Let me start by welcoming you to Murmur Library!
Murmur started as an act of resistance, and took shape in the form of a little physical space with shelves, couches and a large stack of books in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.
The idea for the space came from a really humble, yet complexly layered place; a kitchen table with my best friend/housemate and my partner. Meandering conversations about white supremacy, intersectional feminism, unlearning our own internalised racism and books (so many books), took place over countless bottles of wine and cigarettes.
These conversations and the books I read shaped so much of who I am, and I desperately craved community and spaces to further explore this literature, and to find and give space to like minded people of colour, where they would feel safe and prioritised.
I built Murmur with the idea that I would curate a collection of books focused on decolonising the library space by housing books written exclusively by authors of colour. It began with a stack of books from my own shelves at home, and slowly with incredible community contributions, the collection has grown to be over 500 books strong. The other surprising development of creating this library space has been that it has become about so much more than just books. We have held space for book clubs, spoken word evenings and book launches, all with the shared goal of decolonising, and decentring whiteness.
Now that I have gotten quite comfortable with existing and resisting in physical spaces, I’ve been craving a more abstract place to explore and create community, and this is where this newsletter comes in.
Here, I’m hoping to share the meandering conversations I’ve been recently having in my mind with the different texts I’ve been consuming as both a form of recommendation and documentation. As a black woman I am (of course) deeply obsessed with Toni Morrison, and I’ve been thinking alot lately about her concept of Rememory, the performative act of recollecting and remembering, of memory versus memorylessness, memory as a physical form to inform and ignore.
“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.’ ‘Can other people see it?’ asked Denver. ‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.’” - Toni Morrison, Beloved.
So let’s think of this little non-physical space, born of a very special physical space, as an act of exploring rememory, thanks for joining me!
Murmur Library x