Interview
Through Illumination: An Interview with Sueyeun Juliette Lee / Sohini Basak
Image courtesy of Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Korean American artist, activist, and poet Sueyeun Juliette Lee works at the intersection of ecology, art, and social justice. Her first poetry book was published in 2008 and since then she has carved out a niche for herself as someone who shifts the ground as she writes. Bhanu Kapil calls her work ‘a great disturbance’. On her website, Sueyeun Juliette Lee lists her current interests as ‘light, displacement, imaginations of the future, devastation, and movement’. What must be immediately noted is that these interests are not limited to her poetry, but also flow into the work that she does professionally at community-led environmental organizations, her engagement with literary criticism and critical pedagogy as an anti-academia scholar, as well as into her interlinked practices of dance and filmmaking. Lee’s latest book of poems, AERIAL CONCAVE WITHOUT CLOUD (Nightboat Books, March 2022), came into being after she spent the summer of 2014 in Norway engaging deeply with light, but as she writes in the ‘Notes’ sections, she has been a student of light for years, immersed in its historical, scientific, and philosophical understandings, and she explains: ‘I wilfully appropriated primarily from men who are canonical in their fields … I felt that giving my equal weight within their considerations and discoveries re-centres their methods—in my body and history, to open alternative pathways for the human pursuit of knowledge.’ In mid-May, I had the chance to talk to Sueyeun Juliette Lee over Zoom. Here is the condensed and edited interview that took place between Denver and Barrackpore, over an hour, with the same light transmitting, reaching us variously, converging across time zones.
Sohini Basak: Tell us about the origins of this book of poems that came into being after you visited the arctic and sub-arctic regions…
Sueyeun Juliette Lee: I first had the chance to travel to Norway—the sub-arctic, I guess—in the summertime of 2014. I had a close friend pass away very suddenly during childbirth in December of 2013. So part of my journey was to express some of that grief. When I returned, I was continuing to support her surviving children and her widowed husband, I was sort of like an extra auntie, very enmeshed with that family. And as a year mark passed and we rolled into another winter, I started feeling that I need to disentangle myself from that family, as much as it was important for me to support them over those two years. I felt that my friend, who had died, would want me to move on and live my life rather than try to fill a space that was hers formerly. So, it wasn’t something that necessarily inspired me, but there was a strong feeling… almost like a small voice inside myself that said I needed to go to the most isolated, darkest places and find the softest light. Because of my time in the sub-arctic, I was curious, I had an imagination for what the inverse of that experience might be like and I looked at opportunities in that part of the world and got the invitation to spend some time in Iceland. I specifically requested to be there at the wintertime, which my family was very concerned about. During this time, I had gone through a divorce and also terminated a pregnancy, so there was a lot of intensity and pain, and I was also realizing I wanted to leave being in higher-ed as it wasn’t feeling healthy for me anymore. My older brother actually called me to ask me not to go because he was convinced that I would commit suicide, but the only thing I could tell him was that this voice that was calling to me was the voice of life. So, while all those things were kind of congregating, I felt this call: to go to the darkest place to look for the softest light.
Image courtesy of Sueyeun Juliette Lee
SB: I did not know this complete story. I’m so sorry that you had to go through that painful time.
SJL: You know I’m happy talking about it only because it’s part of the truth of how all of us survive. We will inevitably experience grief and pain and bafflement, that’s true to being human. We will suffer. So how we tend to that with each other can be something true for us to congregate around…
SB: Yeah, absolutely. And you have been congregating around these emotions for so long. In the series of essays you wrote for Poetry Foundation in 2017, you talk about how, over the years, the relationship between you, your art, and light, has evolved. And you write that one word that could sort of encapsulate this relationship is ‘resilience’—how light affects your body, your vision, and also how it shapes other parts of your life: for eg, the shift in your career from academia to social justice… I would love for you to talk to us about that deep connection you have with light.
SJL: If there is anything that I feel is the greatest demonstration of life, it is the fact of light. Which is interesting because we don’t experience it as a biological phenomenon, it just seems like an element, something that’s without agency … and yet without it none of us would have any existence. For me, light is so wonderful to meditate upon because it has such inherent contradictions in how we understand and perceive it. At the one hand, it’s incredibly fleeting and ephemeral, it can flicker, it has so many different constitutions and expressions; and then on the other hand, it is the most enduring message across the cosmos that we can receive from the farthest distant objects that in fact no longer have a molecular existence. And so, it has this wonderful duality to it that I just find so rich and resonant with the contradictions and complexities that I feel we navigate. There’s also so much texture to light. Every culture has a tradition of appreciating and venerating and celebrating it and orienting to it. I don't think there's a way for me to feel that I have completed my understanding or exploration of it, and the more I pursue investigating it or musing on it, I think the more it illuminates itself for me. So part of the fact of it—how through the study of these distant light transmissions, we’re able to decipher for the entire story of planet systems far beyond our experience here. So, for me, when it comes to looking at our own world, I find great solace and a resonant ability to connect with these questions that are unfathomable from any other point of view. The idea of trying to understand something as vast and complicated as, say, climate change, I couldn’t have done without having an appreciation for this complexity of light. I observed that the way I even receive information—like right now you and I are communicating via these light screens and there’s something quite magical about that—so, it started with me just observing that the majority of the way I interacted with information was through illumination.
