Farah Ghafoor’s Shadow Price, deeply attuned to the relationship between capitalism and climate change, between histories of colonialism and our contemporary environment, is always searching for how to understand our own complicities, multifaceted and varied, in relation to larger structures of power. In these careful, precise, sharp poems, Ghafoor makes visible the relationship between self and place, self and history, self and future, pointing us to a vital collaborative experience and caretaking of the world. Always aware of the material world, of the way capitalism functions historically and in the present, Shadow Price is an urgent examination of the histories that have brought us to the climate crisis, and how we might experience the world and place anew.
In this interview, we discuss environment, solidarity, the form of the long poem, and more.
Vika Mujumdar (VM): I’m curious about how the title and anchoring poem came to be—how did that begin, and could you speak to your process of writing that poem and then deciding that it would be the title poem?
Farah Ghafoor (FG): I was taking an economics in healthcare course at university when I stumbled upon this term, shadow price. A shadow price in that context is the estimated value for something that is not usually bought and sold in the market. It’s intangible, and it’s usually used to conduct a cost-benefit analysis; in the context of that course, it was how you measure the social benefit of a policy. One thing that was interesting was how we all understand how you can’t really put a price on health, and yet we do, even though it’s a basic human right. When I was thinking about this term, I was thinking about how when you zoom out and look at all of society, this is how we consider mental wellness and social wellness. And when you consider how we put a salary on dangerous jobs and how we consider the extra fatality risk, and when you extrapolate that value, it would lead to how an analyst or economist would be able to calculate the statistical value of a human life. That fact is what brought me to writing this poem. I wanted to consider how we put a cost on things that we shouldn’t be putting a cost on, like human health, human life, the life of a living creature, or an environment or an ecosystem. I was interested also in personal complicity in this poem, and how it has become so necessary to consider this in the face of the climate crisis. The concept of a shadow price affects most of the decisions that we make every day, and how we accept the status quo. In this poem, I wanted to talk about how in every part of our lives, whether it’s driving a car or the career we choose, we are unintentionally calculating and accepting the cost of our actions. After writing this poem, I realized that this term, shadow price, and these themes were what I wanted to continue thinking and writing about.
VM: How did you organize the collection, and divide the poems into the different sections?
FG: The first section, titled Time, was inspired by an analogy that I found in the book On Time and Water, by Andri Snær Magnason. In it, he aims to make larger measurements of time, like centuries, tangible by sitting his child and his grandparent at the same table and highlighting that everyone at the table represents a century, or even more. The poems in that first section are my attempt at interrogating and analyzing a different perspective of time and how we can make it tangible. The second and third sections came together at once. My goal for the second section was to reflect on how it feels to be at what feels like the end of the world, and I wanted to explore the role of poetry and of the poet. I also wanted to interrogate what art means to society and the role of art in empire. The third section was my attempt at digging through the origins of the climate crisis. That was such a long and difficult poem to write; I felt like I had never actually done so much research since university, and that came together when I realized this book would be incomplete if I didn’t talk about colonialism because I wanted to explore why we have this status quo and what the origins of our perceptions are. When I say that, I mean: how do I face this? What’s an acceptable narrative of the climate crisis and capitalism, and who and what determines what’s acceptable? That section was my investigation into that topic. I felt like the book was very easy to break up because I had very specific topics I wanted to talk about. The last section is called “The Garden.” When I think about the concept of a garden, I think about the world and how we all have a responsibility to take care of it, and it might not be ours. It might just be a garden. I also recently read this quote I keep seeing online: to be a gardener is to be a futurist. That section is my attempt at learning about how we can pay closer attention to the world and how we can continue to live our lives in a way that is safe and healthy for every living creature.
VM: What were some of the earlier poems you wrote in terms of how you’re examining the relationship between empire and the environment, and how did that intersection shift or come more into focus throughout this collection?
FG: The poems that are more explicit about empire came later on in the collection. The earliest poem in the collection was “The Dream Eaters,” and that used to be called “End of the World Poem.” I wrote that in 2021, when I was feeling a lot of anxiety about the climate crisis. In the beginning, when I was trying to put the collection together, the focus was more purely environmentalism. But, as I, as we all, continued living, things got worse and worse. The role of empire became more prominent in the collection. One of the themes of the end of the world poem was time, how the past determines the future. A large part of the past is colonialism and resource extraction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and so I wanted to explicitly write about that journey from the 1800s to the present day, and empire plays such a large part of that, specifically the British Empire.
VM: There’s such a rich focus on place and the natural world, the landscape against the built environments of empire, and I’m also thinking in particular of the poem “Hometown Elegy,” where you write: “I have lived here / long enough for a stranger to call it my hometown, for its weather to discard my heart…”, and this line brings in the kind of particularly complicated tension of what hometown means, what it means to belong to a place and for a place to belong to you. I was wondering if you might speak to your relationships to place and how those impacted these poems?
FG: I grew up in New Brunswick, and spent a lot of time outside. I lived in the capital, Fredericton, and the area around our neighborhood was very undeveloped and we spent a lot of time outside. It was very beautiful with forests and creeks and such, and I felt it was very normal to live in that kind of a natural environment. Later on, I moved to Windsor, Ontario, and since then I’ve always lived in a city. Having experienced what it was like to live in a place that has so much nature has allowed me to appreciate the world, something a lot of people don’t have access to. Living in those places and slowly losing my access to nature is what influenced my ethos and what I aim to do in this collection.
