Dream/Arteries

by Phinder Dulai

A hundred years ago this year, the Japanese steamship Komagata Maru set sail for Canada with 376 Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu migrants traveling from Punjab, India. They were refused entry at Vancouver, even though all passengers were British subjects. The Komagata Maru sat moored in Vancouver's harbor for two months while courts decided the passengers' right to access—and while the city's white citizens lined the pier taunting those onboard. Eventually, Canada's racist exclusion laws were upheld and the ship was forced to return to India.

In his third poetry collection, soul/journ, Phinder Dulai connects these 376 passengers with other New World settler migrants who traveled on the same ship throughout its thirty-six-year history, including to ports of call in Hong Kong, Japan, India, Turkey, Halifax, Montreal, and Ellis Island. By drawing on ship records, nautical maps, passenger manifests, and the rich, detailed record of the Komagata Maru, Dulai demonstrates how the 1914 incident encapsulates a broader narrative of migration throughout the New World.

Dulai's hybrid poetics fuse historical fact with the fictive. He interweaves words of loss and silence with the cacophonous sound bites of TV news culture, war coverage, and the manifestations of contemporary ennui. Framing the "I" in the provisional realm of the observer and "subjectless" space, Dulai draws out the poetic line to explore hope, possibility, and regeneration.

Phinder Dulai is the author of two previous poetry books: Ragas from the Periphery (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995) and Basmati Brown (Nightwood Editions, 2000). He resides in Vancouver.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

136 pages, Paperback

First published October 14, 2014

Reviews

[aniela · Rating 2 out of 5]

i am not the biggest fan of poetry, so already this was not going to be my favourite book, but this is genuinely bad poetry. This fact + the way the story of the Komagata Maru was used gave the work a half-finished, rushed sort of feeling; put simply, if one wants to create a piece of writing about an event that resulted in the death of 22 people and a six-month period at sea, starving and afraid, for the rest, the poems better be the best goddamned poems i’ve ever read. Overall, a bad book that feels very disrespectful to the actual history that occurred.

[Andrea Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This amazing collection captures history, identity and lifelines at the heart of humanity. There is so much to read about and to understand. I am interested in the history of my province of British Columbia and my country. I am startled by the way people were treated and moved by their stories. These narratives are so relevant to our world in the present day and age. It is so important that we do not forget the string of injustices that took place. My heart and mind are open! We must embrace one another after all under the surface we are all connected through the true spirit of humanity.

P.15 "in the deep darkness where no one sleeps
fear and ignorance consume each other
and madness settles in
to sleep and love"

P.16 "each day i write my life in the margins of my faith" (from psalms to the four clergy) - this is a beautiful line that I wrote in my journal to remember.

[Dennis Bolen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Combined rhythmic discipline and a wide descriptive palette, wielded by a talented composer of word images; this would be the definition of anyone's preferred reading. These essential elements are richly present in 'dream / arteries', Phinder Dulai's third book, by a combination of prose, verse and photographic archival compendium pondering the meanings and values of humans in the miasmic struggle to confront life as it variously unfolds. The specific story here is of the fate of a shipload of hopefuls journeying from impoverished India toward new lives in Canada.

A British-born immigrant raised in a Sikh family, Phinder Dulai notes that with one exception, '...the ships that brought my extended family west were all built on the Clyde River in Glasgow, Scotland.' This is also true of the ship at the heart of his book, to wit: the Komagata Maru. In the summer of 1914, with the country preoccupied by a fast-rising European geopolitical maelstrom soon to become the great thunderstorm of World War One, prevailing anti-South Asian racism saw most of a boatload of intent immigrants first detained and then turned away from the city of Vancouver's harbour shores.

In an finely crafted prose preamble Dulai fills many little-known historical gaps while inserting himself into the story in a personal way by addressing an imagined occupant of the ship: 'This letter is to you, my friend, because you are not awake to your sacrifice to the greatest of endeavours: freedom, as you try to find way out of the complete poverty of your arrival in the new land and the living poverty at home on the farm.' This rather thematic passage resonates in various strophes throughout the book, creating an indelible understanding about what it was, and still is, to be an immigrant to this expansive land.

