to signify 105 pigs. This can go on all night, depending on the number of items to mark.

The two husbands begin the garamut signaling

I was honored to be invited to this event and intrigued by every detail, as I watched the various arts--culinary, visual, aural--unfold and interact. The valued role I was able to play there was photographer. People were really happy to be photographed, and I plan to print a bunch of the pictures to send back to the people.