DREAM FRAGMENTS, Mirabel
Cactus Press, 2020
Dreams, and our memories of them, do tend to come to us in mirage-like fragments. In DREAM FRAGMENTS, Avleen K Mokha (aka Mirabel) has crafted a sinuous narrative of sights, sounds and slumber: a memoir of immigration, of the fitful struggle of an unfitting love, and the story of a young woman gradually finding the self-confidence to acknowledge her inner voice.
In this debut collection of poetry, we are treated to vignettes of Mirabel’s experience of moving from her childhood city of Mumbai, India to Montreal, Canada. We are taken through the shifting sands of sleep and time, and the accompanying hopes, anxieties, and feelings of alienation as she navigates both a new and familiar gridlock of city streets and disappointments. We are witness to contrasting symbols of McDonald’s restaurants and churches through Mirabel’s eyes, and both a longing for and a reticence of intimacy. What is relatable and universal is the sense of desire for a sanctuary in these scattered remnants of recall, among the loneliness and uncertainty of movement and change.
Mirabel’s background is in Linguistics, having studied both Linguistics and
Speech-Language Pathology at McGill University in Montreal; fittingly, there is
almost a choked claustrophobia to some of DREAM
FRAGMENTS’ earlier poems, of the terror of being unable to speak. We open
with a troubled question of identity in “Linguistic Nightmare”, and
subsequently are transported through fragmented odysseys of illusions, fears,
recollections and desires from the poet’s confessional perspective.
Mirabel summons recurring symbols of mirrors, locked doors, ghosts and
phantoms: These nightmarish themes develop into a thoughtfulness of
distance—between lovers, between family and heritage, between two homes—and
into more sober reflections of womanhood, on the vulnerabilities of girlhood,
and of the miracle of being human (in “Melatonin”, the poet reminds herself to
“Soften & release: / like loose clay becomes pottery, / I become anew at
night” and to “tighten and believe / your animal heart”).
In a similar way, DREAM FRAGMENTS
chases circles around itself, invoking the feeling of being unable to escape an
old emotional wound or existential anxiety as we navigate from one familiar
dream to the next. This circular imagery is echoed throughout; in Golden Hour:
“...your spine already / a sundial chasing the moon,” in “Redirected”: “Even my
dreams / are rivers that want / to flow back to you,” and “Remembrance”: “A
tree rings around itself”—Mirabel evokes the circuitousness of the
unconscious, and we are suddenly lucid of how it feels to dream.
A few of these works are written in
second person, as though in conversation with a lost love. This differentiation
between speaker and addressee is ostensibly painted as tragedy but there are
underlying tones of self-awareness in this triumph of separation, which
culminate in the final poem, “Talk Back.” Mirabel writes:
Something feral in me comes out,
says [...]
no to the possible,
no to the real,
no to you demanding
small things not
yours.
I feed her now with
warm water, eyes alight
with the heat of
survival.
This feral womanhood is fully capable of disowning “unwanted corset” and what
does not serve her or her personal growth. Paradoxically, the poem
“Self-Sacrifice” addresses saving the self, rather than becoming a martyr:
“every night i am trying to find ways to be / and offering up a younger bone of
me.” It seems that with its placement in the collection and proximity to the
poem “Talk Back” that there is a burgeoning sense of the mature selfhood in
this sacrifice of Mirabel’s idea of herself as a young girl.
Indeed the reader is able to follow a loose emotional chronology in DREAM FRAGMENTS, from states of “Derealization” (“I used to think I was someone, / but I was just another one / of those pedestrians whose faces / we never quite catch”)—a fear of self-knowledge and assertion—to an eventual acceptance of the developing self, which finally culminates in “Talk Back”, this final poem representing feminine maturation and integration of the wilder aspects of womanhood (“I am unmovable little girl … First, as faint as hope. / Then, pink like / a woman returned to life.”) It is a thrilling climax following claustrophobia, taking a first breath that is all our own.
A dream is an expression of delusion, hope, trauma, memory, and inspiration for change. DREAM FRAGMENTS is written as an overt farewell to a city of origin, to an unsuitable relationship, and of a covert goodbye to a sense of personal floundering as the poet’s voice emerges from the crest of an old sense of self into a more certain ability of self-expression. It is an achingly vulnerable and empowering read, speaking to both the child of wonder and the self-possessed adult in us.
Mirabel is following up her first chapbook with a full-length collection, The Vanishing Act (& The Miracle After), available June 1st, 2023 from Guernica Editions.
Samara Garfinkle is a Montreal-based classical soprano, poet, and voice teacher with a Master of Music from the University of Ottawa. Her poetry has appeared in journals and magazines such as Yolk Literary, Columba Poetry, The Nelligan Review and others, and her debut chapbook, Dual Realms, was published with Cactus Press in 2022. Samara is the host of the monthly reading series SpeakUp: The Montreal Interactive Poetry Exchange.
Website: www.samaragarfinkle.com