The place from which the Lamentations of Jeremiah speak is a place which has been destroyed: the gates of Jerusalem lie devastated (Jeremiah 1:4; 2:9); the fortresses have been torn down (2:2); the palaces and strongholds have been razed and destroyed (2:5, 8). This is a place in which life no longer exists, a place of terror from which no-one escaped and in which no-one survived (2:22).
It may seem quite inappropriate to use this text as a basis for considering what utopia might mean. But perhaps a consideration of this “No-Place” can make clear the sense in which it is indeed utopian. Here it is not possible to seek refuge in light talk of the hereafter. The text speaks of and through a space which exists now only in silence and in which language can only survive at the cost of betraying the dead.
It is in confronting this destroyed place and in confronting the difficulty of speaking appropriately of what has been experienced that Lamentations finds the distance necessary for speech. 
Tod Linafelt writes – and this paper came into being in a process of dialogue with his thoughts about Lamentations – “The book struggles on, of course, attempting to stave off the silence, the white space, employing a number of rhetorical strategies to express the grief and anger of the community and to elicit divine response.” [2]
This speech is not linear; it does not have chronological strands of action and thought. Instead, a linguistic space is drafted out so as to create, almost graphically, a textual space in which speech is possible in the face of destruction. 
However, this speech itself trails off into silence. The multi-faceted way in which the experience of being beset upon or besieged by “terrors on all sides” (megur misabib: Jeremiah 2:22) is not translated into a sequence of events. [3] Instead, the text of Lamentations constructs a spatial textuality which is given structure through simultaneity and reversibility, that is, by cross-references and thus by movements both forwards and backwards. [4] Within this linguistic space it is possible for the inexpressible and the incomprehensible to take shape in words and so to survive, “as if we had a future.” [5]
The book of Lamentations begins with a word which in the Masoretic text of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia is separated from the text which follows: ’ekah. This word not only stands alone in the first line, [6] but is indented. More precisely, it is indented, not into the body of the text, but out of the body of the text – into the blank margin. In this way the word ’ekah is made to stand out.
In the Jewish Tradition, this first word gives the book its name: “Echa”. [7] But its isolated place gives it a far deeper meaning than simply that of a label for the book. ’ekah is a call to lament, a cry of despair, the sound which rises into the throat in the midst of horror and grief. It can hardly be reproduced in another language: translations such as alas! woe! O woe! sound banal and meaningless. It is a cry of alarm which has been put into letters to fix it – in the whole breadth of its meaning. No words follow: there is silence for a whole line. 
Linafelt begins his discussions of Lamentations by citing Edmond Jabès in order to show that, despite all its verses, in the book of Lamentations, silence is what remains of the attempt to survive the horror in speaking or writing: “There is the white space before the event and the white space after. But who could tell them apart?” [8]  
The cry of lament breaks into the crippling silence, sets the first letter in the white space, on the empty page. So, in the midst of the despair, it is possible to begin to speak, and then, after a certain number of words to enter the silence again, in the midst of the words. The second and fourth laments also begin with “Echa”, and are in this way connected to the beginning and to the silence before the beginning.
But how is the intermezzo of speech between the silences structured? What finds its way into words in this space, and how? Lamentations begins not only with a cry of lament but with the first letter of the alphabet and thus initiates the alphabetical, acrostic structure of the laments. [9]  
Each of the first four laments has twenty-two consecutive verses which begin with the letters from Aleph to Taw, but which have different lengths. Although the fifth book is not alphabetical, it has twenty-two verses, just as the Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters. The book of Lamentations thus contains five laments, later numbered as five chapters. Although the arrangement of the verses according to the letters of the alphabet is a clear structural marker, “no certain explanation for this alphabetical poetical structure […] has yet been found.” [10]  
Possible explanations have implied that this structure has magical overtones, that it is a mnemonic device, or that it was chosen for reasons of aesthetics. Most interpreters date the alphabetical structure to a later period, since like Westermann they cannot imagine “that those who had been directly affected by the catastrophe would have had the patience to construct such an alphabetical arrangement.” [11]
But is it not possible that precisely in the face of the catastrophe the alphabet could offer a framework “which protected the author from endlessness”? [12] And might it not also be possible in a traumatic situation to seek “safety in alphabetical prayers”, to cite a line from a poem by Durs Grünbein? [13]
This is not to seek to answer the question of when Lamentations took on its acrostic form, which must remain open, as must the question of how and from whom the words in and from the catastrophe acquired a literary structure, text, and a linguistic space. How much distance – both in a psychological and in an aesthetic sense – is necessary for the writing of texts of survival? How touched must someone be, if they are to speak with their own voice? When does a cry become a text?