SB: I want to hold on to that thought about receiving information and knowledge via light. In AERIAL CONCAVE WITHOUT CLOUD, you trace the body of knowledge from the earlier centuries, in fact, you start the book by quoting the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, then you refer to the works of various European male polymaths (mostly), like Isaac Newton or R W Ditchburn, who are known for their contributions to the knowledge about light and the cosmos. And in the note, you mention how you’ve ‘wilfully appropriated’ these men to make space for yourself in that knowledge system and very intriguingly, you also acknowledge the ‘poetry of their writing’. Could you talk about the relationship you have with these figures, with this body of ‘Western’ knowledge?
Page from Ariel Concave Without Cloud. "How One Comes to (Not) Know Light" by Sueyeun Juliette Lee, from Aerial Concave Without Cloud (Nightboat Books, 2022). Copyright (c) 2022 by Sueyeun Juliette Lee. Reprinted with permission of Nightboat Books.
SJL: Coming from a very traditional literary education there wasn’t a lot of access I had to women writers, to writers who were not Anglo Western European settlers in the US. That changed as I got older in my studies, but it wasn’t centered at all. Some of that dictated what I, as a young reader, was encouraged to think about as being noteworthy, worthy of interest, and I think that I've done a lot to unlearn some of the things. But it is a tendency within me still to appreciate things that have complexity, a certain quality of rigour that I enjoy. A lot of that was rooted in an early appreciation for the metaphysical writers who influenced how I tend to work, how I compose things—and that is a tension I hold within myself. I find pleasure in these texts in which I am so absolutely not centred or even considered. And at the same time, I think, for me, a little bit about writing this book was about reconciliation, an account for growth, unlearning, decolonizing of certain attitudes and mentalities. I actually am moving through more of a reconciliation process than a rejection, so those things are central to how I emerged as a young thinker and artist. And at this point in my life, I’m not willing to reject them wholesale, I want to find a way to integrate them, in a way that honors what they gave me, but also still points to the gaps and lost opportunities and the narrowness of a lot of that … So there is a tension in how I work through those things but my framework is one of reconciliation.
SB: I want to connect those thoughts to ask you about the Korean heritage that you also work through into your writing. In this book specifically, there are so many layers: the poetry in English is divided by pages which have only words in the Korean script; there are some poems that bring together the two languages, and there are also the photographs you’ve published alongside the poems: in which it’s you in your ritual dance practice in a landscape, and one can make out the Korean words on the robe that you wear. Could you talk about tackling the expectations of identity and heritage that comes with producing work in the US, and how you disrupt hierarchies?
SJL: As far as the hierarchy of perspective from a colonist a colonizing perspective of what has value goes, I do take pleasure in picking at that. I’ve been becoming increasingly more curious about my own standpoint and my inherent value as a Korean American woman with US citizenship who was born here.
I do think that there’s some inherent implicit value I have as a living creature in this world and I have not really written extensively from a clearly subjective standpoint and I think that’s because I felt so hemmed in by the model texts I was presented as a younger writer: of the multicultural movements that came up in the eighties and the early nineties in the US, and then the deconstruction of that, you know. I feel like I was part of the generation of writers who came in around that time so there’s Craig Santos Perez and Bhanu Kapil … The waves we were riding had a sort of deconstruction orientation to them. So, I had an inherent skepticism of a very coherent, well-performed, articulated subject that could clearly say that this is my story and my truth. I still feel a sort of skepticism around that.
SB: And has that, is that changing, you think?
SJL: So as I've gotten older I find that I’m more curious about that because I have such a subaltern standpoint—I’m a middle-aged Asian woman—it’s like the most erasing erasure. So it’s fascinating as I’m entering this phase of life and in the broader social arcs of value in youth, beauty, productivity, et cetera, and I’m childless, I’m a divorcee. So because of that social erasure I feel an interest in articulating through it more.
And it has started showing up through the dance practice. I was never someone who wanted to draw attention to my body through my art. I felt much more competent presenting through frames of rhetoric, through actual investigation screens, through historical frames, and to insert my body even in some of those pictures in the text felt for me like a necessity. I started making video art the year that my friend passed away and I don’t know if it’s the desire to be seen or be observed, but it has felt like an essential part of this process of what I'm exploring. So all of that is to say that a lot of how I’ve been evolving as a writer is definitely organic and there is some reactivity to the broader social conditions.
