Intertidal Polyphonies
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Museum of Vancouver 9
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Image of a map of Western British Columbia naming the province "GOLD COUNTRY" and "THE NEW EL DORADO."
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Nuraliah Norasid 1
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Nuraliah Norasid talks about the underground settlement Nelroote in her novel, The Gate Keeper, and compares it to Singapore's history of displacing residents to build new housing., Nuraliah: I’m Nuraliah Norasid and I am a research associate with the Centre for Research on Islamic and Malay affairs, but of course on the side I’m a writer. When a space is small, and then the thing is that some things that are uncomfortable becomes really uncomfortable. I think definitely that there is that, but there’s also…when it comes to, when you are in a space that is surrounded by the sea, what happens is that—and especially when there’s a lot of convergence, many different groups converges in one place—what happens is that, then it becomes more important for them to establish themselves. And so I think that’s where all of this, the policies that come through, the sort of social actions that come out, the way stratification and the marginalization comes through, it’s really, to be able to pin down—and unfortunately it’s the one that have the strongest stake that will be able to say where people should go. I think, yeah, it is definitely magnified by the space, because there’s so much working with so little, so it becomes imperative that you put the stakes in, and then you establish yourself, otherwise you’ll just be marginalized.
[1:18]
Joanne Leow: It’s really interesting to hear you talk about the space, and just jumping off of that I was thinking of the…I guess the word would be the control and the governmentality over the space in the universe of the book, and particularly when I’m thinking of the outcasts who kind of descend into this subterranean world. And when they go there, and it’s kind of this…like you were saying, it’s almost as if the stratification that you’re trying to discuss in the text is mirrored by the spatial constructions that are there, so, yeah, just a little bit more about that space, that descent into that hiding.
[1:51]
Nuraliah: This was something that was touched on a little bit in the book, it was when Ria and Barani was going in, then there was this person, Acra, that was just telling them that, well, the reason why they chose this place is because they know that there was settlement, and then that they couldn’t afford city living after their village was being torn down, and then…to make way for modernization. So, there’s that thing. I think where the government comes in, in terms of, how do you say, in terms of the control they have over land. And of course modernization is very very tied to the economics, after all, you want a certain—and like some places are being—you need to concentrate the population in certain places, you need to develop certain lands for certain reasons, and all of these reasons will end up being very economically inclined. And so, there is that. And then the way it then filters down is that the classes and those who are not able to afford living in the residential areas that have been set aside for them, and then they are forced to find other options. And so, then that’s how they end up in Nelroote. And then the way I was thinking is that, maybe in Singapore we don’t have an underground—or maybe we do, we just don’t know…
Joanne Leow: Oh, we do, we kind of do, yeah.
[3:17]
Nuraliah: Yeah. I think not so much a physical underground, maybe someday that might happen, but we definitely have our little underground spaces, the spaces that kind of fall through the cracks, like Circuit Road and so on, Jelemina and everything. So, we do have those spaces, and then the reason why they’re there is they are not able to afford living anywhere else, and then a lot of the rental flats are there. And then of course what happens is that when all the rental flats are there, the land isn’t being developed. For example a lot of these old rental places are not developed, because the resources are placed somewhere else, and then because these places are not very well developed in terms of amenities and access, what happens is that the values of the house goes down, and of course the only people that can afford it will be the ones who cannot afford the neighbourhoods that have the access and amenities. It’s very difficult to pinpoint where it begins, because with Nelroote, in my mind, there was already this settlement that was living there, probably was they had been living there for a very long time, something they inherited from their ancestors who were the ones that left the catacombs in the first place. But, when the government decides to come in with their modernization projects, and they’re trying to develop this land for that, what happens is that the people who are evicted, who are displaced, you can either afford living in the spaces that have been designated for population, or you have to find other options, and then, unfortunately, this is the option, because it’s cheap, and it’s something that you can afford when you are fishermen trying to make a living when all these modern fishing crawlers are coming in, when you’re trying to make a living out of selling snail ornaments or, you know, homemade food and stuff like that. So yeah, that was what happened, so I was basing it in terms of that, how people are displaced.
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Nuraliah Norasid 2
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Nuraliah Norasid discusses the temporal shift in her novel, The Gatekeeper, and how it relates to her experience of Singapore's rapid development in the late twentieth century., Joanne Leow: You were thinking about spatial displacement, I was also thinking about the temporal shift that occurs in the novel, it’s really interesting. Because in the first part of the novel, you have this really…it’s not a nostalgic look, necessarily, but it’s almost like a timeless, almost ancient past, where…you know, there’s mythological and fantastical elements, and then suddenly, in the second half, you’ve transitioned into this hyper-modern city that has all these things that are, again, increasingly even more familiar. I’d just like you to talk a little bit about that shift, and about that ending. Earlier we talked about the kind of hints of the government changing people’s lives, and by the end it’s so palpable.
