Q&A with Jazmina Barrera, author of ON LIGHTHOUSES
Jazmina Barrera’s first book to be translated into English by Christina MacSweeney, On Lighthouses, is an investigation into the nature of isolation, writing, and collecting. Interweaving personal memoir, literary history, and travel writing, each essay offers a wonderfully bizarre and erudite microhistory of a lighthouse alongside a singular look at its place in the author’s inner life. The following is an exchange between Jazmina Barrera and Katharine Smyth, author of All the Lives We Ever Lived.
Katharine Smyth: On Lighthouses is in many ways a book about collecting, about our desire to be “the conserver of relics.” As a written record of your own lighthouse “collection,” it left me wondering why that urge was so powerful—why are we so wedded to the amassing and cataloguing of certain objects and experiences, do you think?
Jazmina Barrera: There are many fragments in the book that try to address that question from different angles, but even after all of that I don’t think I found an answer. Or what I found was many answers and more questions. In a way, the question of why we accumulate objects and why we document and treasure certain experiences became in itself a topic of obsession. Is it something intrinsic to the psychological traits of certain individuals or to certain cultures or to capitalism or to the human race or to a group of species (there are at least a couple of species of birds that collect ornamental objects to decorate their nests)? I still don’t know.
KS: On Lighthouses is also a book about solitude and isolation, which makes it an especially valuable companion during this time of social distancing. What lessons can we learn from the lighthouse keeper, do you think, a creature who is often alone for months on end?
JB: Lighthouse keepers are contradictory figures: they are solitary, sometimes even misanthropic, but they also have a humanitarian task at hand, which is saving ships from shipwrecks, tempests and dangerous maritime geography. What we are forced to do today is similar in that sense: in order to take care of each other, right now, we have to isolate ourselves. The keepers sometimes went mad, or became TV addicts, or prolific writers, or encyclopedic readers, or Buddhists. I myself feel like a little bit of all of those right now, minus the Buddhism, unfortunately.
KS: I was totally intrigued by the structure of your book, which not only spans time and space but also blends history, memoir, literary criticism, anthropology, and science. How did you go about putting it together? Were you guided by some kind of organizing principle, a writer’s lighthouse of sorts?
JB: I’m a great admirer of many writers that have worked with fragments in masterful ways, and I think fragments are very versatile literary tools. For this book, for example, I thought of them as if they were objects, and I organized them like I would a collage, a visual montage. I studied the dialogue the fragments had with each other, thinking about affinities, contrast and balance. But I also liked to take advantage of serendipity, and sometimes I preferred the way in which a fragment was placed somewhere out of sheer luck, and kept it there. I also have to admit I was lucky enough to stumble upon a word processor that allows you to work with fragments as if they were Post-its, or attach labels to them, or turn them into an index. I don’t know what I would have done without it —it is called Scrivener and I really recommend it.
KS: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse has long been my favorite novel, so it was fascinating to learn what a large role the lighthouse has played in literary history, from Homer to Poe to Verne to Joyce. Why is this, do you think? Why is the figure of the lighthouse so compelling to artists and writers?
JB: It is also one of my favorite novels! There’s so much to write about lighthouses, whether as symbols, images, architectonic buildings or historical entities. Every lighthouse is a part of the really long history of lighthouses and is also in itself a repository of stories—stories about madness, ghosts, shipwrecks, loneliness, heroes, and technology. They are an endless catalyzer for writing.
KS: In the fourth chapter, you suggest that you might be drawn to lighthouses because you’re disoriented, because you always feel as if you are adrift. What did you learn from writing this book, from putting your obsession—which you call “a form of mental collecting”—into words? Did it serve to moor you in some way, to tether you to land?
JB: I think I could have kept writing On Lighthouses forever. The printing of the book hasn’t made lighthouses less fascinating to me. It hasn’t stopped my hunger for traveling to them, doing research, or even writing about them. Except that I also want to write about other things right now, more than I want to write about lighthouses. That’s the only reason why I stopped writing the book.
KS: I particularly loved the final chapter, “The Tapia Lighthouse,” a travel log—much like the log of a lighthouse keeper—in which you seek to emulate Sir Walter Scott, eschewing revelations and emotion (though they creep in anyway), and recording only what you see, what you experience. Why was it so important to you to keep your own feelings at bay?
JB: It was a struggle, and the book wants to reflect that struggle. I was going through a rough patch while I wrote On Lighthouses, and I tried to explore the urge to escape from those feelings—escape through the travels, through the stories outside myself—and the need to address them. In the book, the introspection is symbolized by the well, and the external exploration is symbolized by the lighthouse. The narrator of the book wants to become a lighthouse, a cold, stone-like source of light, but fails to hide the emptiness, the deep waters of the well.
