As Vital as Salt: A Conversation with Jessica Sequeira
(Interviewed by Cameron Finch)
Image Credit: The Lost Balloon, William Holbrook Beard, 1882
Cameron: I’m so happy A Luminous History of the Palm is alive in the world! Can you talk about the process of pulling this unique collection together? Did it emerge at once, in a flash of illumination, or was it an accumulation over time? How did the pieces fall into place?
Jessica: I think of the cover of the Keith Jarrett album Radiance, that could be puddles in tire tracks or a cascade of diamonds. At least that’s how I saw it, all at once. Luminosity has something to do with the moment accumulation becomes revelation. When the shards fit together as an image. That point doesn’t come from nowhere. Concept turns to inspiration, and back to concept. There’s an element of cyclicality to it, which requires time and patience. My process is often that a starting idea, in this case, anecdotes organized around the image of the palm tree, folds into creative disorder—an openness that fundamentally changes things—before this is edited back into form. A Luminous History was written in this way, more or less...
C: How do you wish for readers to respond to the book? What kind of conversations do you want the world to have with you, with luminosity, with palms?
J: It would be interesting to think about how the small is connected to, and illuminated by, the large, and vice versa. And how to move between levels of experience. Luminosity is present in personal and universal history. It also is present across art forms. I think of the Sephardic Jewish tradition where a texture of fabric, bit of gold filigree, painted twig, strike of the tambourine, song lyric or dance step is never alone, but connected to the whole. The luminous glow in each individual element has to do with its sense of belonging. Idiosyncrasy finds its dignity and respect through recognition in a lifeworld of people and nature.
C: “A luminous history seeks to make connections beyond the surface level of great events and statistical data. To do so it takes a symbol, any symbol, as a seed to create anecdotes. The luminous begins from the small and everyday, the particular and peculiar.” What was your first introduction to luminous history? Had you read other luminous histories before? How did you know that luminous associations were what you were longing for, and why?
J: Probably this idea traces subconsciously to lyric poetry, which I love, write and translate. Gabriela Mistral, Stella Díaz Varín, Jorge Teillier and many others are invisibly present in this book. A Luminous History of the Palm takes up the idea of selfhood in a very oblique or lateral way, where the minimal idea of the palm produced anecdotes from different voices and periods of time. I didn’t want to write as “Jessica Sequeira”. As far as historians go, Carlo Ginzburg with his microhistory is an influence, though perhaps I saw this only in retrospect. Art, for me, is premonitory: it always realizes things before the conscious mind does. As Madame Blavatsky puts it: “It is not I who talk and write: it is something within me, my higher and luminous Self. Do not ask me, my friend, what I experience, because I could not explain it to you clearly. I do not know!”
C: What brought you to inhabit the particular voices and bodies of your speakers who we meet across lands and time? In this book, a character’s profession is integral, not a background detail, to our understanding of who they are, how they navigate their lives, and how they relate to the palm. In fact, we know the voices not by their prescribed name; they are utterly known to us as their job title and their location on Earth. We meet a healer (Yemen), an apostle (Judea), a rice farmer (Thailand), a chef (Lebanon), a wrestler (China), a plastic surgeon (Australia), and a train driver (South Africa), to name a few. Did you make a list? Why did you choose to highlight the particular jobs of your characters, and how did these various lifestyles offer insight into the characters’ place in the history you’ve curated?
J: Imagining different personalities, livelihoods, periods of time and places was part of the fun of writing this book. I did make a list of possible jobs, which kept changing as I went along. It’s fascinating how an activity and a place can evoke a whole world. Both are, to some extent, arbitrary and speak to the utter flexibility of the human being. A point of view can change so much based on where one is, the language one is speaking, the culture, and the resources that are available. To translate between realities perhaps gives a sense of personality not as essence, but as something more akin to Tarot cards, where the image matters less than the way it’s interpreted and how it finds itself in the larger system of relations. I shuffled and reshuffled the elements of this book so many times, in search of a kind of poetic order, but it could have taken any number of forms. Emotions might be universal, but the way they’re expressed and the direction they’re channelled is so easily altered.
