-
-
Phinder Dulai Clip 1
-
In this audio clip, Phinder Dulai discusses his work Dreams/Arteries. He comments on his use of archives, the form of poetry, refugees, and the polyphony of voices in his work., PD: My name is Phinder Dulai, I'm a poet I have 3 books of poetry publication. That’s Ragas from the Periphery in 1995, Dream/Arteries was published in 2014 and in between that, it's Basmati Brown in 2000.
0:30
JL: Thank you I'll get right into it. I'm really interested in Dream/Arteries. And there, you sort of go into a colonial archive, right? A kind of colonial history, but with / through poetry. Can you talk to me about how—what's that like? It's almost an act of translation. What's that like, moving between genres?
0:48
PD: Um, well, I was the um, I was using different forms in order to be able to expand the intervention. And to be able to resonate with ‘what is a community archive’ vs ‘what is a government colonial archive.’ And the one thing that I found really interesting was the archive itself on the Komagata Maru had a multi, multi-national and trans-national [loud bang] structure, in that it was a surveillance archive that included documentation from Vancouver to Ottawa to London and to India. And so, what was engaging was being able to access the archive and counter point that with what other questions about who these people were on the ship and who these people—what they aspired to and why did they actually come to Vancouver in the first place? And that was what I was trying to do. Is do that, but also connect it with what the contemporary history of that moment was. Um, the beginning of Dream/Arteries says: "a long lantern to the past" and that in itself is also a sourced document.
2:12
JL: That's good, that's all really good. Maybe talk a little bit more, then, about that act of poetry, or the form of poetry. Like, what does that allow you—in, you know, a very nuts and bolts way—what does that allow you to do that perhaps a more historical kind of narrative would preclude?
2:32
PD: Well, poetry in its form, for me, it allowed me to actually bring in the deeply personal. Um, and using fragmentation in my work. Like, one of the, I guess the, I guess an important element of my writing style is to write in fragmentation, and to write in a place of marginalisation and the reason why that is, is because the lived experience is that, and the form kind of represents a lived experience and reality. Fortunately, it also is steeped in conceptual poetry itself. And to actually come up with a broader concept of something like Dream/Arteries, where it's a mix of historical documentation, poetic intervention, and then also a kind of a the invisible which is that temporal space. Which is what does it doing in reflecting now, across time periods?
3:30
JL: Let's talk a bit more about that. I mean, what specifically do you think, in the work that you're doing in Dream/Arteries, speaks to our current moment where we have these enormous refugee crises, right? We have waves of new immigration, right? So, how do you think that sort of historical work that you're doing speaks to the moment?
3:45
PD: Well, that was a big question for me, which was: ‘how do I speak about the present moment, as it relates to refugees and immigrations and the crisis of population movement?’ I knew I couldn't actually take on personifying a voice that was from the contemporary moment. It's not my narrative to tell. So I wanted to reflect back on a community perspective that I knew was there and be able to fragment time in a way that would kind of reflect back into the contemporary moment. So, so, almost everything around the ship is anthropomorphised. So, it has a number of different voices that are both female and male in their respective kind of socialisations. And the reason why that was was because I wanted to be able to create a nurturing persona as well as a persona of a, of a, of a paternalistic voice, of the, of the adoptive voice. And that's what kind of helped the flow of the narrative and the movement of the ship take place was to actually move back into an archive that just didn't stop in Vancouver, but the archive of the ship also has deep connections to American cities, like NYC. And so, I wanted to reach back even further to identify what was the ship’s ultimate purpose? And it was a migration ship. It was a migrant ship. And doing that also expanded this kind of spectre of the South Asian and kind of moved it into, well, this is actually a migration of people of cohesive groups of people across different time periods. And in that way, I wanted to reflect back on the contemporary moment, that this is, actually, not anything new. That this is a migration that is reflective of the sort of global structures that we were in. Both in terms of capitalist structure and corporate structure, where people become assets instead of human beings, and it's that intervention that I was looking into in terms of writing Dream/Arteries.
