Farzana Doctor talks to Sharon Berg about her debut poetry collection.
1. Review after review of You Still Look The Same states that this is your debut poetry book, but you yourself have said that you’ve written poetry since you were young. You seem to have always set the poetry aside, releasing four novels before this book of poems that focus on your 40s. What convinced you that this was the time to release a book of poetry? If I can ask, why was it this heartache, the one contained in these verses, and not an earlier one?
I think I needed time to feel comfortable releasing this book. My four novels gave me an audience, experience, and confidence to take this leap.
I have written poetry since childhood and have published poems in journals, and while that felt exposing (when the poems were more personal), I could manage that discomfort because it was one poem at a time. A collection is a longer, more intimate piece, and this book is my most personal work to date.
2. You became an activist early on, then studied social work and became a therapist, working in clinical situations before you opened your private practice. I imagine there is bleed-over from your work into your writing, in terms of forming the motivations of believable characters, etc. but I wonder how much bleed-over there is from your writing into your work, especially in terms of this book of poetry. I feel you are so succinct in your emotional storytelling. Does it affect your work with therapy?
Interesting question—I’ve mostly been asked about the other direction of bleed-over (from therapy to writing)! I think one bleed-over has been that I have been using metaphor and imagination much more in my therapy practice, especially when facilitating somatic exploration and when using guided visualization and hypnosis. Perhaps my therapy work has become more intuitive and artistic as a result of my writing life.
3. You have lived through a variety of traumas, from an early age, not only due to immigration to a foreign culture but through various aspects of your own culture, such as female genital mutilation. You have set aside all encouragement to button up about private issues and laid bare in this book your struggle with not only break-ups but online dating, misogyny, sexual orientation… just about everything we could imagine crossing the mind of a thinking woman, without pretending that any of it is part of a character you have created for your novel. Your bravery is unimaginable to some folk. Can you comment on the importance of speaking so openly?
My activism around female genital cutting has emphasized the need to break silences in order to change and heal from harmful social norms. I credit the activists who came before me for empowering me to do this.
I really believe that if we are able to speak openly (and we do need to discern our bandwidth and safety before doing this) it can be both personally and politically liberating.
There are so many taboos in our society, many of them stemming from patriarchal shaming, control, and violence, including the list you mentioned. The more we open up these conversations, the more we cut through the shame. This has been a through-line in all my work, including in my novels.
4. What themes and inquiries are you pursuing in this collection?
Each section begins with a tongue-in-cheek “Therapy Homework” question that is answered by a haiku. There are four of these questions, relating to the overlapping themes of loss, self-searching, trauma, and healing.
5. What central inquiry or question unifies the collection?
This is always a tough question to answer, but when I was trying to come up with some marketing copy, I wrote “How did you survive your forties?”, and this sums it up for me! This decade kicked my butt emotionally and poetry helped me make sense of it.
6. Was there a specific incident or experience or series of events that inspired this work? What was the development process for the inspiration to become this newest collection?
A few years ago, I received a Chalmers Grant for professional development in which I received mentorship from Sonnet L’Abbé. We studied ten BIPOC poetry collections and talked about form and content. This was my first real poetry education since high school, and it inspired new poems and nudged me to bring together my (mostly) unpublished poems. Sonnet read early drafts of some of the poems in this collection and offered me feedback on how to improve them.
7. What books were you reading when you wrote this? Are there any books that you had to keep visiting for inspiration when writing this book?
As I mentioned earlier, Sonnet and I read ten poetry collections together as a way to explore form. Some of my favourites included Even this Page is White by Vivek Shraya, Fester by Rita Wong, Witness, I am by Gregory Scofield, Tell by Soraya Peerbaye, Citizen by Claudia Rankine. These collections inspired me to play and experiment more than I had been doing before. All of these collections address issues of identity, colonization and race, and so studying also them helped me clarify some of my content.
8. How did you arrive at the title? What was your intention for the title to do?
The process for finding titles is kind of a dreamy one, and one of my favourite parts of the process! I look for a compelling word or phrase from the work to pop out. In this case, I chose You Still Look The Same, which is the title of a poem about a childhood friendship and bullying. The poem is also about memory, and how each of us remembers traumatic or difficult moments differently. I like the way the title/phrase has multiple meanings about how we see, our perceptions of change, and our appearances. The friend to whom I dedicated that poem died a couple of years ago, shortly after I wrote it, and so it holds special meaning for me.
9. Other than finding the most effective way of reaching a version of ‘truth’, were you conscious of any particular literary ambitions e.g., developing a distinctive voice or a narrative style or disrupting standard reader expectations of the genre?
I very much felt like a student as I worked on this collection. One literary ambition was to keep learning, to move out of my comfort zone. I worked on editing a lot! I also fussed about structure, order, and flow. I asked for feedback from many people, including poet friends and editors.
I want to keep growing as a writer, to explore other forms. I recently completed a YA novel and self-care manual, and I’m now working on a memoir. It’s both intimating and stimulating to shift genres.
10. Are there any aspects of the book you would like to change /tinker with?
Like most writers, I always want to tinker with a book after it’s in print; it’s hard to stop editing! One change I wish I’d made was to retitle the first poem in the first section. Currently, it’s titled “Blame it on childhood 1”. It’s mostly a list poem, and the list includes the themes that follow in the collection, and I’ve noticed most readers have missed this intention. So, I’d want to retitle it “Blame it on childhood 1: an alternate table of contents”.
Farzana Doctor is a Toronto-based author, activist and a Registered Social Worker Psychotherapist. She has published four critically acclaimed novels, including Seven, which Ms. Magazine described as “fully feminist and ambitiously bold”, and was shortlisted for the Trillium and Evergreen Awards. Her new poetry collection, You Still Look The Same, which Quill & Quire has called “a powerful and necessary collection that breaks silences” was just released in May 2022.