By Dennis, Bolen, Special to the Sun | Link to Article
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.
By Dennis, Bolen, Special to the Sun | Link to Article
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 the maelstrom soon to become the First World War, 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 a finely crafted prose preamble, Dulai fills many littleknown historical gaps while inserting himself into the story 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 a way out of the complete poverty of your arrival in the new land and the living poverty at home on the farm.”
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.
The volume is elegantly produced and includes strategically placed archival photos, some faintly impressed as sepia ghostings upon translucent panels. The effect is one of contemporaneous immediacy within an irresistible sense of the importance of the past.
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.
Phinder Dulai will read from dream /arteries at the Talonbooks fall poetry launch; Nov. 12, 7:30 p.m. at the Pyatt Hall, Vancouver Symphony School of Music, 843 Seymour Street.