SB: Talk to us more about this tension between anonymity and subjectivity, between erasure and recording/making public. In a poem, you write: ‘namelessness is another way of inhabiting my body without intentions’. And actually, one of the first things I noticed about your book was how nameless the landscapes were: no tree or flower is named, there was a sort of blank-slate approach to the journey the readers are taken on: I began reading the book with the feeling that it might take us anywhere…
SJL: It wasn’t conscious on my part, but I’ve been very pleased for the most part that it is quite generic language. When we’re confronted with very specific flora and fauna, I think it actually can displace folks who haven’t had an encounter with those landscapes, with those environments. It can be iterated as a kind of separation, but what I was feeling in those places was actually a really deep coherence. And although I work for environmental organizations, I’m a very illiterate wilderness person (laughs). And I think I’m not alone in that … I also cherish a kind of precise blur which I think a lot of this book demonstrates. There’s a precision there in terms of an emotional intensity and at the same time, it’s a little bit not graspable, it echoes for folks—I don't know if we can all say exactly what we’re feeling but we can feel an emotional intensity or a connection. And I find that satisfying because that’s how I experience the world: there’s a kind of beauty in awe, and when I try to hold it, I’m not able to get at exactly that thing, or place, things elude a lot of times. So, thank you for noticing that, it helps me understand something in a new way.
SB: ‘A precise blur’: I love that so much. You touch upon a similar point when you critique contemporary literary spaces, especially institutionalized ideas of gatekeeping when it comes to ‘difficult writing’ or even avant garde poetry. You have written about the ways such perspectives alienate communities and perhaps that’s why you moved away from academia.
SJL: A hundred per cent.
And I wanted to connect those ideas to what you’ve just spoken about: integration & reconciliation. As a writer of ‘experimental poetry’ who also engages with social justice movements led by communities—are you still reconciliating with the inherent dichotomy of ‘difficult writing’?
SJL: I do still struggle my way through that. I worked for a social justice organization for many years and part of my job was to bring very diverse groups of people together to participate in collective learning, to have an anti-racist practice and also to share power: through which they could actually make change in the community by, say, distributing out funds into organized work. Doing that work felt so different from the kinds of conversations I would have at literary conferences or experimental writing convenes. Here, we have a community that’s really deeply invested in complexity, in difference, in navigating that, reconciling that. What I found was that the art practice didn’t feel that way … it felt like simplicity, it felt (I’m probably gonna be in trouble) like a derivative understanding of populism, and that was not what I felt was actually happening in these spaces. And I just personally gravitate to work that is not always easy. I feel like it demands things from me as a viewer versus presenting them to me. I really enjoy the agony of being uncertain of what experience I'm having and I enjoy the agony of puzzling through even how I'm arriving at an interpretation. So, I do find some value in that, which I think would be good for a lot of our movements to really embrace wholeheartedly not just in the organizing praxis, but also in the aesthetics of what we consume and participate in. I wish for this type of work to also be intelligible at times, important especially when I want to have my assumptions challenged, when I want to grow versus be conformed around something. But I’m still in the process of reconciling.
SB: It’s so refreshing to hear you talk about these tensions between your practice and profession. And like you say, I too do enjoy reading ‘open’ books that require me to participate in the meaning-making process actively.
Related to these tensions you’ve mentioned surrounding the production and consumption of books of poetry: is that one of the reasons why you’ve taken to the language of video and filmmaking? I was so intrigued to read about your project After the Holocene which you state is ‘dedicated to thinking about artificial light and its consequences’ on human and non-human life and the environment…
SJL: After the Holocene is something I would love the opportunity to devote myself to: it’s a concept I’ve been developing as a series of installations with research based multi-dimensional writing which begins with the sperm whale holocaust.
The video work really began as an extension of my curiosity to understand the form better, at that point, I had been writing for fifteen years pretty devotedly and I found myself wanting to explore this type of expression. When I started making the videos, I was calling them video poetry because they’re getting at poetry in a way that the text can’t, but they’re moving in the same way—I liked that consonance.
I’ve also been learning how to have more irreverence; be playful and make things that are not containable. Like there’s a piece that I did in 2020 called Teddysnorkle which has clowning and it’s funny and strange, and is also heartbreaking. With the film work, it’s also a nice way for me to also collaborate.
SB: As a bonus for The Willowherb Review readers, could you recommend one writer of colour we should read who would add to our understanding of nature writing?
SJL: Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. A writer of Dutch and Chinese ancestry who did so much for the Asian American organizing work in NYC at the time. She has some wonderful ecological imagination, she spent a lot of time in New Mexico and also has a fascination with light that shows up in a lot of her work … I learned so much by deeply rooting myself in her work.