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.