has done this with a unique blend to it, which is why it is divested of the Victorian
dramatic monologues’ typical destructive endings. Lastly, by initiating the monologue as
essentially between two lover-characters, the path of history and memory charted, and
which links and speaks to the present, indicates the recognition that both men and women
were involved in the liberation struggle that has produced the current post-apartheid
dispensation. It also speaks to the future and the recognition of gender equality in the
response to the definition of the making of the African postcolonial nation in the period
of globalization mediated, among other things, through practices of migrancy. On the
overall intervention of Serote through these poems, especially from the angle of the place
of the poet in traditional South African society, and when considered against the
backdrop of the precipitating history of the nation, perhaps it will be in order to
corroborate Zolani Mkiva’s assertion that truly “people feel no event is complete without
a poet” (Susan Kiguli and Dunca Brown 2004:80). Yet, Serote transcends this mandate in
his intervention in the way he engages with events from the future.
Concerning the narrative of nationalism and the spotless dimension it assumes in the two
epic poems, it is crucial to remark that Serote may have consciously shielded away the
discordant and acrimonious dynamics of the years of struggle within the nationalist
movements. This romantic approach to the idea of history with respect to the struggle
brings up again the remark of Gilfillan, as the partisan position of Serote as a poet of the
establishment must have accounted for this. If the apartheid years saw Serote singing a
critical song against the then establishment, it must be because of the exclusion of the
ANC and other similarly configured movements that were up in arms against the
apartheid regime. To that extent, should we return to the question of mourning, it is just
in order that those days of disunity and the formation of splinter movements from larger
movements like the ANC will go un-mourned. For in his essay “Mourning the
Movement” Isaac Balbus declares that no “group is all-good or all-bad but nonetheless
worthy of care” (2005:86).
Beyond partisanship, however, it is important to comment that Serote brings an angle of
freshness to nationalist narrative in the way his epic poems serve to illuminate the