Sarah Xerar Murphy
Prize winning author of ten books of fiction and memoir, Sarah Xerar Murphy is also widely recognized for her spoken word performance, literary art installations, agitprop interventions and social justice work. Her bi-racial, bilingual and multicultural background combine with her long-term residence in all three of North America’s largest countries, Canada, Mexico and The United States, to bring electrifying authenticity to her creations.
Broad in scope and exuberant in style, Murphy's newest work is Itzel, an engrossing two volume novel of turbulent times.
From the working docks of fifties Dumbo to the concentration camps of Nazi Europe,
the late-night meetings organizing the US antiwar movement of the sixties to the false bottom vans carrying Central Americans to Canadian Sanctuary in the eighties, Itzel takes us on a whirlwind ride through our continental heritage even as its narrator,
Nauta, never an innocent abroad but once a knife-wielding Brooklyn tomboy,
contemplates her own coming of age inside the events—personal and political—that surrounded the massacre in Tlatelolco that ended Mexico’s student movement of 1968.
Itzel & A Mexican Journey
The Work
The first volume of Xerar Murphy's two volume novel,
Itzel I: A Tlatelolco Awakening, was published by Guernica Editions in 2019. Itzel II: A Three Knives Tale is upcoming in 2020. A hybrid work decades in the making, it all started while walking across a treeless Calgary park in 1981 when its first line sprang into mind right after Murphy had taken down a solo exhibition of her constructions. Itzel was an Auschwitz survivor it said, as she remembered the older woman once her closest Mexican friend. Only the second syllable of the name altered. It's finishing touches came fifty years after the events around which its story gathers like morning clouds around the Popocetépetl.
An Award & A Commemoration
Recipient of multiple awards and prizes, Xerar Murphy was honoured with a grant from The Canada Council for the Arts to return to Mexico in 2018 during the 50th anniversary commemorations of the Mexican student movement of 1968 to put finishing touches to Itzel, exactly fifty-one years after she moved to Mexico. The novel’s two volumes chronicle the participation of a young activist from Brooklyn in the events leading up to and away from the Tlatelolco Massacre of October 2nd, along with the lives of her closest friends.
Note how in the photo above the army comes shortly after dawn to raise the flag as it does each day, only today on October 2nd on this official day of mourning it will only be to half-mast. Yet they do it with special pomp and circumstance, press corps, public officials, a brass band, as if to erase the institution's culpability in the Massacre. At noon to your left a map of Mexico drawn in chalk is filled with shoes and other articles of clothing as were left behind in Tlatelolco. ¡El 2 de octubre no se olvida!
Old Friends and a New Antimonumento
The return to Mexico allowed Xerar Murphy to commemorate the Massacre among old friends, and to watch as thousands entered the Zócalo in celebration of the 68 Movement’s lasting accomplishments. After much traditional music from a band in existence since Mexico’s Revolution of 1910, participants left to the ironically and brilliantly chosen chorus of a Beatles’ song: Oh, I believe in yesterday.
In this photo as the demonstration breaks up, paper mache heads of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, the president who ordered the Massacre, burn in effigy. The small red white and blue object is an antimonumento, a crowd sourced monument made by local artists thenR positioned together with a petition signed by thousands to let it stay. It contains the logo of the CNH, the National Strike Committee who led the '68 Movement together with 68's Olympic dove.
In Tlatelolco
From large wreaths to handmade signs, glasses of water to small bouquets of cempaxochitl—the orange marigold of the Day of the Dead—the Plaza where the Massacre occurred and from where the demonstrators have marched fills with memorials. And with memories. Bodies are outlined in chalk or paint on the paving stones. And the words repeat: Ni perdón, ni olvido. Neither pardon, nor forgetting.
The Antimonumento 1968
The Antimonumento 1968
The Antimonumento 1968
Stating:
October 2nd will never be forgotten.
It was the army.
It was the state
The Zócalo in 1968
The Antimonumento 1968
The Antimonumento 1968
More than once, movement participants were greeted by tanks
Such photos are reproduced on the base of the antimonumento
The Antimonumento 2018
The Antimonumento 1968
The Antimonumento 2018
Stating:
Our Struggle will never sell out
We will win
Some Highlights ― works, events, Awards And A Fellowship
Other Awards
Xerar Murphy has been the recipient of many other grants and awards from the Canada Council, The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and Arts New Brunswick, as well as Canada’s Golden Beret Award for her spoken word work and contribution to her community.
Note that earlier work was mostly produced under the name Sarah Murphy.
A Fellowship, A CD, A Monologue on tour
She also received an Arts Council England International Artists Fellowship on which together with Keith Jafrate and Shaun Blezard she produced, toured and created a CD of her spoken word monologue when bill danced the war, a tribute to her Choctaw father’s heroism.
Here, the CD cover produced by the UK's Word Hoard.
This monologue was later performed at Ladyfest Ottawa's First Women, First Voices with Cheryl L'Hirondelle and Bear Witness.
In yet another version, it was performed in New Brunswick & Maine with the duo Wave.
This CD cover is from that version and shows Murphy's father standing with his Japanese family under the Nagasaki atom bomb marker, an event chronicled in the monologue and in a separate article by Murphy, "Ground Zero."
In residence At the Banff centre
Revolution 2012
While part of The Revolution 2012 aboriginal arts residency, facilitated by Adrian Stimson, Murphy put together...
The Weavers 2012
A celebration of Maya wearing through enlarged photos of a traditional tzut, often decided as garishly folkloric, this work asks the question: If this were an abstract painting, what would you say?
Oklahoma UhOh
She also produced and performed this monologue while walking down a spiral staircase reminiscent of the observatory chimney in the Mesoamerican city of Xochicalco which Murphy returned to for a visit in 2006.
Early activism
And Starting Out
Born and raised in Brooklyn Xerar Murphy became active in the early Civil Rights movement at 14 and soon occupied a position on the National Council of the Students for a Democratic Society with whom she later organized against the War in Vietnam.
Above: the fall 1963 national council meeting of the sds
Here, in 1965, at yet another conference—smokin' a not so very big ceegar—as a member of mankind, Xerar Murphy prepares herself for a man to man talk in the men’s lounge.
The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
At 17 With Tim Murphy and Dan Millstone
In later years when Xerar Murphy would teach MLK's 'I have a dream' speech to students of English as Second or Foreign Language, she would tell them that she had a dream that day, too., though she does not remember it.
Having done her duty as a picket captain on the march and after several days of very little sleep, she was sleeping under a tree during the speeches,
A rally at Columbia in 1965
Now regional organizer for New York SDS, Xerar Murphy addresses the audience as Dan Millstone holds an umbrella. Although years before the Pentagon Papers were published, she knew all their essential information, the ironies of that moment still escape her.
Within two years she will be in Mexico..