George Makary

The Funeral Of A Passionate Man

The funeral procession has been the nucleus of the content of most of my secular paintings, sketches, studies, and watercolours. I found that funeral processions, both in my experience and in research, intricately cover all the aspects of life and culture. The expressions of communal mourning within the Coptic community are symbolically oriented, with the liturgical texts and consolatory language associated with mourning acting as effective indicators of their worldviews and belief systems. Biblically, the motif of death and resurrection repeats itself symbolically and literally throughout the Old and New Testaments, often in themes of submersion and immersion, danger and safety, and loss and retrieval. These themes extend into the behaviour and consciousness of Copts, all localized into the days of a Coptic individual’s death and burial.Various theories within psychology and psychiatry stipulate that individuals will voluntarily repress any awareness of their mortality in order to maximize their functionality. Theories that are extensions of these further explain that when a population that employs such repressive attitudes encounters one that does not, the former receives this attitude offensively and may develop an aggressive and hostile dynamic with the one that does not. Whereas the West may find this discomfort when interacting with Eastern communities, diasporic communities and Coptic children of immigrants undergoing assimilation may often find themselves within a dichotomy. This may be a dichotomy of homeland and new-home, secular and religious groundings, and intellectual and emotional mannerisms. To recapitulate, the West suppresses consciousness associated with mortality, while the East embraces it and emphasizes it. However within the diaspora, first and second generation Coptic children of immigrants often find themselves in a tension between the two, a synthesis of formal awareness of death, but an intricate avoidance of its repercussions. Hence to me, the importance of the funeral to the Copt is all the more important to the Copt who lives outside Egypt, because it is through that funeral that the immigrant (or their child) connect with their past, their heritage, their identity, and their ancestry. The Ancient Egyptians lived to die. All the elements of their everyday life were driven by the need to perfect their status in the afterlife. All their art, craftsmanship, ritual and cultural existence clung to the heels of their deaths, and that same attitude has survived thousands of years, preserved in the ancient Coptic prayers that ring from the mouths of the clergy to the grieving crowd hauling up the corpse of the deceased into the procession of life.