iii
23rd May, 1914 — Vancouver Harbour
Manifested this day the following Asiatic passengers ex Hong Kong:
4
Sikhs
340 souls
Mahomedans
24 souls 12 souls
Hindoos
Sum Total
376 souls
and among the souls, two women five children
folded into the number
provisions account:
four days out of Hong Kong stores sufficient
Vancouver Roads provisions denied by order.
iv
early June
no water still none
1 HMCS Rainbow and the Komagata Maru in Vancouver Harbour. City of Vancouver Archives, Major Matthews Collection, AM54-S4-: LGN 1031.1, [July 1914]. public domain. 2 ‘Hindu invaders now in the city harbor on Komagata Maru’ (1914, May 23). The Vancouver Sun , p 1. Historica Canada, Critical Digital Literacy Education Guide . https://fb.historicacanada.ca/ education/english/critical-digital- literacy/17/ 3 Carman, B. ‘July’. In B. Carman & M. P. King, Earth deities, and other rhythmic masques . New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914. p56 4 ‘Indian immigrants on board the Komagata Maru in English Bay, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1914’ Library and Archives Canada. PA-034015. 5 Barkatullah edited the journal Islamic Fraternity and, later, the newspaper El Islam , both critical of British rule and banned in British India; his appointment at the University of Tokyo was terminated in 1914 as a result of these activities.
(to drink or perform wudu).
No record
is precise
on who it is
refusing.
So grow a new sensorial world,
folded in the lyric’s hoary beginning.
Allow the lyric to die
inside the museum of your skull.
In discarded bone,
Photographs selected by Armaan Ghaffar.
write the lyric back and forth in the grooves of bone.
‘shorelines’ is drawn from The Somnambulist’s Library , a book-length sequence written in counterpoint to the Canadian literary tradition as it stood in 1914 — the year the Komagata Maru sat in Vancouver’s harbour, its 376 passengers, including 24 Muslims, refused entry, while poets such as Bliss Carman wrote pastoral lyrics from Connecticut, untouched by the crisis unfolding in their homeland. ‘shorelines’ asks what does the lyric owe to witness, memory and the systematically silenced?
Begin when words lock into place.
You will become a rib cage of music when the book envelops you like a moat.
Drown the lyric to unearth its dark intention, draw it up into night’s geometry
into the absence of things slipping
into the darkness we love.
ASHER GHAFFAR is a poet, writer and critical historian who lives outside Toronto.
5
on site review 49 :: shorelines
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator