By Roanna Gonsalves
[This text was presented upon invitation, as a speech at ‘Voice, Agency, and Integrity – Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts’, the launch of the Beyond Tick Boxes report by Diversity Arts Australia, Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, on Friday, Oct 5, 2018.]
Good afternoon everyone. I was going to title this talk “What polyamory can teach us about the Australian arts landscape”, but, I thought, ‘it’s not the right moment yet’.
By Rashida Murphy
These days I write the word ‘writer’ on forms that ask me what I do. I know I’ve earned it. I am that person – a published novelist. Publication has changed the way I view my profession. The secret is out. I can own it. Even when I’m questioned and occasionally challenged. ‘What do you write?’ is the inevitable question and these days I have an answer. Sometimes that answer – fiction, is followed by another question – what sort? This leads to conversations, which in most part are educational, entertaining or informative. I may hear the idea of a story I really ought to write or I may be asked to read 500 pages of this story they wrote when their dad was a lad during the war. Of course, everyone knows someone who writes and surely, as a writer I must know them too. Occasionally the conversation turns to my ability to speak English so well, the colour of my skin and my good fortune that Australia allows me to do whatever I want to. Because in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Fiji or wherever I come from, opportunities for women are so limited, you know, because they don’t even let women drive there.
By Rashida Murphy
I read a lot of books. For research mainly, or so I tell others and myself but also for pleasure, for comfort and to know myself better. I read fabulous books and ordinary ones, heartbreaking books and healing ones, smart books and hilarious ones, and I have a system of shelving these in idiosyncratic ways. I give away a lot of books too, sometimes because I can’t stand to have them in my house and sometimes because I realise guiltily I have multiple copies I don’t need. And I rarely loan them out. I’m sure the ones that I do loan to very special friends burn in their hands until they return them. The bibliotaph’s burden. We all have something to carry, do we not?
This is the text of the letter addressed to the High Commissioner of India in Australia, the representative of the Indian Government in Australia. The letter was delivered in person to the Consulates of India in Sydney and Melbourne on Monday, April 23, 2018. The full text of the letter is reproduced below. The letter was signed by 102 concerned and prominent Australian and Indian-Australian writers, artists, musicians, theatre practitioners and academics, many of whom are Indian citizens and Overseas Citizens of India, and who have ongoing connections with India.
By Rashida Murphy
Such a loaded term – cultural knowledge – coming as it does with its own set of expectations and hints of secrets. When I try to unpack it a little, I think about how knowledge differs from appropriation and what the keepers of cultural knowledge can do to protect themselves from stealth and theft. And the answer is – very little. We live in times of exchange and borrowings and slippages and it is hard to skid to a stop, metaphorically speaking, and say – ‘You have gone too far.’
Southern Crossings is thrilled to announce that the brilliant Rashida Murphy will be joining us as our new Guest Contributor for the next few months.
Rashida Murphy has published short fiction and poetry in various international journals and anthologies, including Westerly, Open Road Review and Veils Halos and Shackles. Her novel, The Historian’s Daughter was shortlisted in the Dundee International Book Prize and published by UWA Publishing in 2016. She was Writer-In-Residence at the Katherine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in 2017 and is currently an Adjunct at Edith Cowan University in Perth. Recently, her short story, Strands of Jupiter, was shortlisted in the Newcastle Short Story Prize. Her essays and stories are forthcoming in Landscapes Journal, Red Hen Anthology and an anthology to be published by Orient Longman later this year.
We are honoured that she has joined us in our aim to collectively reimagine Australia, South Asia, and the world. We can’t wait to read her new work in Southern Crossings.
Read more about her here: https://rashidawritenow.wordpress.com
Buy The Historian’s Daughter at all good bookshops, and here: https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/collections/rashida-murphy
By Mayank Teria
Imagine a tense spring in a pinball machine, all coiled up and compacted, rearing to go. That’s what your body feels like, a pinball trigger, when you’re in the closet. That is what my body felt like when I was in the closet.
By Roanna Gonsalves
(This is a reworked version of the summary observations I was invited to present at the conclusion of ‘Beyond Tick Boxes’, a symposium organised by Diversity Arts Australia, or DARTS, at Casula Powerhouse, on Thursday, June 29, 2017)
Good afternoon everyone. I’d also like to acknowledge the indigenous people of this country, the Cabrogal Clan of the Darug Nation, on whose land we have gathered today. I would like to say thank you to Lena Nahlous and Kevin Bathman for inviting me to give you a very short and incredibly opinionated summary of my observations today.
I have three main observations. They are colour-coded: red, black and yellow.
By Prakash Subedi
To be a non-white writer in the west today is probably very different from it was, say, fifty years ago. Books and ideas travel much faster now, and even if you are writing and publishing in the west, there are more and more people back home who have access to your works. And while this was always the case to some extent, it is now truer than ever that the most passionate responses and vociferous objections to your work are likely to come from readers at home. More often than not, by virtue of being based in a western country and writing about your home, your writing is treated with wariness and your motives with suspicion.
By Rashida Murphy
When the editors of Southern Crossings invited me to write about the idea that migrant writers use their cultural history, ethnicity and language to mobilise the ‘exotic’ nature of our cultural cache, I was keen to explore this idea further. The notion that what was previously considered a handicap is now desirable, catches me by surprise and brings to mind the (in) famous question asked by Jana Wendt of Toni Morrison in 1998.