The alphabet lends a strong structure to the linguistic space of Lamentations. The horror which is breaking in upon the destroyed city of Jerusalem from all sides is here opposed by a linguistic space in which the remaining fragments can be secured. In the midst of the catastrophe itself, only a despairing cry can be thought of. What does it mean to expose oneself to what has happened in memory, to articulate the unbearably empty white spaces before and after what had happened in such a way that they can not only be survived but communicated? 
The trauma resulting from the destruction of Jerusalem does not only arise from the situation itself but is continually exacerbated by memories. The alphabetical ordering of Lamentations might represent the wish not to be irredeemably crushed by those memories, but rather to create for them – and thus for oneself –  a space of preservation. [14]
That which in the immediate experience of traumatising destruction can only be expressed in broken words or cries, is expressed in Lamentations in the full knowledge of the dilemma of the survivor. [15] As Tod Linafelt puts it: “The poet is caught in the survivor’s dilemma: to speak is to betray the memory of the dead, for there is no adequate language; but to remain silent is a worse betrayal. So the poet continues.” [16]
This becomes particularly clear in the rhetorical question of Jeremiah 2:13:
To what can I compare you, to what can I liken you, daughter of Jerusalem? To what can I liken you to comfort you, virgin daughter of Zion? For as vast as the sea is your ruin: what can heal you? 
Although the response to this question can only be silence, it is preceded and followed by images which attempt to articulate the collapse. Body imagery is frequently used:  thus the destroyed city is compared to “a woman who is menstruating, and so unclean” [17] and with a naked, raped and wounded woman (Jeremiah 1:8, 9, 15). The use of the female body as a symbol of the destroyed city reflects the actual experience of women during war. It is their experiences which underlie the elegy. These linguistic images are, however, always ambivalent: on the one hand they can be interpreted as a manner of perceiving and understanding the effects of military conflicts on the lives and bodies of women, while on the other hand they might repeat the violence against women in language and through language. [18]

The rhetorical question in Jeremiah 2:13 is given a negative formulation in the first lament which functions somewhat as an antiphon: There is no-one to comfort her (1.2, 7, 9, 16, 17, 21). The negation is expressed with the word ’ajin, which has the root meaning “non-existence.” [19]   It is not simply that the person who could offer comfort or help is absent, but that such a person does not exist. A similar formulation can be found in the fifth lament:  There is no-one (’ajin) to rescue/tear us from their hands (Jeremiah 5:8).
These antiphons of despair refer to each other. The repetition of these words structures the spatial textuality by linking words across the silence. The textual space becomes a space of protection in which speech and silence can be experienced simultaneously: “Echa”.
The Babylonian Talmud (baba bathra 14b) gives a different heading: qinot (hebr. pl., sg. qinah) – song of lament, death lament. Hesekiah 2:9-10 refers to a scroll, which had writing on the front and the back, and written on it were words of laments and mourning and woe. [20]  
The term qinah is “at the same time the name of the genus Lamentation and of its particular meter.” [21] According to Cross, the poetic meter of the qinah-laments is defined, not by a particular number or pattern of emphases, but by a parallelismus membrorum “in which grammatical and semantic binarism is chiefly between corresponding bicola.” [22] This division can be seen in the contrast, typical for prophetic death laments, between then and now, between which lie destruction and death. [23]  
The text of Lamentations in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia makes the contrasts of the bicola visually clear by leaving a gap between them, even when no contrast is to be found in the content of the text. The Biblia Hebraica also leaves a space between each of the alphabetical verses, [24] as breath, taken away by the horror, must be drawn again and again if further speech is to be possible. It is as though the “poet” of Lamentations sought to translate the horror into a fixed linguistic space. This can be seen even in the first verse, which reads: