Shazia Hafiz Ramji Interview 1
Details
Shazia Hafiz Ramji Interview 1
Metadata (MODS) |
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| Titles | Shazia Hafiz Ramji Interview 1: Clip 1 |
| Name | Shazia Hafiz Ramji |
| Name | Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Name | |
| Type of Resource | sound recording-nonmusical |
| Genre | Interview |
| Identifier | Interview |
| Identifier | Shazia Hafiz interview Clip 1 |
| Abstract | In this clip, Shazia Hafiz Ramji discusses the circumstances of beginning to write Port of Being, her debut poetry collection and winner of the 2017 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She recounts a story of seeing a child interact with a public transit cop and how she noticed the various forms of surveillance in such a public space. She also describes visiting the Teck Gallery, where she wrote most of the poems in her collection. At the time of this interview, Ramji's collection was not yet released. |
| Extent | 3:15 Minutes |
| Form | sound recording |
| Note | Shazia Hafiz Ramji: I am Shazia Hafiz Ramji, and I write poems and stories about Vancouver. (0:06) Joanne Leow: I wanted to start straight off thinking about the new book that you have coming out, Port of Being, and the poems, the few that I’ve had, sort of, the honour of reading from there. What was the overarching thinking and inspiration that pushed you to write a book that was like “port of being,” so it’s like a port, but also something deeply personal as well? (0:24) Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Yeah, “the port of being” is actually a phrase from Ken Babstock’s book On Malice, and the phrase is something like, “all relation a port, a port of being,” and so I felt that was really fitting (laughs). But the book started when I left my job as a poetry editor at Talon, and a couple of days later I was just sitting at Waterfront Station and sort of absorbing the sounds and watching people, because that’s what I do, thinking about money (laughs). And I saw this little kid, he was maybe 10 or 11 years old, and the Compass Card system had just come in at that time, and he was tapping through and the transit cop saw him, and he looked at the pass and he said, “oh this isn’t your pass, who’s pass is this?” and the kid said, “oh it’s my mom’s,” and the transit cop said, “you shouldn’t be using your parents’ passes to get around through the city,” and he pointed to another cop who was, I think, an RCMP cop who was standing behind him, and he said, “you could get in trouble if you do this.” And just when that happened, it seemed so absurd to me, because, you know, he’s a kid trying to get by with his mom’s pass, you know, it’s not like he’s running away or anything. And so, I noticed this system of just how visibility and sort of surveillance was structuring the space, and then I noticed all these cameras just around that area in Waterfront Station, they’re all numbered, and just the way this hierarchical system worked and how it shaped this relation so much, and it just made me really sad. And then I started thinking about this New York artist, Vito Acconci, and he did this performance work called Following Piece where he followed somebody on the street until they entered a building or a car where he could no longer enter, and so that, to me, that was very related to what happened to the kid, because the space of access and visibility was structured so much by surveillance and policing, and just how things move in those areas that are… (2:12) Joanne Leow: But specifically bodies, really, like you’re thinking about how bodies move. Shazia Hafiz Ramji: Exactly. Joanne Leow: And when you were thinking about—I love that moment where it’s the kid with the Compass pass trying to get through the turnstile, basically, right? (Shazia: Yeah) When you were thinking of that, and when you started writing the rest of the poems, did you also think about, then, trans-border movements or movements within other parts of the city as well? How did that initial seed of the idea grow for you? (2:34) Shazia Hafiz Ramji: I didn’t want to think about it so broadly, like I didn’t want to impose a kind of, this is what I want to write about. I kind of wanted to try to grasp what those kinds of structures do to our relations and our emotions, and so I thought—I think—the best way to do this would be to see how people talk about things, and to see how things move, maybe on the surface of the water and just in the city. So, I wanted to try to capture the surfaces of things and the way things move, and that’s what I did for the Container section of the book of poems. So, I sat at the Teck Gallery, there’s a view of Harbour Centre, and I watched the harbour every day from six, seven in the morning to seven in the evening or so, and I just wrote. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Subject Geographic | Pacific Ocean |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | North America--Canada------Vancouver |
| Subject Cartographic | 49.2845 N, 123.1116 W |
| Subject Local Name | ----Poetic Intervention--Pacific Ocean----Surveillance--Water |