PREFACE:

There is a wonderful passage in Gloria Anzaldúa’s book Borderlands (1987) in which she describes the strange space between its birthing and its elusive, germinal seed. At some point in the writing process the book’s ‘deep structure’ began to emerge, ‘thin here, thick there.’ She could sense its pressure points, alert to its yearnings. ‘If I can get the bone structure right, then putting flesh on it proceeds without too many hitches,’ she observes. The only ‘problem is that the bones often do not exist prior to the flesh, but are shaped after a vague and broad shadow of its form is discerned.’ [1]

In 2019, when Ashraf approached me to work with him on this book, he had in mind a selection of twenty-five pre-existing essays, drawn from the 1990s to the present. All we needed to do was sift through his writing over the past three decades and handpick a few to put some meat on the bones. Not one to live life in retrospect, his hope was to produce a living, breathing creature that might reflect the urgencies and impulses that continue to inform his love affair with art, in particular that of South Africa. It wasn’t long, however, before we realised that that book would have to wait. Ashraf had gone into labour, and we were soon dealing with an altogether new baby.

Since then, it is fair to say that this book has ‘had a mind of its own, escaping me and insisting on putting together the pieces of its own puzzle.’ The process has been messy. Like Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, this book has proven a ‘rebellious, wilful entity, a precocious girl-child forced to grow up too quickly, rough, unyielding, with pieces of feather sticking out here and there.’ [2] That it has found its way into your hands, neatly packaged and intact, is nothing short of a miracle, but to view it as such would be to discount its wayward nature.

As suggested by the title, this book is a Strange Cargo: an odd assortment of forty essays that in many respects build upon the concerns of its predecessor In the World (2017). As siblings, they share the same DNA. Here, as there, Ashraf is drawn to the work of artists who place themselves within the aggravated complex of a given dilemma, remaining ‘doubtful of the iconic currency of an artwork . . . the desire to spin [meaning] via a preordained ideology or value system.’ [3]

Here, as there, what matters most is an artwork’s ‘estranging ghost,’ and the ‘peculiarity of perspective’ that it affords. [4] In this regard, it felt fitting that this book should begin within the context of the home, a space that is as familiar as it is elusive. Contrary to the understanding of the home as a space that ‘shelters dreaming,’ Ashraf recognises that homes are places of hurt, too; that as a ‘construct,’ the home is not what we imagine it to be, ‘no matter how avidly feather-dusted.’ This sentiment is echoed a little later on, when he writes that words are also homes, places to ‘rest and dream,’ but that they are nevertheless the ‘veils we give to substance’; that photographs are ‘dreaming tools, never facts’; and that faces are ‘glaring hiding places.’

If he insists on treating a face as a face (and not as a window to the soul), a photograph as a photograph (and not as a record), paint as paint (and not as a representation), it is because, ‘by rendering mystery exceptional we disguise its ubiquity.’ The idea that faces can be read, that photographs are facts, that a portrait resembles its sitter, masks the mystery inherent in all photographs, faces, paintings . . . For Ashraf, it is the ‘glitch built into art,’ the ‘ellipses between a given combination of colours, shapes, and references’ that ‘best reveals the felt structure of life.’

This is something that has been at the back of my mind throughout. Despite the semblance of order, there are many ways in which this book could have been strung together. Given that the bulk of essays herein were written over a very short period of time, between 2019 and 2021, there are many such overlaps between them. I have tried, in part, to intuit those areas in which the flow felt strongest. Needless to say, there are many other hidden arteries and underpasses that, when followed, make for an incredibly rich read. In this, the only parting words of advice that I can give to the interested reader belong to the late, great Dambudzo Marechera: ‘Thoughts that think in straight lines cannot see round corners.’ [5]