intervention constitutes an attempt to reconnect with an age and movement defined by the
struggle for liberation. Both the age and the movement for all the pains and anguish they
engendered are not without contents that those involved in them wish would not pass
away. Like the age and the movement, the figures, both dead and living, but especially
the dead that run through the lines of the epic poem, are reminders of the process through
which an undesirable domination of apartheid was upturned. This understanding gives
voice to the series of suffering and sacrifice that lined the road to the democratic
dispensation, better referred to as “freedom” in the poem, that the South African nation
now enjoys. With this approach we are reoriented that the idea of heroism, mourning,
sacrifice and suffering does not, however, end with the nationalist narratives of the public
figures whose privilege often eclipses the contributions of the ordinary people.
Perhaps the necessity for this ritual stems from the capacity of mourning to open up doors
into the future. Its therapeutic and productive significance at both individual and
collective levels accounts for why Esther Schor (1994:5) contends that mourning is “a
force that constitutes communities and makes it possible to conceptualize history”. She
reveals further that losing sight of the sense of mourning can only “be at our personal and
social peril” (ibid). Put another way, in mourning the dead, as Serote has done, there is a
sort of engagement with the past, an activity which Michel de Certeau contends cannot be
complete unless we put into perspective the interchangeability and interaction of the
“past” and “the dead” for the realization of meaning in our discussion of mourning (cited
in Schor 4). But if the stress on the past and history suggests an engagement with the
elusiveness of the experiences that punctuate the ambience of the dead, mourning
nevertheless is not only reflective, but also forward-looking in the way it illuminates the
path to the future. This is what Gail White (2007:68) sees as possessing the illumination
that allows one “to find meaning in the world again”. In highlighting the significance of
mourning with respect to Freedom Lament and Song , therefore, the artistic value
identified also fuses with that of the designation of the poem as an epic and its capacity to
not only assume a historical and social responsibility for an entire nation or community
an issue that will be given greater attention in the conclusion of this chapter but to also
engage with the imperative of the future. To that extent, the illumination of Freedom