“What We Lose is Synonymous with Death”: A Conversation with Farah Ghafoor
Industry is everywhere in Farah Ghafoor’s debut collection Shadow Price. Framed by economic terms, Ghafoor wanders through time, across nature, and toward the poet’s desk to contemplate a life crushed under various devastations—capitalism, climate change, empire, and the intersections of all three.
The most striking motif in Shadow Price to explore these devastations, to me, is the car. In the title poem, Ghafoor writes: “I don’t like to drive. I don’t like the smell of oil. I imagine getting high off of it. I have never smoked anything. I’m risk averse, you see, and so, afraid of everything.” As the poem leads us through the crude estimates of calculating the value of a life, I consider what leads us to the car—the false promise of the American dream that makes migrant autoworkers, the imperialistic violence that ravages nations for their oil, this product in itself a recursive violence that pollutes our airs.
Ghafoor joins me over Zoom, exhausted from book promo. When we speak, the collection has been out for just a few weeks; it is still in the early stages of forming a life outside of the poet’s hands. In our conversation, the poet says she found value in the term “shadow price” because it collapsed her interests—theorizing about bodies under capitalism, the way different environments alter the value of those lives—and became a way to consider risk alongside climate change. Like the titular term, anxiety is another uniting motif: climate anxiety, the well-being of the speaker and those around them, as it palpably threads itself through each section. It makes sense, then, that the car appears throughout the collection as both a metaphorical and literal vehicle to carry the realizations that come with the shadow price.
The final section, “The Garden,” returns our attention to landscapes. Each poem with a beautiful, attentive eye to what we may take for granted: larvae, a firefly, a pear. There is a devotional affection, but still a bleak awareness—the section has an impressive build toward the poem “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,” named after the Ghibli film in which Nausicaä is a fierce defender of nature against apocalyptic, fascist forces, to remind us of ecopoetry’s teeth. Again, in the car, she writes: “At this velocity, a mistake would be fatal, so I say aloud, / perhaps to myself, perhaps to anyone listening, / Don’t worry, we will make it there. We’ll make it home.”
Summer Farah: The book opens with the definition of the term “shadow price”: “the estimated price of a good or service for which no market price exists.” This was a phrase I was unfamiliar with before reading your book. Could you tell me about the first time you encountered that term, and your relationship to it that led to giving the book its name?
Farah Ghafoor: I was taking an economics course called the “Economics of Healthcare,” and one of the terms I learned was “shadow price.” I don't even remember the rest of the course, honestly, I just remember this one term. How would we calculate how a dangerous job would impact co-insurance and related economic aspects? If [a worker] operated heavy equipment—factors like, how many people have died doing that job? Once you extrapolated that value, and you looked at how it would impact multiple lives, you would be able to calculate how much a life would be worth, in economic terms. I was very interested in how money and labor impact our daily lives and really connect to how we live and what we prioritize. That term pulled everything that I was interested in together. I don't even know where my writing would be or where the book would be if I didn't.
Summer Farah: Shadow Price has a repeated refrain of “risk aversion.” I’m interested in the concept of “risk,” and how it pertains both to poetry and your relationship to work. I’m thinking about both formal choices, content choices, but also how we move within the literary world, and “risk” in terms of economics—in the context of the Canadian literary world, actions against the Giller Prize, and the Indigo boycott, are examples of poets engaging in “risk” to what some may say is their “livelihood”; as you write through risk, from what angles are you considering it?
Farah Ghafoor: That's such a good question. I think there's only so much we can risk within poetry—within written poetry, not exactly the poetry community—there's only so much you can do on the page. I think there's always going to be a risk when you're writing what's deemed to be political work. I know that people have lost opportunities after protesting and after speaking up about Palestine. There’s always going to be a risk when you're speaking your truth and speaking the truth about the world. But I think that's also a necessary part of being a poet. In my [formal] practice, I don't think I'm very risky at all—my priority is accessibility, how I communicate in the tone and in my word choice. I do think it's a bit of a risk bringing any economic terms, because there's an immediate aversion to work that's about money or topics that are considered non-poetic. But that's honestly the only thing that I'm interested in. There's no reward without risk.
I think there's always going to be a risk when you're writing what's deemed to be political work. I know that people have lost opportunities after protesting and after speaking up about Palestine. There’s always going to be a risk when you're speaking your truth and speaking the truth about the world. But I think that's also a necessary part of being a poet.
SF: With prioritizing accessibility in your work, do you think that your voice developed with that in mind? What kind of audience do you imagine reaching?
