“I often end up feeling that the books we write are, in some ways, waiting to be written long before we are born” | In Conversation with Janice Pariat

By Vidhya Anand

A story of extraordinary ambition and heart, Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches is a novel for the ages. In a conversation that expands across themes of ancestry, writing, and love for the green of this earth, Janice speaks with poetic clarity on all that connects us. 

Image by Pankaj Khanna

It’s a splendidly challenging task attempting to summarise the contents of Everything the Light Touches. Sinful even, because the act of doing so to work like this is by all means reductive. One could call it grand adventure, or poetry that nudges you to step out into the sun, or a recounting of songs and narratives so ancient they feel as sacred as the cosmos itself. This is a story that pans across continents and centuries through many travelers on unique journeys. Journeys that at first seem disconnected from each other in space and time, only to later discover that all is connection.

I had picked up Everything the Light Touches after letting it stare at me from my bookshelf for months at the peak of winter in Northern America. To read of luscious green forests and the wettest place on earth from that terrain, during the coldest days of the year is an unfathomable joy for the senses. Just as I was finishing Goethe’s first parts of the story, where he travels and is often found nose-deep in his botanical writings, a dear friend of mine invited me to a book fair. So, we stepped out in layers and headed to a warehouse where the fair was being held in the middle of nowhere. I began walking through what seemed like the oldest of book aisles, and in a tiny corner named, “Vintages and Collectibles,” a singular, giant book sat jutting out from the rest of the shelf, as if to say, “Hello, come say hi.” So I did, walking closer to it, squinting my eyes to read the title. “Goethe,” read the title, in a bright mustard yellow font, “The Story of a Man.” 

Cut to about a week later, and I’m still reading the book. The parts with characters Evie and Shai with their adventures in the Meghalayan landscape have been unfolding, and at this point, I’m positively thrilled about ideas of forest spirits, 100-year-old root bridges, and what it means to leave something behind when you take something from the forest. At the time, my dearest aunt, who we all know loves spontaneous traveling, riding her bike to different parts of the country had somehow not been responsive on the family WhatsApp group. A curious thing, but nothing out of the ordinary. A couple of days pass, and she finally reaches out again. We jump on a call, and she says, “Do you know where I’ve been all week?” Excited to hear about her travels, I ask, “Where?!”  “Cherrapunjee,” she says and goes on to talk about ideas of forest spirits, how they protect the land, and how she walked on 100-year old root bridges and ate fresh fruit. 

All I knew, in finishing this wondrous work and doing this interview with Janice a few weeks later, was the truth of the fact that all is indeed connection, and while I may have at first started reading the words written by someone I’ve never met, a stranger if you will, at a time that had me experience profound synchronicity, there is nothing stranger-like about Janice at all—she is kind, familiar and a writer full of heart. 

I often end up feeling that the books we write are in some ways there waiting to be written long before we are born. And the books we write begin a very, very long time ago. Not just in our own life histories, but in the histories of the people who come before us, our ancestors and the life that they led.

Where did the idea of Everything the Light Touches come from? It’s an ambitious narrative.
I always find questions like this a little bit difficult to answer, not because you know, ‘Oh, how do you narrativize the process of writing a book,’ but I often end up feeling that the books we write are in some ways there waiting to be written long before we are born. And the books we write begin a very, very long time ago. Not just in our own life histories, but in the histories of the people who come before us, our ancestors and the life that they led. The historical forces that shaped them, where they ended up, and who they were. So, it feels just like the book in some ways, like this very, very geological and very vast sweep that comes together in some alignment to have you write the book that you write. So, for me,  I would say, Everything the Light Touches wasn’t really just born in the ten years past when I was working on the book, doing all the research, doing all the writing - but that it was there a long time before me, and perhaps it pressed upon my life in the way that it did because I always felt uncomfortable with categories. 

Image by Samuel Sawian

Especially in terms of who I am and where I'm from and because I'm such a child of colonialism, and that really comes from everywhere, from a mixed heritage that I've often felt, that all the categories we have that are meant to tell you who you are and where you're from have never been enough. Never been enough to accommodate me, my siblings, or my family and the kind of extensive ancestry that we've had. So I think the impulse to write the book really did stem from that. Because the book is really about questioning our proclivities to box and label and categorise everything very neatly, and all of my fiction in some way has been an attempt to question that impulse. But Everything the Light Touches is one that does it most blatantly and most obviously. So that's the long answer (laughs).

I love it. I really do, because I almost had this ache for Shai and Evie to maybe touch the same object, walk on the ground that Evie has walked on, there’s so much beauty in that. It makes readers think about their ancestral lineage—where we come from.