VM: I found the way you write collectivity, or in a sense, solidarity, compelling here—how there’s such a foregrounding of collectivity, especially in terms of the contrast between the opening poem, “Shadow Price,” in the singular voice of the speaker of these poems, and the last poem, “Here, Grass,” in the collective ‘we’. Could you speak to that shift across the collection, that widening of the ‘we’ across the arc of the collection, that sharpening of collectivity as the themes of empire and environment come more info focus?
FG: My focus has always been from a place that I am part of a larger collective and so is everyone else, and we continue to live in a hyper individualistic culture. One thing I wanted to do in this collection is help people understand that everything we do has an impact. The climate crisis is something that we’re all facing. I was trying to be careful about when I used “I” versus when I used “we” because using that perspective might feel like an accusation to some people. At some points, I did want to point to the reader and tell them that they are part of a collective, and everything you say, everything you buy, there is a cost. When I was using “we” I wanted to also consider we are all still subjects of some empire, whether it depends on who is colonized by who, but the past isn’t going away, and the past still affects all of us.
VM: I really loved the two long poems in this collection, “The Plot” and “The Last Poet in the World.” I was wondering if you could speak to how you see the work of the long poem in relation to the themes of this collection? How do you see the role of the long poem more broadly too, in relation to empire?
FG: The long poem allows for so much space to bring in different themes and ideas. If you’re able to pace yourself while writing a long poem, the reader will be open to connecting such different ideas; in “The Plot,” one of the threads was about the origin of a story—structure, including plot and character, and the form of the plot allowed for the form of the long poem. In terms of how it connects to empire, there are so many different facets of how we live our daily lives that are connected to the past and where we came from and how we were ruled. There needs to be that space to bring those ideas together, and come to, not necessarily a conclusion, but an answer to the questions that have arisen through these different threads, in the long poem, and it also allows you to bring in different literature, like I did through Aria Aber’s work.
VM: I found “The Last Poet in the World” such a compelling poem formally—the way it moves between different formal structures: white space, free verse, the epigraph from Duras, and the more prose poem like sections. Could you speak to your process of writing this poem and how it grew and shifted between these forms?
FG: I didn’t write all the portions of the poem consecutively. They were collected over time. How I choose the form of each section of the long poem depends on the tone and also the content, as in images and other structures that influence the energy of the poem. What’s important to me when I select the form is how it comes across to the reader. If they read a paragraph, they’re going to expect to read it differently from a traditional poem with line breaks. For “The Last Poet in the World,” I wanted to create a narrative using those varied forms to represent the different aspects of what it means to be the last of maybe your kind, and your people, and also how poetry is represented in different forms, and how it changes based on the different facets of living at a time like this.
VM: I also really loved “The Plot” and how it works in the space between a long prose poem and a lyric essay. There’s a really detailed intertextual, archival sense in this piece, as it thinks about poetry, language, space, and the world, and I wonder if you could speak to how this poem came about and took shape, in terms of research and the documentative mode it engages with?
FG: I had this struggle of wanting to put so much research in the poem that I was digging up on the British Raj and how they ruled over India, and their goals and history. I ended up only putting in a small fraction, because I didn’t want the poem to be too research heavy. I wanted it to be digestible while being able to bring in different topics. It ended up being sort of like an essay, but I also wanted to break up the research by using areas that felt more like poetry. One topic I wanted to talk about is how there was one tree that had the right to own itself, and that brought into question how we use the law to dictate what has the right to live versus what doesn’t. When I was putting these sections together, I was trying to make sure they logically made sense. I was talking about the right to live, and what it means to live and how your right to live is sort of destroyed by outside forces, like the government and other authorities. I wanted to make sure that the reader was able to consume these chunks of information in a way where they were able to understand one thing after another. That’s when I started threading these different ideas together, and showing them how these ideas were all connected to one thing, the climate crisis. That’s how this came out: a lot of research, a lot of paring down these ideas into something that’s easy to understand. And I wanted to leave a trail of breadcrumbs in the direction that I wanted to go, which is how we ended up with our present climate crisis.
VM: Who are your influences as a poet? Could you speak a bit to how they influenced the poems in this collection?
FG: Solmaz Sharif, whose work taught me how we are still subjects of empire, especially in Customs. I was interested in how poetry is part of that, whether it’s formalized or informal. She taught me through her work how to be brave and talk about things that people maybe don’t want to hear. Aria Aber too, who did something similar, where she was talking about how your personal life is infiltrated by the world, and how foreign policy is still a major part of so many of our lives. Richard Siken, who talked about how art and narrative determines what’s important and what’s represented in the world. Natalie Diaz—I loved her book, Postcolonial Love Poem, and I was really interested by her perspective on water and earth and how we exist among other living creatures in the world. And Daniel Borzutzky; his book The Performance of Being Human, which won the National Book Award for poetry in 2016, made me want to be very brave and explicit when talking about the climate crisis. His work is very explicit when it comes to how people are under the boot of the bank, the state, and other authorities that determine how we live in the world. Those are my main influences, and they showed me what I wanted to focus on and what’s important at this time in relation to the themes I was trying to pursue in the collection.
Farah Ghafoor is an award-winning poet living on the traditional territory of the Anishnabeg, the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. Her work was awarded the E.J. Pratt Medal and Prize in Poetry, longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, is taught in university courses, and published in The Walrus, the Fiddlehead, Room, and elsewhere. Raised in New Brunswick and southern Ontario, Ghafoor now works in Tkaronto (Toronto) as a financial analyst.
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Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in Fiction. Her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, the Brooklyn Rail, Public Books, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.
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