Nuraliah: Yeah, that’s correct.
Joanne Leow: What went through your mind when you were thinking through that shift in time, but still in that concentrated space?
[0:45]
Nuraliah: I think what went through my mind was—and then people have pointed this out, that there are people who really really love the nostalgic space, and then, to the point that when you get to the second half the book, and then we’re with Eedric and his modern life, they’re just like, “(sound of disgust), go back, go back!” And then that’s the thing, I do—and this is something that I’ve discussed with others before—when it comes to, especially with the Malay community, nostalgia actually features very strongly, because it is actually featured in the old black-and-white films. And then that was the golden age of the community, and then there is today. But there’s also that disconnect, you see, that there’s nothing—the in-between is almost lost to us, the 1980s, the 1970s, 1990s, I mean, do anyone remember the ‘90s? The center-parted hair, and so on, where we…and the boy bands.
Joanne Leow: (laughing) From the music, maybe.
[1:40]
Nuraliah: Oh yes! I remember the music, that’s true. So, I think if there is that shift, and then there’s almost that nothing in-between, it could be because of that, that even in my exposure to the past—the Singaporean past—and then living in the Singaporean present, it doesn’t—in my mind it’s not really…and then the truth, it is gradual development.
[2:07]
Joanne Leow: But do you think it’s gradual, or do you think it’s because the development was so accelerated that people can’t process it?
Nuraliah: Perhaps.
Joanne Leow: In the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s it just happened, you claim the land…
Nuraliah: Just like that.
Joanne Leow: …you know, all these new buildings, I mean, every time I come back now, I’m just like, what?
Nuraliah: Yes, that’s true.
Joanne Leow: But you can’t process it, so you skipped that. I wonder…
[2:25]
Nuraliah: That’s true. Perhaps, yeah. And then the only thing is that you only have all of these cultural, how do you say, artifacts, you know, from our past, and then there’s, the in-betweens are so fuzzy. So, yeah, I would think so. And even if—you don’t even have to be away, here in Singapore it’s just like, “eh? This place used to be this, what? Uh…I think?” And then the scary part is…I live in Yishun—Area 51 of Singapore. Yishun used to have forest, there’s a reason why it’s a little bit weird, because it was just a lot of forest, a lot of open fields, some of the open fields had tombs in it, but—and then now it’s just BTOs and HDB flats. I do sometimes look at the space and feel as if what I remember, back then, that’s not feeling so real, because I was just like, “what this used to be, am I right, did I really see a tomb here? Did this forest once catch on fire?” Things like this. So, yeah, I think the development is really accelerating, even with Manticura it was very accelerated. And for the people, it’s just, suddenly in the horizon there are all these ships. And for Ria and Barani, it’s just, suddenly this land, this little plot of land that their hut is standing on is now priced land, because it’s needed for development. And I think they’re not able to process that, because it comes so suddenly, it’s almost an intrusion. There’s definitely that disconnect, and even with me, I only have these cultural artifact, and then stories that my parents would tell you of their kampong days and so on, and then, it’s like, pop! Then I just don’t know what happens in between. I would say it’s almost like a cultural amnesia, the in-between is just, I don’t know what happens.
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Nuraliah Norasid 3
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Nuraliah Norasid discusses how she conceived of the languages in The Gatekeeper in relation to the physical bodies of the different races and their social organisations. She explains her decision to use the medusa as a central figure in the novel., Joanne Leow: I wanted to get your view about how you see this invention of this new language in relation to the ecology, the natural world around it, the migrations into this island, and everything like that. What is that relationship between the language and the placemaking, the worldbuilding?