Yes! Where do you come from. In the book, all of them are—chronologically Carl, Goethe, and Evie are ancestors to each other and Shai eventually. Because, of course, the other impulse of the book is also to throw up a connection to, say, Carl Linnaeus, on his little expedition in Lapland, is as connected to all of the things we are fighting for today in terms of environment and ecology all across the globe. So, it's a hope that we will, as readers and as people, tend to see more expansively to accommodate these vast perspectives so we actually understand how deeply contextual everything is. Perhaps the only way forward, for lack of a better term, is to recognize these deep histories in these deep contexts. 

I'd like to segue into that before we come back to the story because it is horrible when trees are cut down, as a deep sense of "Are we forgetting who we are?" We are part of this planet, and to recognize that so much of our being and so much of the patterns we have at a cellular level is deeply connected to everything out there. I think that's the deeper sense of the book too, something it doesn't blatantly speak about because when you take Shai's father sitting under trees to protect them, it reminds me of my grandmother, it reminds me of how she feels. She comes from a family of farmers, and when I take her on a drive, even today, she can recognize every plant and every tree there is that I know most people in the city wouldn't recognize. Where did we lose that? I'm guessing that's part of the theme of the book too.

Very much. Very, very much. In fact, it's the Shai narrative, really. The narrative that cradles all of the other narratives offers this kind of encouragement to really think deeply. And to think deeply and to think with deep context is to come to this recognition that we are so minutely and intricately connected. And you know, it bewilders me that we forget this so often and so easily. But that's exactly it! I mean the closing of the Shai narrative—not to give too much away from the book for anyone else—but the closing of the Shai narrative is that kind of call to recognize exactly this. We are in the moment of the first inception of the universe.

It's wondrous and gives me goosebumps thinking about it. How else do you explain why we feel calm in the middle of a forest? I have to ask, do I see a little of you in Shai and Evie, or other ancestors in them?

I think in some ways, there's always a little bit of the writer in all of the characters that they create. Simply because they come from you. They are part of your DNA in that way. So even the characters that seem farthest from you, so unlike you, carry something of you in them. I'll come to Shai and Evie, but I'm just going to speak about one of the characters who doesn't seem to have much of a connection to me as a person or a writer at all. For example, Carl Linneaus who sits at the centre of this book as this smug 25 year old, this mister-know-it-all out to kind of organise the world and you know do good things for himself and for science. And, I set out on my journey with him thinking, ‘Ugh, I'm going to loathe this man,’ this mansplainer, this really smug, really annoying, you know, old white man, and I'm going to dislike him. But, as I spent more time with him, his journals especially, his travel journals, I realised, oh my God this annoying man has this infinite love for the great outdoors, for nature, for the living world. In his own way, of course, because he sees it as something that needs to be labeled, something that needs to be categorised. But I couldn't help but share this wonder and awe with him. That complicated the man for me. That complicated the character for me. Goethe, for example, constantly feels, 'Why does no one take me seriously as a scientist? Everyone is talking about how wonderful a poet and playwright I am, and yes, yes, I am! But I'm also deeply interested in the living world, and why must one person be only one thing. Why can't we acknowledge that we are many things and we exist in multitudes and how diminished we are if we are only one thing.' So, for me, that resonated so much because, you know, we are often told one thing, and why can't we be more.

Come to Shai and Evie, of course Evie shares my love of adventure and travel, and the need to live an unruly life, a life that regards the things she doesn't feel are important that have been placed on her in terms of expectations, who she should be as a woman, and she's so eager to carve her own path and head out on her own journey. And Shai, of course for obvious reasons echoes most obviously with me and my journey of being someone from the North East, lived elsewhere, who has had to make that journey, back and forth. Home and away again, so so many times. But, Shai and Evie are also surrounded by characters who are significant women figures. You know, Grandma Grace or Shai's nanny Oin. They are characters who are very much drawn from women I've known. And women whom I've had the privilege to have in my life. So in that way  of course, they come more to life because of the women I've known and loved in my life.

That is so beautiful. Because, sometimes, when my grandma picks a plant, I can't google or find the name of. She just intuitively knows. She's not seen much of the world, but there's this deep sense of knowing. What a seed stands for, what it would grow into.

Yes! And you know this kind of knowing is as important, and as rigorous as anything that's done in a scientific laboratory. And this is the clash right, the clash of these different worlds of knowledge. Colonial knowledge and local, traditional and indigenous knowledge. And how colonial knowledge which comes from the west from an exceedingly euro-centric space has sort of smothered indigenous, localised knowledge—but it stands on its own ground. It has its own way of knowing, its own way of seeing. Its own rigour. Its own methodology. So I completely get what you're saying. Your grandmum may not be educated in the western-scientific sense of the word. But she is deeply,  deeply educated in the ways of the world of where she comes from and the earth that she stands on.

