Phinder Dulai Clip 1
Details
Phinder Dulai Clip 1
Metadata (MODS) |
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| Titles | Phinder Dulai Clip 1: |
| Name | Phinder Dulai |
| Name | Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Type of Resource | sound recording |
| Identifier | Interview |
| Identifier | Phinder Dulai Clip 1 |
| Abstract | 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. |
| Extent | 10:08 Minutes |
| Form | sound recording |
| Note | 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. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | North America--Canada------Vancouver |
| Subject Local Name | ----History--Poetry--Polyphony--Archives--Transnationalism--Archives--Colonial--Voices--Refugee--Reality---- |