[0:15]
Nuraliah: The language itself took me six months to even think about, and to develop it. What happens is that, in terms of the relationship—the Tuyuns are the, you could say that they are the natives of the island, they have just been there for the longest time. And so, then they have this language, Tuyunri, and the language itself is actually very tied to—and I was thinking in terms of, how is language tied to culture? And how is language also tied to the environment? Because obviously we don’t create language for things that we really cannot comprehend—things that we cannot imagine even, or fathom, it just doesn’t have a language. Maybe there might be an image, but eventually there would be a language with which we can still narrate that, but can we think of something that we don’t think about? Is there a language for that non? I was thinking in terms of that. So, for the Tuyuns, what do they need to communicate? They would need to communicate, definitely, the relations between one person to the other, and also they would need to communicate time of day, activities, and then because I was thinking they’re a hunter-gatherer society—tribal society—so they would have to communicate, location of prey, location of edible food, edible fruits and so on. And these would translate into language. So, I came up with words for the things that they would need to communicate in the environment. And then I also thought about the fact that after the Tuyuns, the Scereans were—because it was mentioned that they have a very close working and trading relationship—the Scereans, because they came from—because they are the swamp, marsh dwellers—and then they came from South Ceras, and then they would have to communicate. And the thing is that, the interesting thing about lingua franca is that it develops even, let’s say, in the Malay Archipelago, and then everyone speaks a very different dialect, and it comes together—but then the thing about the lingua franca is that it has to work to communicate common things between two groups of people, and yet at the same time it has to also be simple enough for two groups of people to be able to speak it, which is why, if you think about languages, there are lingua francas, they are a little bit easier to just grasp, Malay, for example. And so, I was thinking that, when the Scereans came down, they actually speak Sumayan, and so what happened is some of the words from Sumayan would actually translate into Tuyunri as well, and then so Tuyunri would have some of those words that can be communicated. So, yeah, I was thinking in terms of that, and then I was thinking, how would it sound, like, it would have to sound… language and the way language sounds has a lot to do with biology. But also the environment plays a huge part, because sometimes some languages would need to be forceful, because they’re in an environment where you need to communicate maybe over long distances; you articulate words that can be heard from the person over there. But then in smaller spaces there’s no real need to be very loud. For example, Malay is actually very flowy, I guess, I think people tend to live in pretty close proximity, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong in this one. So I was of what Tuyunri would sound—and then if they are hunters trying to communicate to another person, another hunter over there, it would have to sound very natural to the environment, it would have to sound like a call, like an animal call, and the animals probably won’t think too much about it. So, it’s probably guttural, very back of the throat, and then because their scales resemble the bark, and the rocks, and so that’s also played some part in the way it falls into your voicebox and the way it shapes your body, so I have to think in terms of that, too.
[4:22]
Joanne Leow: The last part with the body is just really really cool. What struck me the most, I guess, when you were describing the way you were thinking about language was that those bodies, again, and also the kind of indigeneity of the two sisters to the island. In some senses—and we haven’t talked too much about this—the medusas themselves, why pick them? Specifically, why pick them in the context of the island? Are they, in some ways, almost physical embodiments of that land? What does that mean, really?
[4:51]
Nuraliah: The interesting thing is that between Barani and Ria, both of them are not endemic to Manticura, especially Barani. And it’s in the way I crafted their two characters as well. Barani’s hair, actually, the vipera barani, which is endemic to Turkey, so, and then her features are also not very local, so she’s very tall, her eyes are very close to violet, and then she has really high cheekbones, where Ria is much much closer. It’s almost as if she is molded by the land and then birthed from it, because her hair is the naja sumatrana, which is the black spitting cobras of Sumatra, so, that is already pretty much embedded in the Malay Archipelago, then transposed into this world, and her skin is pretty much very close to the environment. It’s almost as if she could just stand there and she would camouflage. With Barani, I specifically wanted her to seem a little bit foreign, but then at the same time, and that’s where we think of migration, isn’t it, there’s a high chance that Barani would be from somewhere. Ria may not be completely endemic, but this part that environments—and I mean environment does play huge role in molding people—they have a way of molding people. Choosing medusas, huge, huge question, simply because it is so outside of Asian mythology, or Malay mythology for that matter, and so on, because it’s very embedded in what people keep viewing as Greek mythology or Roman mythology, but that’s the thing, that in my research, what happens is that even the figure of the medusa picked off from even earlier Neolithic, not even from like, the Mediterranean Mesotopia[sic]. And then they, even the Mesotopians[sic] picked up the figure of the snake goddess or the snake woman from much, much earlier cultures before them. And, it is almost a common line when it comes to thinking about snakes and its relation to women. I grew up actually reading about the White Snake, Madame White Snake. In the Malay mythology or folklore, there are mentions of snakes. The reason why I chose medusas is also, in a way, to show what we keep thinking is cultural borrowing may not be so alien after all. In terms of such imageries and figures, it can flow into a culture, and then that culture shapes it in one way or another. So that was that, and that’s why the sisters have—I mean, the way they are being drawn or written, and then the descriptions of the snakes and so on—it is meant to show that there is that movement, that flow, and then after that there is that molding that happens. So, I wanted them to seem very foreign, or to have a certain foreign aspect, and yet this very grounding familiarity to them. So, I was just playing around with that.
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Nuraliah Norasid Reading an Excerpt from The Gatekeeper
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In this recording, Nuraliah Norasid reads an excerpt from her novel The GateKeeper. Norasid raises topics of culture, settlement, discrimination, and development--depicting the colonial reality of spaces and the accelerated changes such a reality brings with it.
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Phinder Dulai Clip 1
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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.
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Phinder Dulai Clip 2
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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.
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Polygon Gallery 1
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Image of Jordan Abel's "Cartography" from the bottom of a set of stairs.
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