C: Will you take us through your favorite vignette from A Luminous History of the Palm? How did it come together? Where did you draw inspiration from? Why is it your favorite?
J: One of the vignettes is about an Egyptian pianist. He’s a composer, a pianist who is tired, who has heartburn and issues with the bottle, who’s had to put in a lot of elbow grease. He rejects the idea of inspiration, and claims to put more faith in coffee and hard work. It’s all a bit ironic though. Shot through his discourse, there’s a kind of faith, hidden but manifest, in the very joy and golden light he’s criticizing. There are some Coptic elements to all of this. The process of artistic composition, particularly in music, has always interested me, and in this case that process seems to parallel the approach to the divine, despite the cynicism of the narrator. What he points to is how the divine is present in the human and the sensual world, imperfect as they are: “The innermost emotions, the pulsing spirit, the ancient rhythm in my songs does not come from any shining rays sent by Saint Anthony or Pachomius, any whirling skirts that whip up intense emotions in the crowd, any illumination from the kohl-lined eyes of a single night’s companion. Rather, I find my satisfaction in a good breakfast.”
C: Do you live with a palm now? Is there a particular palm type that you feel a kinship with? Perhaps you resemble each other in terms of growth or appearance or behavior?
J: Santiago, where I wrote this book, is full of palm trees, in the city and in its poetry. That’s probably what gave me the idea for the book at all. So yes, I’d have to say the Jubaea chilensis. In my place at the moment, I don’t have a palm, but I do have some ferns and flowers. It’s good to live with a bit of nature. I also like the palms on the southwest coast of India, by the Arabian Sea, where coconut goes into all the food as a basic ingredient, as vital as salt. That’s the Borassus flabellifer, I think. It’s a bit skinnier and spikier than the Chilean palm, and thrives in a more tropical, less Mediterranean environment. Tagore has a poem about the palm tree “peering at the firmament”, which tosses its head and swishes its fronds, dreaming of the sky but ultimately enjoying its existence on earth. And Mistral has a lovely poem about people who scatter seeds that become palm trees, singing as they do so. I feel a kinship with the cyclicality of all this.
J: I believe in the integrated arts, the combination of forms and approaches in one’s own practice and in arts education. Most of all, music influences me with its rhythms and compositional processes, where emotion can be transformed into songs with or without words. There’s a mathematics to this, but also something much more mysterious and sensible, involving ways of touching the soul through vibrations and sound combinations. Most books I like have a synaesthetic element, where I imagine that structure could be mapped as music or image. I also like to look at the colors and textures of abstract paintings, where the eye always finds a new place to alight.
C: Do any other art forms influence your writing? If so, how?
J: A few things . . . one is an essay about a writer I admire, which will be accompanied by a series of poems I wrote inspired by her ideas, which I’m also setting to music. There are a few other things too, including some collaborations. I won’t say more for now, since everything’s in the furnace!
C: What writing projects are you currently working on?
C: Who is a writer you wish more people were reading? What stories do you dwell in when you’re longing for a soft glow?
J: I turn most often to poems, with their direct condensation of emotional complexity. Right now I’m reading Sephardic Jewish lyrics, the kind sung by medieval troubadours, and the poems of Mariela Malhue. In narrative, I could recommend that more people read Augusto Monterroso, who builds infinite lyric worlds packed into nutshells.
Jessica Sequeira is a writer and literary translator. Her books include the poem collection Golden Jackal / Chacal Dorado, the novel A Furious Oyster, the story collection Rhombus and Oval, the essay collection Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age and the hybrid work A Luminous History of the Palm. She has translated over twenty books by Latin American authors, including Gabriela Mistral, Winétt de Rokha, Teresa Wilms Montt, Daniel Guebel, Osvaldo Lamborghini, Adolfo Couve, Liliana Colanzi, Hilda Mundy and Rocío Ágreda Piérola. In 2019 she was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán by the Society of Authors and longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her translation of Sara Gallardo’s Land of Smoke. She also edits the literary magazine Firmament, published by Sublunary Editions. She has lived in Chile for many years, and recently she completed a PhD at the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge, titled “Other Grounds for Dignity: Ideas from India in the Philosophies of Twentieth-Century Latin American Writers”.