Rashida Murphy

An open letter to UWA from a former international student and UWAP author

Dear Mr. Tayyeb Shah,

I came to Australia as an international student from Mumbai, India in 1998. One reason that attracted me to Australian institutions of higher education was their commitment to creativity, to intellectual rigour and to encouraging a plurality of ideas.

I wrote a book of short stories called The Permanent Resident, mainly to chronicle the lives of Indians in Australia, including the lives of international students. This book is published by UWAP. It has since won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award 2018 (Multicultural), been very well-reviewed in Australia and India, is on the syllabi of a number of universities and on several “must-read” booklists. This would not have happened without UWAP, particularly Terri-ann White, championing my book.

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23/09/19 Arts & Culture , Australia , Diaspora & Travel , Society & Politics # own voices, Rashida Murphy, representation, Rushdie

All our knowledge

By Rashida Murphy

“All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.”

T.S. Eliot

Salman Rushdie’s 2017 novel, The Golden House, has an Australian hypnotist in a transnational cast of characters ranging from Mumbai ex-cons to Belgian filmmakers in New York. It is a typical Rushdie novel, full of verbal pyrotechnics and not-so-obscure political references, but it is the Australian character I puzzle over. Nothing wrong at all in placing an Australian in the heart of Manhattan. But one that speaks with a Kiwi accent?Rushdie’s hypnotherapist speaks in a grimly unfunny and terribly clipped way that mocks the Kiwi accent, not the Australian one. Especially when you consider that Rushdie was in a brief relationship with Australian writer Robyn Davidson in the 1980s, you wonder if the gaff is deliberate or an oversight. And whether, in a convoluted way, Rushdie is attempting to reverse centuries of negative portrayals of brown people in white fiction.

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23/08/18 Arts & Culture , Australia , Diaspora & Travel , Society & Politics # australian literature, books, diaspora, literature, Rashida Murphy, South Asia, women, writers, writing

Peddling my wares

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.

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13/05/18 Arts & Culture , Diaspora & Travel , Society & Politics # A God in Every Stone, Arundhati Roy, creative writing, India, Islam, Kamila Shamsie, literature, Muslim, Nadeem Aslam, Old Delhi, Pakistan, Peshawar, Rashida Murphy, reading, research, south asian writing, Taliban, The Blind Man's Garden, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, writing

A Ministry, a Garden, a God

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?

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12/04/18 Arts & Culture , Australia , Diaspora & Travel , Society & Politics # appropriation, Australia, creative writing, culture, feminism, home, identity, India, motherhood, Rashida Murphy, university, writing

Cultural Knowledge

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.’

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30/03/18 Arts & Culture , Australia , Diaspora & Travel , Society & Politics # guest contributor, Rashida Murphy

Welcome to our new Guest Contributor, Rashida Murphy

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

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14/08/17 Arts & Culture , Australia , Diaspora & Travel , Society & Politics # Asia, Australia, beneficiaries, cultural appropriation, cultural cache, culture, diaspora, India, POC, Rashida Murphy, South Asia, The Historian's Daughter, WOC, writing

Whose culture is it anyway?

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.

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An open letter to UWA from a former international student and UWAP author

All our knowledge

Peddling my wares

A Ministry, a Garden, a God

Cultural Knowledge

Welcome to our new Guest Contributor, Rashida Murphy

Whose culture is it anyway?

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