dream / arteries

By Phinder Dulai

The Japanese steamship Komagata Maru set sail for Canada with 376 Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu migrants travelling from Punjab, India. They were refused entry at Vancouver, even though all passengers were British subjects. The Komagata Maru sat moored in Vancouver’s harbour 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, dream / arteries, Phinder Dulai connects these 376 passengers with other New World settler migrants who travelled 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Feb 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781772015676

Phinder Dulai

Phinder Dulai is the Vancouver-based author of dream/arteries (Talonbooks, 2014 – reprinted, 2021) and two previous books of poetry: Ragas from the Periphery (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995) and Basmati Brown (Nightwood Editions, 2000). His most recent work has been published in Canadian Literature and Cue Books Anthology. Earlier work appeared in Ankur, Matrix, Memewar Magazine, Rungh, the Capilano Review, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Toronto South Asian Review, subTerrain, and West Coast LINE. Dulai is a co-founder of the Surrey-based interdisciplinary contemporary arts group The South of Fraser Inter Arts Collective (SOFIA/c).

Book preview

Cover: Dream / Arteries by Phinder Dulai

dream / arteries

Also by Phinder Dulai

Basmati Brown: Paths, Passages, Cross and Open

Ragas from the Periphery

Phinder Dulai

dream / arteries

Talonbooks

Logo: Talonbooks

© 2014 Phinder Dulai

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from Access Copyright (The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency). For a copyright licence, visit accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Talonbooks

9259 Shaughnessy Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6P 6R4

www.talonbooks.com

Talonbooks is located on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ Lands. 

Second printing: 2021

ePub edition: 2022

ePub ISBN 978-1-77201-567-6

Cover design by Typesmith

Cover photograph by Rennett Stowe, Flickr (cc 2.0)

Talonbooks gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Prov-ince of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Dulai, Phinder, author

Dream/arteries / Phinder Dulai.

Poems.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-88922-913-6 (pbk.)

1. Komagatamaru (Ship)—Poetry.  I. Title.

PS8557.U385D74 2014C811’.54C2014-903256-0

"A poet’s work is to name the un-nameable, to point at

frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world,

and stop it going to sleep."

– Salman Rushdie, The Independent (February 18, 1989)

four days after a fatwa was pronounced against

him in Iran because of The Satanic Verses

I ask the walking stones

about the heart-breaking incident

they laugh

turn their faces and walk away

– Sadhu Binning, The Heart-Breaking Incident,

No More Watno Dur (1994)

In memory of

Mewa Singh Lopoke

and for those who seek sanctuary

CONTENTS

an epistle to the reader (confidential)

soul-journ to the end of the pacific

from fragments

wisconsin temple poems

mourning ghazals

3 flag poems – dry skin draped over clay stones

the rivers

ants

desert

atomic eeyore

smile

chita – 100 lines to die

rakhri

the world after tomorrow

presence

hollow

waves

dawn

3:00 a.m.

sleep walking

pencil thought

ash

return

swing

asiancy (a word)

of friends

after tomorrow

grief

sadness

it-dhé (here), a vancouver special circa 1980

melancholy

autumn drift

in conversation

re-word

slam

the obesity in idea

a man steps

how lingua and i met in conversation

in the room

havana christmas – five interludes

where love resides

acknowledgements

source notes

archival photos

about the author

Archival Note: The following is entered by p. dulai as an introduction.

Public Record Notice: The above statement has been proven to be incorrect and lacking in clear facts (dated July 23, 2014 – dp)

KM File 10037 (Personal)

Book item opened and contents entered as record

P.S.D. / pd

Surrey, British Columbia, July 23, 2014

Dear R.E.A.D.E.R.,

Respected citizen of a country and inhabitor of the world,

Madam or Sir:

I beg to confirm the context of this letter.

The book accompanying this letter has been deposited into your hands as an opportunity to uncover truths. Indeed, this book sets out both a fictional and factual account of an emigrant ship that had profound historical consequences – impacting peoples’ lives and future government laws on immigration; thus the book examines what truth looks like in the interstice between the public record and archival space.

This literary record is a response to the well-maintained factual records of the arrival of the Komagata Maru

at Vancouver in the summer of 1914. So little is documented in the public record about the aspirations of passengers during the ordeal. Such a lack of interest shown by the surveillance procedures and reporting process for the passengers’ ideas of what they were seeking in the New World and what they left behind certainly shows a profound administrative oversight if not a gap of empathy and good conscience.

As the