Intertidal Polyphonies
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji Interview 2
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji and Dr. Joanne Leow have a conversation about the ideas of bodies of water and human bodies, particularly regarding transportation and transnational flow. This progresses to a discussion about waterfront development and the way condo developers co-opt artistic / poetic language and use of imagery to sell properties., Joanne Leow: I really love how you’re equating surface—not equating, but kind of linking this idea of surface to things people say, how we talk about stuff, like almost the discourse that surrounds—but the kind of surface discourse that we just talk about when we talk about movement. What, to you in your mind, linked this idea of this movement on this placid surface of the bay…what do you make—like that linkage, I’m just so interested?
(0:23)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: I think that so much of our relations are shaped by visibility, just what we can see and what we can’t see, and so that was one aspect of surface that I was trying to give weight to. But also, I was reading this article by Charmaine Chua, which is published in a magazine called The Funambulist, which is published out of Belgium, but it’s a really great magazine about objects and design, that sort of thing. And she wrote this article about the history of the container, and in it she says—there’s this line that I’ve quoted in the book—and she says about the container that “it doesn’t matter what’s inside, it only matter that it flows.” So, this idea of circulation and visibility was really important to me to see just how these relations are formed.
(1:00)
Joanne Leow: It’s really interesting because if you think about the container, it’s contained, it’s actually just like a closed space; if you were stuck in it, that would suck.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Yeah.
Joanne Leow: But at the same time, it’s the link to these transnational flows. I was thinking about, as well, the changes to the Vancouver coastline and your poems trying to come to terms with this disorienting experience, of seeing things moving, and being on that water from being in the Teck Gallery. So, what do you think has been your experience working and writing and living in Vancouver in the past couple of years?
(1:26)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: That’s a really really big question. I feel like it’s been extremely difficult living here.
Joanne Leow: Yeah.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Just as an artist, especially, you know if you’ve—you brought this up in your talk yesterday, just the, developers using sort of poetic language and artistic language to sell the west bank. Promotional material has, you know, fight for beauty, and all these sort of…poetic—
(1:48)
Joanne Leow: That’s so disturbing.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: —artistic phrases. So, this co-optation is something that’s really bothering me, and it’s my—I think it’s my job as an artist, as somebody who’s working to understand how these systems work, to articulate how they’re working. Because in theory or in class we would talk about it in terms of complicit critique, where the critique itself is embedded, or something’s co-opted; so in order to have any way to resist, the layers of referentiality have to be articulated and broken down in order to have some sort of ground to stand on to say, “oh no.”
(2:21)
Joanne Leow: Yeah, I know. And then you’re really—then you’re working on the kind of semantic level, you’re thinking specifically about what words mean, what they can mean, what they have been used to mean.
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji Interview 3
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In this clip, Shazia Hafiz Ramji delves deeper into her inspirations for Port of Being. She explains that "Flags of Convenience" are flags of poor countries flown on corporate shipping vessels that allow these corporate ships to avoid certain fees, depending on where they port. This is contrasted with the reality that immigrants from the countries of those convenience flags are not readily accepted or welcomed into Western countries. Ramji ends by discussing how Foucault's concept of heterotopia impacted her understandings of the issues she grapples with in Port of Being., Joanne Leow: Making me think of Dionne Brand’s idea of inventory. I was just thinking of those lists, those inventories, like you keep listing stuff. I just want to hear more about what you think. Was it a conscious or unconscious choice when you started going like, “okay, I need to kind of almost enumerate what’s going on here”?
(0:13)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: It’s interesting, because I hadn’t thought about it in terms of inventories, but I was thinking about it in terms of facts and in terms of labels. Ai Weiwei did this piece in 2009, and there was an earthquake in China and he made this piece where he listed all the names of the schoolchildren who had died because, you know, the government wouldn’t take responsibility for the substandard housing that was responsible for basically killing all these kids. And so he just made a list of the names, and I was really really moved by that, to just have these facts listed, even though they’re just words, but there’s life and meaning to all these things. And so I kind of wanted to bring that into my poems a little bit, like I have this section called “Flags of Convenience”—it’s not on the elephants but it’s a really important part of the book—and the flag of convenience is basically a flag that’s flown on a ship that’s the flag of a poor country, like Panama or Liberia or something, but the ship is originating from, let’s say Denmark or a capitalistic, more developed country than Panama or Liberia or Malta or whatever. And so, the reason for flying that flag is so that they can evade taxes and quotas from the originating countries because…there’s a lot of different laws around that.