6:05
JL: What really strikes me, as well, is obviously you're dealing with this, the familial and the personal, but then you're dealing with this really large-scale histories—empire. How do you—what was some of the challenges that you sort of had to overcome, or that you're still processing, regarding, um this idea of the polyphony of voices. There's just so many stories that have to be told, right, so how do you sort of deal with this multitude?
6:30
PD: I think because it's a poetic form, it allows for um kind of really choosing moments within the archive that you, that I, wanted to kind of reflect. And that I wanted to incorporate into the book itself. With the form itself, it allowed me to kind of take from the US archives, take from the archives, the Canadian archives, and then the BC archives. And creating voices out of that was an important kind of consideration. The other part to this history is the Ghadar Movement [loud bang]. And the Ghadar Movement is um is a Marxist movement that took place in India at the turn of the last century. And that movement was essential in establishing community in Vancouver and it was through the Ghadar Movement that there were interventions to save the ship from being from being forced out of...[trails off]
7:37
JL: That's so interesting. Like when you start investigating, that all these other tales come into play right? Can we talk a little bit then about—I know when you're writing the books, it kind of expanded that way—come back a little bit and talk about Vancouver. Like what about the specificity of its histories, um, what is it that drew you to write about it? What was there? What was the initial motivating factor to be like 'okay, I’m really going to start from here, I’m going to expand, but really ‘here, this is the moment,’ ‘this is the moment in time.’ But here is the specifically the moment grounded in this space that really fascinated you?
8:13
PD: Well, I began with the community of a South Asians that live in Vancouver, but I was also reflecting on Vancouver as the absent histories, and it has been constructed as quote “the most beautiful place on earth,” right? And it goes and works with that rhetoric, the political culture that's part of the Vancouver political scene. But Vancouver as a city has these intersections of histories that are not known, and it was through that process that I wanted to actually uncover the realities and the documentation of what Vancouver was. Vancouver is a city that is known for its multicultural sensibilities, but the history of its place and the history, the documented history, is that it was a racist community. That worked very hard in keeping a British colonial presence as part of the pre-dominant history of Vancouver. Whereas, actually, when you think about the history and settlement, there's the colonial settlement and that settlement included, yes it included English, Scottish, but it also included Chinese, South Asians, African American and a number of different communities, and trying to take one community and unearth the archive of the of what the gaze of the government at that time was really important. And that opened the door into then kind of explore ‘wel,l how does this sit within the national boundary?’ But ‘how does it fit within the transnational?’ And then, and then I really wanted to work with time because the time sequence and the time break down is an important mechanism to the story of the Komagata Maru, but also the story of what the contemporary migrant ship looks like today.
-
-
Phinder Dulai Clip 2
-
In this second clip to the interview, the conversation starts with a discussion of Vancouver as a multicultural place. In turn, this leads into the spaces of ports and ships and global infrastructure of such a space., there's also this pressure of, you know, this construct, of Vancouver, in particular, as a multicultural place. What are your thoughts on this category ‘Asian-Canadian,’ for instance, and this idea of uniting this multiplicity of history under this category? And obviously, you're excavating a particular community at a particular time. Um, do you have thoughts on what a kind of solidarity might look like between multiple communities of non-white, actually, groups of people, whether indigenous or so-called Asian-Canadian. I don't know. What are your thoughts on that?
11:05
PD: Well I think about the history of also that space. I think of coloured communities, Asian and Indian, South Asian, have been in a parallel kind of space and have been in a space-less space of solidarity. If you look back on the colonial records, both Chinatown and then South Asian um mill workers were actually present for each other's witnessing. And also, with the the restaurants in Chinatown, they were the only places that would allow South Asians to eat there. And so, there's a historical kind of context to this. But as a label, “Asian-Canadian as a writer,” there's there's an ebb and flow of function, for me. And sometimes the function of ‘Asian-Canadian’ is about communities and communities working together, but then it's also about also organising a composite literature of work from various Chinese and South Asian authors that write in the English language. So that frame and labelling itself has another function. For myself, personally, I actually have gotten really parochial. I say “Punjabi,” I say: “Punjabi writer writing in the English language.” And the reason why that is, is because I need to locate. It's really important to locate the specificity of your community, and if I'm going to do this kind of writing, it's important to be specific. As opposed to working in this kind of Vancouver as the kind of the cosmopolitan space vs the Punjabi community who was a settler community and that has a documentation and a history of struggle. And so, I think that there's different functions in different places as we kind of use the word "Asian-Canadian." Um, South-Asian Canadian, but even as a... and then there's the political context, and that is ‘what is Asian-Canadian? Why is it Canadian?’ And the question of ‘being Canadian.’ And this kind of comes back to this notion of being civil and also of being a citizen. What is the role of the citizen? And who is enfranchised in the citizenship? And that to me is also another kind of consideration, but it's something that is getting to the truth of the exclusions that took place that were specific to being unCanadian vs a Canadian or being a citizen but with very limited rights.