Yes, and it’s memory right? Because imagine the amount of accumulated memory that comes from generation after generation. 
So true. It’s tactile knowledge, you know. 

And life is like that, isn't it? We impose these neat narratives onto life. But life doesn't offer up neat narratives as often. It has its own direction, it goes its own way and what we try and do as humans is to impose some kind of order, some kind of narrative so that it makes sense to us. But I very much wanted for these stories to feel as though they go on beyond the pages and that they live on in your life. And in their own story worlds as well. 

It really is. There's something about reading a book like Everything the Light Touches from another land too. I do say, another land, because this is my home. Because I feel a sense of home here, and we are home everywhere, but it's almost like your recognition of the land. One thing I noticed in the book, and I think it's so intelligent—I could have entirely imagined this—while the details of the story itself make us question our approach to life, stories, people, and whatnot, I noticed even in the way you have expressed characters, their conflicts, and denouements too - we're not going to find exact resolutions for them, because we're not doing that. That sense of how Shai's story turns out, the mythological narratives, and the songs they sing, there are so many variations to the same story, and I believe that was intentional, right? It's up to the reader; it's up for interpretation.

Very much, absolutely. I mean, even the narrative that's narrated most closely to an adventure quest trying to find this mythological plant, it's presented in some ways as a quest. And you know, a quest narrative usually ends with the thing that is being sought being found. And it was not the point for Evie's narrative. For Evie's narrative, it was for us to—I mean many things, of course, and I won't dictate what those things should be, but I hoped it might allow readers to think of what they might do in her position, what is worth to them leaving everything behind. What does knowledge of this kind do? Does knowledge actually, you know true knowledge, deep knowledge does it not change you in a way that actually, you can never go back to being who you were, no matter what. In some ways, learning something about the world and about yourself and that kind of knowledge always requires you to leave yourself behind. It always requires that kind of renewal, that kind of transformation. And with Shai as well, you know, most of the characters as you've noticed—apart from Linneaus of course (laughs), who heads straight home—were left perched and suspended at a moment in time. And life is like that, isn't it? We impose these neat narratives onto life. But life doesn't offer up neat narratives as often. It has its own direction, it goes its own way and what we try and do as humans is to impose some kind of order, some kind of narrative so that it makes sense to us. But I very much wanted for these stories to feel as though they go on beyond the pages and that they live on in your life. And in their own story worlds as well. 

Yes, absolutely, because there here is a sense of subversion, too. You’re on a quest, and you don’t get a direct answer. Narratives, like that of HBO’s Succession or even Frank Herbert’s Dune, I love how you’re almost tied to this idea that well, I need to know who the saviour is, I need to know what this ancestral mythological plant is and to be put in that place, it really makes you question who you are as a human being and if you have this—if you have it in you to take life as it comes, to be there, take it, and to just be, you know.

Yes! And sometimes to live with that not knowing.

Exactly! And that in itself is living right. To be graceful in doing that.

Oh. So wise, Vidhya. 

It took me a few weeks to make that connection with the book mulling over in my head, and I would go, ‘Oh, that’s what happened!’ With the book, how long did it take to do all of this research?

It took almost 10 years. To be very honest, it was more the thinking about the book and doing the research for the book, because I am no science student. I have done arts and humanities all my life. So, really, it was a lot of research, and a lot of research very much from the bottom up. I would sit with sort of beginner’s botany for weeks on end and, you know, really start from scratch as a science student because in order to critique the way science is done and the way knowledge is produced in our world today, I had to know how it is done, to begin with, and know it well. So, the research, the thinking, and the gathering of resources took much, much longer than the actual writing. By the time I got to the writing, it happened a little quicker. Only because, in some ways, there were things already in place, and I knew or at least had a sense of direction I wanted to go in. But yes, almost 10 years. 

I think it’s so important to acknowledge that writing, unlike what the West usually portrays it to be as this lonely activity, up in your little ivory tower, writing is so collaborative in nature.

Image by Pankaj Khanna

I came across this quote the other day, and I wish I remembered from where, but it spoke to the idea of how nature takes time to do the things it wants to, but in the end everything is accomplished.

Yes, there you go.

