Perth Words… exploring possibilities.

By Rashida Murphy

Growing up in the seventies in a convent school in India meant that the foundations of a colonial education were firmly entrenched by the time I was a teenager. To borrow Rushdie’s words, I too grew up “kissing books and bread.” Most of the books I kissed and consumed were those that inhabited my father’s rosewood bookshelves, along with the ones we were obliged to read as texts. The Bronte sisters were an early influence, as were Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. I could easily visualise Byron’s “deep and dark blue ocean” despite never having seen one and hear Shelley’s skylark without any idea of what that might be. And how I ached, along with Keats’s “drowsy numbness” and wandered, “lonely as a cloud” with Wordsworth, while peering into that “deep romantic chasm” with Coleridge. The poets spoke Romance to me and the Bronte sisters taught me…