14:07
JL: And, basically, being not white in this space called Vancouver, for sure. That ties really nicely into one of the last questions that I'd like to ask you. Probably the last. So, coming back to this idea of that fraught definition then of who gets to be Canadian, who gets to be—who gets to have status in this space, I want to turn to, just a little bit, back to the work and think about the ship and the port, right? On the one hand, you have this colonial port, Vancouver, with all it's exclusions and its ability to kind of martial an almost military, actually, militarised, um idea of exclusion zones, even now, and then you have this figure of the ship, which, in many traditions, is you know a very sort of fraught figure as well, right? We think about ideas of indentured labour moving back and forth across the Pacific, but also obviously slavery in the Atlantic, so, in your thinking, also, either specifically for Dream/Arteries, or even now more broadly when you're reflecting on the book since you've written it, and talked about it, what, how do you see these two figures, the idea of the ship and the port and obviously we're thinking, you're thinking about that specific ship, that specific port, how do you see them sort of working against each other as figures or speaking to each other? I'd just love to hear your thoughts on that.
15:25
PD: Actually I think that the actual geography of the port itself and the construction of it is connected to a global infrastructure. And that global infrastructure is about corporatizing people. And turning people into physical assets to do the migratory work and to do the indentured labour, and that was why it was important to go back to the archives of NYC. When you look at the archives of Ellis Island, and that's where the ship actually landed, it was because of this mass migration at the turn of the last century and many people ended up being indentured labour, even at that time, so there was a real, I had a real need to kind of bring those things together in the contemporary moment of this reading experience. So, there's again some fluctuations of time, but also there's the port of Vancouver, which is um, it's a space that is about creating commodity and assets and the ship itself is fraught construction because what were ships doing at that time? They were instruments of colonialism, and I kind of appreciate that, but in the context of the Komagata Maru um, I wanted to source out that, and tease out, that relationship but also kind of place a certain kind of movement and liberty and movement to to become part of something like a city and like a nation state as part of like becoming—getting to a better place to live.
-
-
Polygon Gallery 1
-
Image of Jordan Abel's "Cartography" from the bottom of a set of stairs.
-
-
Polygon Gallery 5
-
Image of a wall providing information about the N. Vancouver exhibition.
-
-
Portside Park 1
-
Image of parked semi-trucks and cars with shipping cranes and containers in the background and with a tree on the left side of the shot.
-
-
Portside Park 10
-
Image of docked boats with shipping cranes and containers in the background.
-
-
Portside Park 11
-
Image of grass by the shore and docked boats with shipping cranes in the background.
-
-
Portside Park 12
-
Image of the remaining roots and trunk of a fallen tree by the large rocks of a shore.
-
-
Portside Park 13
-
Image of birds standing on the trunk of a fallen tree by the large rocks of a shore.
-
-
Portside Park 14
-
Image of birds standing on the trunk of a fallen tree by the large rocks of a shore. North Vancouver and ships are across the water in the background.
-
-
Portside Park 15
-
Image of birds standing on the trunk of a fallen tree by the large rocks of a shore. North Vancouver and ships are across the water in the background.
-
-
Portside Park 16
-
Image of birds standing on the trunk of a fallen tree by the large rocks of a shore with North Vancouver across the water in the background.
-
-
Portside Park 17
-
Image of birds standing on the trunk of a fallen tree in water. A white bird is in mid-flight on the right side of the shot.