To be very honest, I know that it sounds like 10 years, and I did this on my own, and that is so far from the truth. I think it’s so important to acknowledge that writing, unlike what the West usually portrays it to be as this lonely activity, up in your little ivory tower, writing is so collaborative in nature. I had so much help along the way, from friends who would send me books, to little links to articles, to friends who would just converse with me about the book—oh my god, this was a long time to be talking about one project, how are you still friends with me! And other writers and academics, and at the end of it all, we had a decent draft, and we sent it to a botanist to read because we wanted to make sure all of the scientific detail was as accurate as possible. This particular botanist, Henry Noltie, was so thorough and so rigorous. So, I say ten years, but it was also ten years, not just of me working alone somewhere but it’s with so much help and so much collaboration.

So much soul that’s gone into making this.

(Laughs) Lots of love, from a lot of people.

There’s an incredible sense of ambition in the narrative. What stood out to me reading this is that you’re moving from character to character, different time to a different time, across centuries, and the language comes through to suit that time and that character.

And that is so much because I had an incredible editor as well at the language level—Rahul Soni. First of all, an incredible editor, but at the language level, where you’re thinking about how would this character speak in this period being that kind of character right? So, Evie is Edwardian. As much as I trolled through Edwardian women’s diaries and letters, you need that kind of external eye to say, this is what works better. For example, it may not even be something anybody notices, but if you look at Evie’s narrative, there are hardly any bringing together two words. For example, ‘It’s’ will always be ‘It is’

That reminds me of one of my American co-workers who would suggest something similar.

They would get along famously with my editor! I think it made a huge difference. Because language is at that cellular level, and you often might not even notice, but something registers, that it is something different to our contemporary way of speaking.

Especially between Evie and Shai. There’s a bit of Indian connotation with Shai, which is very different from how Evie speaks. Let’s talk about Goethe. How was it writing his perspective? Also, a male perspective.

Goethe and Linneaus were hard, probably for obvious reasons. I mean, here was I, some brown woman writer from some corner of the world, writing these larger-than-life male European figures who tower in their own sort of nation’s history, but also in European and world history. Linnaeus is the father of taxonomy, and Goethe is almost synonymous with anything German in those days. So it was very intimidating, to say the least. So even though I had access to a lot of their letters, journals, and writings, in some, I had easy access to them; they were men (laughs); there’s lots written about them, right? They were very, very famous, and there’s all of this literature on them, so accessing them was not difficult, but to write them and make them my own felt like it was the most incredibly difficult task. I kept asking myself, ‘Who am I to do this?’ 

We tell ourselves these little stories. I’m no one to do this. I shouldn’t be doing this. I don’t have the right to, and then you know, somehow, you work your way out of that. What really helped me, especially with Goethe, was to read about him as a character in other books and other works of fiction. For example, Milan Kundera’s Immortality— Goethe features as a character, and what helped was that he was often this really grouchy, sort of slightly ridiculed kind of character in the most endearing way. You know they didn’t do it sort of just for a laugh. It kind of humanised him. It made me feel like he is just a person. A man who you know is certain about many things, because men come with their own set of certainties usually. And you have to acknowledge that and write that into the character. But they also come with their own frailties. That is as important to acknowledge. Especially if I want to write this character into my book and make him my own, it was about acknowledging those things, but also feeling bold enough to be a little irreverent. And to just laugh a little at him and to kind of make him crawl around on all fours in some park looking at daffodils. So, he’s a little bit silly, a little bit obsessive and a little bit pompous, he’s all of these things, but I hope also you know that the reader’s able to see his vulnerabilities, his loyalties, and his immense love for this place, this city that he would so desperately would love to call home. 

Image by Samuel Sawian

But we've always been a species on the move. We've always loved our epic adventures and walks into the forest. 

How do you feel at home with your voice as a writer? 

I think it's a process that's ongoing. I think there are moments, fleeting as they might be, feeling like you've really come into your own and you feel that the story you're trying to tell is shining in a way that you hadn't ever imagined it before. You feel that the words in the page are truly, truly yours or that you are exactly where you need to be at that particular moment in your life as a person, as a writer. I think you come into these moments, and you also move out of these moments, I think that's the negotiation that is ongoing for all of us in some ways, all the time. So we are always journeying in and out of these moments. So I can't say with any certainty I've arrived at a place or that I feel completely myself as a person, a writer, a woman writer. I don't know if that will ever actually happen. I think the best that we can hope for is to inhabit those moments of being, and being yourself wholly. In whichever way that is meaningful. And you also move out of those moments into insecurity, anxiety, and a bit of precariousness, and to know to have the resilience, the strength, and the tools with which to work through that, so that you find your way back into those moments of light, once again. 

What are you thoughts on journeys, the constant returning and constant leaving? 

We've always been on the move. It's much faster now. You can get around the globe in a day, perhaps. It might have been slower a few centuries ago. But we've always been a species on the move. We've always loved our epic adventures and walks into the forest.