Sally-Ann Murray - a short biography and bibliography of this KwaZulu-Natal author.
zoom
Sally-Ann Murray
|
Sally-Ann Murray
(1961 - ) was
born in Durban. A boy was expected, and her surprised but
resourceful parents drew her name from a hat of
possibilities. She grew up
in a corporation flat in Umbilo and remembers her
childhood as one spent
'making things' - poems, puppets, plays, collages,
shrines, clothes, box
theatres, collections of found objects (some of them dead
animals, bottled
in formaldehyde!). She was Head Girl at Durban Girls??
High, and after matric
spent a year on an exchange scholarship in San Francisco.
On her return to
Durban, she worked for a few years in retail and
personnel, and studied
through UNISA, before taking up a scholarship at the
University of Natal.
She now has a PhD on 'Magazines, Malls and Theme Parks'
from the University
of KwaZulu-Natal, and lectures in the Programme of English
Studies at the
same university. She is the winner of the SANLAM Award for
poetry in 1991,
and the Arthur Nortje/Vita Award in 1989. She considers
herself to be a
'Durban' poet, since much of her work tackles the
pleasures and problems of
writing in the uneven spaces that make up identity in this
extensive coastal
city. Important claims upon her imagination include the
seashore, gardening,
local history, femaleness, motherhood, and the little
dramas of domestic
life. Her poetry also suggests that she is conscious of
writing 'as a woman'
in a local poetic tradition whose most notable craftsman
is Douglas
Livingstone.
Murray has published one collection of poetry,
Shifting (Carrefour, 1992),
while her poems have also appeared in journals such as
EAR, Staffrider,
Illuminations and Agenda. Many of her poems
have been anthologized in
volumes such as The Heart in Exile, Breaking the
Silence and
Worldscapes.
Her work has most recently appeared in The New Century
of South African
Poetry (2003, Ad Donker Publishers, edited by Michael
Chapman) and
Imagination in a Troubled Space (published in 2004
by Poetry Salzburg). Selected WorkSome still lives. South Africa.
A parked car fumbles near Blue Lagoon. Gangboys bash the
bonnet, bullet
the boy, strip the girl to running tears. She lives, but
always through
the gap of her escape.
A woman's longtime lover tells her daughter: somebody has
to teach you,
it may as well be me. Back onto the bed she leans, unable
to avoid his
leering tongue.
A guy struts streetstuff for his brothers, snipes at
chicks as they
flicker by. A woman in a downcast headscarf hurries past.
Cloaked in
their everyday madness, the Cape Flats don't even blink.
A mother slap slap slaps her son with satisfaction. Little
shit. Bloody
well deserves it, quipped to no-one in particular. Half
hopes other
shoppers have seen her being so bad.
A couple condomises. Afterwards, he snores. She makes him
pay. Extra.
Slides a wad from the sleeping trousers, glides past
glances in the
lobby. It is 3am when the taxi comes.
A dronkie drops questions, ducks the blows. 'Fucking
pervert,' the
father yells, 'lay off my kids!' Like you have, the eldest
smiles,
elated at the anger her accusation has aroused.
A wheelbarrow bundles a crumpled figure. The farmer
forbids taxis on his
land; officialdom demands embodied identity; the son must
get his mother
to the Vryheid pension queue.
A woman talks of her boy. Flushed from in hiding beneath a
car,
emasculated, screaming stopped with a petrol-soaked rag.
Impimpi?
Impossible? She sobs, glazes into remoteness. This truth
too is
televised.
A Grade 11 learner after class, mouth so sweet that
teacher wants to
drink her. And does. Years later he fondles this
transgression, weak at
the undeserving gift of health.
A train passes. For now, it is not theirs.
It pulls past shut shot shuttering shuddering into the
fading light.
The stills move too quickly.
Horizontals flickering verticals cutting spliced
together without benefit of reflection.
Men and women watch, transfixed.
Yet they seem sad that the sunset is so happy to flatter
them. Bibliography1992. Roy Campbell's Adamastor :Reading And Re-Reading
The South African Poems. (with A.E.Voss)
1992. Shifting.
1992. A Soul Struggling With Its Material
Surroundings: Olive Schreiner. - Durban -
- Index -
For more information please visit
KZN Literary
Tourism
|
|
