Hmong instructions to the dead

Abstract

During the Hmong funeral ceremony, detailed instructions for the journey to the world of the ancestors are sung and played to the soul of the deceased. The free-reed mouth organ, or qeej, encrypts lengthy sung poems in its seven musical notes, creating a disguised language that can only be understood by the dead. This paper presents a first and complete version of the funeral poems of the qeej, performed by Mr. Xeem Thoj, a White Hmong ritual expert and qeej player from Laos who resettled in Australia in 1991. The text is presented in White Hmong with English translation. Annotations to the translation describe the qeej's role in the funeral, compare accounts of the Hmong funeral from differ..