While a pointed, heartfelt and lyrical precis of a sore spot in Canada's expansive immigration history, 'dream / arteries' is no less a work of agile poetics and vivid juxtaposition:

i walk the four corners of life
where there are three places of absence
my name is wrought in the language of solitude
where the dawn meets king edward
the smell of cedar and sawdust are my comforts

The reference to woodwork, the great industrial core of British Columbia economic strength down through the decades, is not incidental. As anyone can attest who has ever toiled aside tough and uncomplaining Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and the other turbaned legions of brown-skinned labourers of the forests, sorting yards, trucking depots and sawmills of the coastal woodlands, the South Asian contribution to this engine of prosperity is likely beyond calculation.

Moving along in sections titled 'from fragments', 'the world after tomorrow', and 'in conversation', 'dream / arteries' samples a full range of common life experience and observation, shifting its focus from the specific immigrant experience on into a wider observance of the world and its offerings. This stanza of 'it-dhé (here), a vancouver special circa 1980' captures a kind of rainy-town residential poignancy: 'tread quietly then/the sleeping basement/has the sun high above/the chalk-walled room's mustard air/absorbs the slumber'. In 'asiancy (a word)' Dulai serves up a portion of despair: 'from those who almost spoke to the bricks and mortar/bowed their heads in quiet and tuned eastward/their destination, the blurred outline of the unknown'. This poem leads us through the dark meanderings of the displaced mind, but as most of the pieces, ends in a positive direction, 'watching for the light, always watching for the light'.

The volume is elegantly produced and includes strategically placed archival photos, some faintly impressed as sepia ghostings upon translucent panels. The affect is one of contemporaneous immediacy within an irresistible, and oddly compelling, sense of the importance of the past. It is as if, thumbing through these versified pages and stark documentary imagery, the experience of the book's participants almost becomes a thing alive. It is a testament to Phinder Dulai's consummate skill, aside from his personal connection to the material, that we come away from 'dream / arteries' with a heightened awareness of all travel phenomenon, the harshness and revelatory thrill of new lands, the coldness of alienation and the vivacity of new connection.

[Sofia Lemay · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF
Which is ridiculous, because this is such a short book.
I couldn't really get into the poetry. You have to know quite a bit about the Komagata Maru to be able to understand it.
I have to say, there were a few nice lines, and it did make me want to know more about the whole incident.
Even after some research, I wasn't a fan of the poetry, though I did understand it much better. It just felt like a chore to read.

[Vinay Khosla · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5- it was ok, not the most coherent collection imo

[Esmé · Rating 1 out of 5]

With this book’s first 40 pages, Phinder Dulai attempts to write what he calls “documentary poetry” and, from what I can tell, fails at making both documentary and poetry. Just because you play with the idea pf concrete poetry and use alliteration and assonance and other literary devices that he seems so focused on does not mean you are writing poetry, at least not very poetical poetry. Poetry that actually speaks to people, that speaks from the heart. The documentary aspect which focuses on the Komogata Maru incident did not enlighten this piece of history to me, but rather obscured it, and I had to go read the Canadian Encyclopedia article about it to get my bearings again. In the Komogata Maru section, Dulai tries to use puns, parody, and personification of the boat and of a dog on the boat, but these strategies for criticism all fall short of the point and just come off as highly insensitive. The other sections of the book which have nothing to do with the Komogata Maru (strange to me that they were put together since the book’s description and how it is profiled seems to only focus on the first 40 pages and that topic) are also full of poetry that doesnt seem to say much at all, except for some points where i could tell where they were supposed to be love poems but they women were written about just seemed so objectifying and fetishizing. Anyway i clearly don’t recommend this book and if you want to learn about thw Komogata Maru incident, I would recommend looking at the historical archives themselves. That’s where you’ll find the story. Not in this historical obscuration piece or fanfiction or whatever it is. Certainly not poetry.

[Farzeen Ather · Rating 4 out of 5]

7.5/10