(1:23)
Joanne Leow: That’s so interesting that they would take on—if you were coming in as a refugee claimant or someone, you would not want to take in one of those flags of convenience, and yet the ships—
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Exactly.
Joanne Leow: —because they want a different kind of mobility are trying to attempt to pass, really, it’s an act of passing, right, yeah.
(1:41)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Exactly, yeah. And I was looking at workers’ reports that I just found on the internet, from the supervisors, saying, “oh there’s—the workers abandoned the ship,” these container ships, because they weren’t paid adequately or they weren’t fed adequately, and they mutinied, basically. And so it was just very very emotional to have all these facts, and the supervisor was saying things like, they couldn’t communicate because half the crew was Filipino and half the crew was Polish, and it’s just all this cheap labour on a ship flying a flag of a country that no one has any sort of connection to.
(2:11)
Joanne Leow: Obviously we talked a little bit about Vancouver, we talked about the port, and drawing those two things together, when you were writing “Flags of Convenience,” but you were also thinking about existing in this space as, like, a port city, and the kinds of ways people try to prevent people from arriving in Vancouver, prevent people from being here. What kinds of advocations or productions of space, then, do you think happen in your poems? Like when you’re thinking about those—it’s almost like a paradox, like contradiction, it’s just like immobility and mobility, it’s like the surface movement, and then yet this constant need to contain things, to keep things in the container, you need to keep people at the border. The horizons just need to stay. What spaces do you think your poems produce when you’re faced with these almost contesting forces?
(2:54)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: It’s difficult to find a word, but before I started the book I was thinking through Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, and I found it really useful. It’s one of the concepts that he brought up in his last lectures, and I found it really useful because it’s a space, the heterotopia is a space of simultaneity, and it’s a sort of palimpsestuous, layered sort of space, but it’s also a space of otherness. And so the thing that I found really interesting about the heterotopia was that he gives the example of a mirror, so let’s say I’m standing in front of the mirror, I’m constituting myself from a space of absence because I’m looking at myself in the mirror, and that’s an absent space, so I’m constituting myself from that position of absence. And so that heterotopic space that embodies absence almost has an agency when I’m thinking about migration and loss and displacement, because it brings that back to the present.
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji Interview 4
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji addresses her responsibility as a poet to articulate the complexities of space and places. She acknowledges the difficulty of accurate articulation, but nonetheless advocates in favour of such an attempt as articulation enables changes., Joanne Leow: And you’re really actually pointing a really difficult way of expressing how we exist right now in so many different spaces at the same time. Maybe one last question. When you’re thinking of contestations of space, in the city, in the waterfront, and you were talking a little bit about that, about condo developers, and asking people, “Be bold! … Make sure you get in on the rush!” When you’re thinking of those contestations, and specifically for yourself and your work, and you said you felt this responsibility to critique it, not just responsibility to critique, but how do you think your poetry enables you to inhabit the space differently?
(0:37)
Shazia Hafiz Ramji: That’s really difficult, because sometimes it feels futile, because I feel—I always worry that my poems are not going to be accessible to everybody, or that they’re going to be perceived as too avant-garde, or too this or too that, whatever, right? But I…I feel like it’s the least that I can do, because there’s nothing else that I can do, really, except put my body in these sites and feel and think and articulate things, because articulating is half the problem. Once you’ve articulated something, then it gives you the power to take it back. So I feel like that was, that was half the battle for me (laughs).
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji Reading
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In this audio recording, Shazia Hafiz Ramji reads two poems from her debut poetry collection, Port of Being (winner of the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry). She reads "Khalifa" and "100 Plastic Containers for Human Corpses." Both poems consider global economic trade and policy and the intersections of those realities with lived human experiences and digital expressions of lived experience.
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Shipping Yard 2
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Photo taken inside a car. Looking at a crane and a semi-truck.
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Singapore Island Cruise Audio 1
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Audio of the ambient sounds on the Singapore Island Cruise ferry, including creaking noises, engine vibrations, water sounds, and people chatting. Duration: 0:54
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