this brings one raises even more substantial questions about the existential exile into
which groups and individuals involved in the liberation struggle were subjected during
this period. Put differently, and as shall be seen subsequently, the second part of this
collection aspires towards a representation of the struggle in the understanding that it is
more acceptable to conceive history and social change in terms of a “total human
phenomenon” and not the exclusive privileging of hagiographies of generals and other
leaders alone (Paul Ricouer 2004: 240). Therefore, as well as the major figures that
history locates at the centre of the struggle, Serote’s poetry goes further than their
celebration and remembrance to recount the heroism and tragedy of those anonymous
volunteers, both in the direct and indirect sense, who sacrificed their lives to kindle the
fire of the struggle to its ultimate stage of functional transformation. This is more so
when one realizes that the struggle, for sure, was also to be found in and reinforced by
what Jeremy Cronin (1989: 35-6) designates as “semi-insurrectionary uprising”:
Mass stayaways, political strikes, consumer boycotts, huge political funerals (including
anything up to seventy thousand mourners at a time), factory occupations, rent boycotts,
schools and university boycotts, mass rallies, and physical confrontation over barricades with
security forces. This wave of mobilization and struggle has spread into the smallest rural
village. It has interwoven with a substantial organizational renaissance: youth, civic, religious,
women’s trade union, and student organizations have sprung up and spread countrywide.The benefit of hindsight that the deployment of poetry offers is, therefore, doubly
significant because the genre, like the uprising, was simultaneously involved in the
witnessing and testifying against the aberrations of the apartheid regime, especially where
other genres had failed (Nadine Gordimer 1976:132-133). It is thus logical that the end of
the struggle would also take into consideration the various anonymous deaths that the
struggle produced, perhaps not so much because the departed have to be mourned as
because their own instance of death especially as following from their undisguised
activism and confrontation of injustice was wholly redemptive. This is why, it can be
argued that Jacques Lacan throws up a conundrum when he declaims that “it still remains
to be decided which death, that which is brought by life or which brings life” (Abdul
JanMohamed (2005: xiii). However, the lamentation that one encounters particularly in
the second part of Freedom Lament and Song resolves the polemical puzzle and
indecision in the sense that the death of the departed was, ironically, precipitated by the