My maternal grandmother ended her own life shortly before my birth. While driving me to my frequent dance lessons when I was a young child, my mother often spoke to me about her. She was still angry at her emotionally distant, self-involved mother, one so entangled in the tendrils of her own unhappiness that she could not offer genuine emotional care to her child. But my mother also told me something that I later realised was most extraordinary: she said that she often thought of me as her own mother who had, in a way, come back and been given a second chance at life.
Listening to my mother, I was unsettled: I felt a great deal of empathy, but to my shame it was not for her (this developed as I grew up) but for my grandmother. In the stories she told to me, by means of her justifiably conflicted and painful memories, my mother maintained that she could not understand why her mother had acted as she had; but I thought I could. I believed that even through the screen of my mother’s unhappy words, I recognised myself in the stories of my grandmother and believed that she might indeed be alive within me. My mother could not convey to me how her mother had felt, but I thought I could imagine it.
As scholars, we frame our research in (largely) rational terms, carefully motivating—as I do in the text that follows—the reasons for our choice of subject matter, framing discourses and their relevance to contemporary scholarly work. Yet something within us as researchers compels us to return unconsciously, often by circuitous routes, to certain stuff. I use the word intentionally—“stuff” is imprecise, amorphous and difficult to untangle. Like faces in clouds, we find our stuff in many places and are drawn to it without our conscious, rational knowing.
Prefaces are written at the end of a text but read at the beginning. I did not set out to extrapolate my experiences of my mother’s stories into my scholarly work, but I now see how powerfully those conversations with my mother shaped this project. These conversations stimulated my desire to connect with a past reality that was left out of the narrative told to me. This book tackles our relationship with the past, a past often presented to us through narratives of pain. The present always shifts, and often we feel the need to find something in the past other than that which we can access through the stories we are told. While it has become clear to me that my interest in the subjects of this book has been influenced by my personal memory and that my insight gained through it is simply the result of living within a particular set of conditions, I find these themes reflected in the society of which I am a part, a society in deep distress about its painful past.
During the writing of this text (which began as a PhD thesis), students at my institution (the University of Cape Town) were in protest. Symbolically central to their grievances was the statue of Cecil John Rhodes that still occupied a commanding space on the campus in 2015, but the concerns of the protest were deeper. Throughout, students and staff vociferously criticised what they argued to be the colonial legacy of the university, identifiable fundamentally in the nature of its curricula and intellectual life, in addition to prevailing discriminatory attitudes and the practical functioning of the institution. For me, there can be no clearer indication of our persistent preoccupation with the complex, painful and violent past of this country and the compassion with which it needs to be addressed.
In parallel, when I first came across the stories of Krotoa (a Khoekhoe woman from the early Cape Colony who is one of the subjects of this book), she was virtually unknown to the general public. But over time, I saw my own deepening and intensifying interest in her echoed around me in numerous creative productions (notably a feature-length film) released during the time I researched and wrote the thesis on which this book is based. The search for a connection with the past is not mine alone: it has shown itself to be a vital component of our lives, as South Africans, and the structures in which we dwell. This book has been profoundly moulded by my society’s and my own tangled investment in the pasts that shape the milieu in which these struggles occur.
The text of this book is mostly a reworking of my PhD thesis, submitted some five years before the time of writing these words. As is perhaps the nature of all books born in such a manner, this one evidences the demands of the form of a thesis as well as that of a book intended for general (if academic) circulation. But even as I was writing the thesis, I wrestled with the strictures of academia, partly because the discipline it imposes is so arduous, but more pointedly because at the heart of the very project of (what is now) this book, lies a deep suspicion of the forms of knowledge-work that have become naturalised in our institutions.
One of the key strategies I employed during my PhD to struggle against the linearity and predominantly cerebral nature of scholarship—in which I was obliged to demonstrate my capacity—was to interweave my own images with my lines of text, interrupting them, drawing attention to the form of the page with the aim of defamiliarizing it and make plain its artificiality. I could do so because I had control over how text and image appeared on the page, as I endeavoured to shape the thesis-object itself into a work of art. Those parts of the thesis that answered the academic requirements of a PhD thus became but one component of a text whose ambition was to give form to much more, to retain within it a tacit acknowledgement of the other ways in which we know, including the visual and intuitive.
Like many doctoral graduates who have had to metamorphose their theses into books, I was painfully aware of the tensions between the form of the thesis and the form of the work of art, not least because some time has passed since my graduation, time during which my life and ideas also grew into new spaces. What is more, I do not possess the same level of control over the visual appearance of the book as I did with the thesis, although I am happy to accept this restriction in my awareness that their publication allows my words to reach places the thesis never could. In the preparation of this book therefore, I was faced with numerous tricky choices that all seemed to hinge on the question of how much I should intervene in a text that has served as the basis of my intellectual and creative life for the last five years, so as to satisfy the gains of hindsight.
In the end, I decided to treat this text as an account of how I arrived at the conceptual constellation that is the anarchive. It serves as evidence of my long journey through the archives of Krotoa and Anne as I searched for the words that could articulate what I sensed but did not yet know how to say. Consequently, this book constitutes a snapshot of the anarchive, as a constellation of archive and absence, coming into being. I opted to retain the internal coherence of this snapshot, even if there are parts that I now, having witnessed the analytical yield of the anarchive in spaces outside the thesis and indeed South Africa, would have tackled quite differently or have omitted completely. Since the visual appearance of this book is determined by a particular process of production, I have decided to employ it as a vessel in which earlier iterations of image/text configurations, including those of exhibitions and even the thesis-object, may be contained.
At various points in the process of working the thesis into this book, I fought a strong impulse to revise my words comprehensively. However, I realised that if I were to tinker with them too much, it would start to unravel the wholeness of a text that represents rather a specific point in the development of my ideas around archive as a colonial technology, how “knowledge” can be a trickster, and most of all, how my attachment to the past and to Krotoa provides the some of the most profound meaning in my life. I thus offer this book as a “photograph” of the anarchive finding its form in my mind, but also as a manifestation of the magical ways in which words and images tie us to both the then and the now.