FG: Honestly, maybe this isn't a good strategy, but I'm trying to reach all audiences. I tried to do that by varying the types of work that I have in the book. I know that some of these poems are more simple than others; there are poems that are for poets, and poems that feel like they're more for a general audience. I’m trying to give a selection to everyone so they can find at least a few poems they like and really understand. As people rely more on AI, and they're not really willing to think about more complex topics inside and outside of poetry, it's important to keep a level of complexity in some poems. I don't think we should give up rigour altogether, even though our audience is changing.
SF: Yeah, I agree with that. It's fun to have a challenge or a puzzle, to not understand something the first time you read it. I think it's how you build a relationship with a poem.
FG: Yeah, absolutely. It feels like a reward at the end of the poem when you really get something that you initially did not get. Like sometimes I have to read poems over and over again before I get them, and I think that's something that people have to understand. They have to be a little patient with them. The best things in life are a little bit hard.
SF: I love that last section, especially the poem “Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind.” Can you tell me more about the approach to organizing the book?
FG: [“The Garden”] was inspired by my anxieties around climate change, more inspired by my earlier environmentalist approach. A big inspiration was Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing. I was interested in how she encourages people to really pay attention to everything that lives within their immediate biosphere—like, learning the birds' names and what plants live in your area. We live alongside all these living creatures—it's important to understand that we are part of something larger. [I focused on the “Time” section] after I read Andri Snær Magnason’s Time and Water; when I was trying to quell my anxieties about climate change, he was able to frame it in a way that focuses on tangible things.
[S]ometimes I have to read poems over and over again before I get them, and I think that's something that people have to understand. They have to be a little patient with them. The best things in life are a little bit hard.
SF: I found the “Last Poet In The World” section especially interesting, in that there's a visual separation with the epigraph from Marguerite Duras (“Very early in my life it was too late”). In the notes, you mentioned the poem is inspired by Solmaz Sharif, at least partially. The section that poem leads into reminds me, at least structurally, of the middle section in Customs, “Without Which.”
FG: With [“Last Poet in the World”], I was interested in how we place ourselves in greater society as poets. I found that when I wanted to approach the internal world of the poet, I had already actually been writing those fragments, thinking continuously about the role of the poet, as inspired by Solmaz. I came upon the Marguerite Duras quote later on—it really framed that sense of devastation that I wanted to introduce to the reader before letting them into the internal world of the poet.
SF: There is a preoccupation with death throughout the book, either of the speakers’ deaths, or imagining another’s death. I'm interested in where that inclination comes from. You spoke a lot about different anxieties, and I wonder if this is another one.
FG: When I was writing the “Time” section, I felt like the world was ending. I literally felt like the world was going to end by 2030 and I was just like, “Okay, we're all going to die. So what's the point of me completing my education?” I couldn't sleep, and I was just anxious all the time about the future and how dangerous it is to live now and how dangerous it's going to be very soon. I still have that anxiety—you know, the next climate target that a lot of countries have is 2035 and that’s 10 years from now, so that's a very close deadline. A lot of this preoccupation with death comes from this lingering sense of climate anxiety and the disappearance of species everywhere, but also our homes and our cities and the places that we love. What we lose is synonymous, for me, with death. Throughout our lives, we're just going to keep losing as much as we gain.
I think the role of the poet is, at least within their work, to talk about what we deem unpoetic. I'm interested in poetry that talks about the way we live, in terms of how we spend our time, what we spend our money on, how we live under different systems.
SF: What are your mentor texts? Are there other poets who write about economics? Your work was the first time I'd seen these concepts explicated in this frame.
FG: The poet who made me want to explore economics was Daniel Borzutzky. His work is incredibly interesting. It's very explicit with the way it talks about torture and death. He writes about the ways that our lives are influenced by banks, the state, using economic and business vocabulary. His work was inspiring to me—even his titles paved the way for me to explore this interest. You can tell that he doesn't care about how people are feeling about the vocabulary that he uses. Some of his poems are very hard to read because they're very explicit, as I said, with torture and bodily fluids and how people hurt each other. He also talks about the role of the poet in his work—seeing him just talk about the truth in a way that might not be digestible for everybody made me care a little less about writing what people want me to write.
SF: That's super cool, I've never heard of his work.
FG: He won the National Book Award for The Performance of Becoming Human in 2016. I remember reading that title and I was just like, I have to read this, because that's so interesting.
SF: We’ve talked a little bit about the role of the poet in an abstract sense, but I wonder how that calls to you in a grounded way.
FG: I think the role of the poet is, at least within their work, to talk about what we deem unpoetic. I'm interested in poetry that talks about the way we live, in terms of how we spend our time, what we spend our money on, how we live under different systems. To show people that there might be alternative ways of living, if we really pay attention.
