It is, therefore, not out of place to look back at the liberation struggle and the euphoria of
the present with a view to, at a private level, composing an elegy for the past. And if for
the past, as for the memorializing of the passage of an epoch, one defined by racial and
capitalist oppression, then the various dynamics and intrigues that defined both ends of
the spectrum of the struggle and the much blood that was shed in the attainment of
freedom should not go unmourned. This certainly is the thesis of Freedom Lament and
Song. In other words, it is not enough to make encomiastic comments about the merits of
the present transformation without a sober reflection on the past. It accounts for why the
poem opens with deep reflections on history as well as memory:
Here we go again
history is a life and it is a death
it reincarnates
in words
feelings and deeds
it walks the streets
it repeats itself
at your doorstep and window and at your eye (1).The idea that there is a persistence of the past in the present is crucial to the import of the
lines above, which register their significance through a strong personification of history.
Reference to the past, therefore, facilitates the necessity of resisting any organized
attempt to foist a kind of collective amnesia on the new social order. That is, if the TRC
was commendable in its approach to the resolution of the tension and crisis of history and
memory, and by so doing, also became an incarnation of a grand political elegy for the
nation, there is a sense in which Serote, like some other writers, has necessarily extended
the lyrics and rhythm of this elegy in order to address the lacunae in the figuration of the
past. In other words, the limitations of the TRC are transcended when writers resolve to
ply their trade within the space of history and memory. It is in line with this that Andre
Brink (1996: 17) asserts that addressing these grey areas of silence in South African
history will be crucial to its representation.
That how the desirable present came to be, obtains so much from the struggle of the past,
and that the struggle caught a particular racial group more in its vortex than others are