Daphne Marlatt, Then Now

 

Trains of Thought from a Later Sidesman

walking home from church oh Windsor Road oh St. Martin’s where you quietly ushered people to their seats aisle to aisle offering collection plate we talk-walked those minutes home you telling me about time in Dunne’s Experiment you’d read as a young man (London? Penang?) something about a train’s continuing present some young man dream-wondering what lies outside a speeding train window more than seen the one outside in another time so many outside dimensions telling young teen me we were / are each inside so many outsides

Vancouver poet, critic and fiction writer Daphne Marlatt’s latest poetry collection is the book-length Then Now (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2021), a book composed as a response through lyric to the recently-discovered wartime correspondence of her late father. As the back cover offers: “[Arthur] Buckle left England in the early 1930s to join a British accounting firm in multiracial Penang, Malaysia. He continued living and working there until taking leave in 1941, returning after WW II, whose looming threat striates his early letters, and staying until 1951. Decades after the letters’ composition, Marlatt began writing poems in response to them, interwoven with memories they provoked from her postwar childhood there.” Marlatt’s lengthy “Afterword, after words” expands upon her shifts of perspective that both time and the letters, as well as history, provided her, to open up exploring her reponse:

            This was my protected child-view. Not until I saw the revolver on my parents’ bedroom bureau did I realize there was something wrong. And not until after we had emigrated to Vancouver and I was learning in school about the two World Wars and democracy did I begin to ask in more detail about that revolver. And so began my introduction to the 1950s Malaysan Emergency, the postwar struggle for independence from British colonial rule, the various factions working in the jungle, in mainland towns and kampongs, both Chinese Communist guerillas and Malay nationalist rebels. I learned that my father was on a guerrilla blacklist because, driving in to a rubber estate on one of his accounting visits, he was alerted to an attack on the manager’s house, got out and called the police, saving the manager’s life. Only later did I learn that closer to home there had been an attempt to burn the funicular railway station at the bottom, which would have left everyone living on the Hill open to attack. Perhaps that was the last straw for my father, who had an anxious wife and three young daughters to safeguard. We emigrated to Canada’s West Coast in 1951 with no money but packing crates of teak furniture for a house heated by a sawdust furnace in the basement, its dry heat gradually ping-cracking tabletops and wardrobe doors.

It is a curious thing, to first go through such letters from a beloved and close relative, decades after they had been composed, and the portrait can’t help but be slightly unfamiliar. Set as a kind of scrapbook, alongside occasional photographs from her family archive, Marlatt sketches in and around letters home from her father, composed in response, in addendum, and in way of surrounding or filling in, of responding to him directly, and the circumstances he describes in missives home. Writing to his father in January, 1942, Buckle offers that “Edrys is going up to the Blue Mountain for three months as it will be more healthy. Her parents will be in a neighbouring town & two friends from Penang will be in the same guest house so I hope she will be able to keep cheerful. After that she returns to a guest house in Sydney until June 25^th when her baby is expected. I am terribly sorry for her, but we have put our faith in God & trust that He will see us safely through this appalling muddle. In any event, our last 6 months together have been very happy & we are extremely grateful for that & for the fact that we missed the terrible bombing of Penang.” A page or two further, Marlatt writes, to open her poem “Returning,”

November 1945. Having served your “peaceful” war in Melbourne deciphering codes at Allied headquarters, you board a merchant ship to Singapore where you get yourself delisted from the Royal Navy. Edrys with 2 children, a 3^rd on the way, stays behind. George Town still in shambles after Japanese bombing & occupation.

So company loyalty calls, yes. And something else. What was it?

She writes of belonging and being, the tribulations of war and occupation; she writes on returning to live on occupied lands, and the implications and responsibilities therein. She writes as sketched-responses, furthering or expanding narrative points brought up in her father’s letters, or providing background, responding to the colonial belief that occupation was akin to “nation building.” She responds to what she is now better aware of, having since learned the social and political situation that surrounded him during those days, that he himself was implicated in. “if present,” she writes, in the short lyric, “Alive,” “even newly arrived in others’ / long-inhabited here?”

There will, of course, be questions that might never find answers, but nonetheless require speaking aloud. Her poems write between the lines of her father’s correspondence, from the margins to the stories that couldn’t possibly be told at the time. She writes of silences, and family distances, and deaths. “this porous body’s deep Vancouver-grown yet here,” she writes, to close the poem “nostos & not,” “familial history steeps imperial sites Bank Chamber’s / long arcade no war amp beggars squatting in its shade by / Tuan’s office door no syce no King of Heaven shrines to / grace Edwardian pillars now British culture’s gone & yet / it’s advertised: ‘George town heritage restored’[.]”

Her perspective sweeps are remarkably fluid, yet precise. She pinpoints moments across large distances, writing out the father she sees as a man beyond her memory. As well, there are moments when the lyric of the prose feels akin to a descriptive rush, as though all history, even personal history, if you go far enough back, occurs simultaneously. There is something lovely about being lost in the rhythm of that language, and those memories. As any of us well know, the threads of memory can sometimes become difficult to untangle and distinguish, instead presenting themselves as a particular kind of blended collage, as she writes as part of the lyric sweep of the opening poem, “Entrance to What,” that reads:

            early Portuguese spice traders knew as Pulo Pinaom north of
Malacca Strait’s monsoon-shelter trade route Moluccas to Madras
or Pulau Ka-Sathu First Island to the sea-sakai or Isle of Areca /
betel nut palm under the mainland’s Kedah sultanate trade
rivalries meant its Tanjong Penaga stand of coastal laurel trees
met Sir Francis Light’s costly goldcoin cannon shot luring
underpaid Indian sepoys & lascars to cut dense hardwood clear
rainforest jungle growth for Fort Cornwallis that British East
India Company outpost then Prince of Wales Island a town
rapidly growing Hokkien-Malay-Tamil-Euro entrepôt trade rival
Malacca’s but George yes George Town’s shallow harbour hosting
high-prowed junks triple-masted Indiamen sail wind sail as sampans
unloaded to ghauts coolie labour hauled up merchant wares for godowns
and finance houses West to east East to West now Malaysian Pulau
Pinang’s long-gone betel nut stands ghost under so-called Silicon
Valley of the East’s Internet of Things yes “things”