Maria Sevilla: "The parents took the difficult path of speaking to us in a language that was not theirs"

Barcelona“Yes: in my second year of secondary school I started / speaking Spanish / because us Catalan girls couldn't get a date / and because, as Sylvia Plath said, / every woman adores a fascist”, writes Maria Sevilla Paris (Badalona, 1990) in one of the poems in Ni una o l’oposada flor (Arrebato Libros). On the left-hand pages we read the original poems in Catalan. On the right, the Spanish version, which often becomes a transformative game, by Juan Andrés García Román and the author herself. Ni una o l’oposada flor explains, in a ductile and precise language, Sevilla’s devotion to animals, plants, and all kinds of living organisms –including men–, while simultaneously reflecting on her relationship with Catalan, which although not the language her parents spoke to each other, has become her language of habitual use, her professional tool –she is an associate professor at the University of Barcelona and runs workshops at the Casal dels Infants del Raval– and her vehicle for artistic expression, which has so far yielded half a dozen books, among which are Dents de polpa (AdiA edicions, 2015), Plastilina (Fonoll, 2021), and La nit ovípara (Documents Documenta, 2024).

A few months ago you edited an anthology of lesser-known texts by Josep Palau i Fabre about Jacint Verdaguer, Poeta i fangador (Fundació Palau/Vibop, 2026). In the prologue, you recalled that Palau i Fabre was the alchemist poet, and Verdaguer the mediumistic poet. How would you define yourself?

— I like the idea of medium, and I would say it connects both with what can be read in Ni una o l’oposada flor and with the line of things I want to write. My intention is to connect with the visual, sound, tactile and olfactory frequencies of the entire non-human world. While I was writing Ni una o l’oposada flor I had a clear idea from Marta Tafalla in the book Ecoanimal [Plaza y Valdés, 2019] inspired by Theodor Adorno: the climate crisis is in large part an aesthetic crisis.

Why?

— Both wonder how we will be capable of preserving, protecting and respecting the ecosystems and the world in which we live, if we do not know how to appreciate or listen to it. We do not need to go very far to realize that this is the case: surrounding the cities there are many streams and spaces between urban and rural areas that we do not even know exist.

In Neither one nor the opposite flower appear “black pine forests”, the “stench that tipuanas make in June”, an “untranslatable vein of quartz” and the singing of the blackbirds.

— I like to connect mediumistically, even if it has nothing to do with any paranormal operation, with everything that exists beyond our aural world, and to transmit it with words as precise as possible. When you focus on the world, it multiplies. It is fascinating that there is a word to describe the vomit that birds of prey produce.

The mentions in a poem, right?

— Yes: pellet. With what they cannot digest they make a ball that they end up regurgitating which is called that. When I come across a word like pellet I cannot help but invent a whole poetic fiction to end up using it. This language also allows me to play with tensioning what the reader expects to find in a poem.

At what point did you start noticing nature and translating your observations into poems? In La nit ovípara it could already be seen, but I would say that before it wasn't as present.

— I dedicate Ni una o l’oposada flor to my grandfather Joan's goldfinch and my grandfather Fernando's canary. It is a way of referring to these two soundscapes that I had in my life as a little girl. Since my parents worked late, I spent many hours at the homes of both sets of grandparents. They all came from the pre-industrial world and loved birds, even though they kept them in cages, something I would not do. Grandfather Joan used to take me for walks around the outskirts of Badalona and taught me to distinguish a few bird species. I did this first learning as a child, but then I didn't pay any more attention to it until the pandemic. Then, confined in a 57 m² flat in the Eixample, with a tiny balcony where I had practically never been out before, I began to notice how the nettle trees and plane trees in front of me were budding. Since I was bored, I ended up spending time on the balcony, and thanks to a mobile application I started identifying the birds I saw in the trees: sparrows, greenfinches, serins... The next step was learning to distinguish the birds' songs. Later on, I also became interested in migrations.

To Neither one nor the opposite flower you dedicate a poem to a cat, the She-Wolf, who instead of saying “meow” or “mew” says “mrau”.

— Loba belonged to a roommate. She was a cat but was called Loba: she had species dysphoria, didn't she? When the roommate moved out, my ex and I kept her. It was thanks to Loba, while I was writing La nit ovípara, that I made the decision to stop eating deceased animals. Jacques Derrida has a book, L’animal que donc je suis [2006], in which, starting from a day when he steps out of the shower and his cat sees him naked, he poses all sorts of ontological questions. Are animals aware of when we are naked? When I am with my cat, is it me spending time with her, or is she spending it with me? Humans believe we are at the very top of the trophic chain, and in part that is true because we exploit everything. We believe we are at the peak of discourse generation, but animals also generate discourse about us. One day I had the cat on my lap watching me while I was writing and I wondered what she might be thinking. Looking into her eyes I told myself that I could no longer eat beings that, like her, could look at me and generate discourse.

The cat's poem talks about communication with her.

— Undomesticated felines do not meow. Cats that live with us do. A cat's meow is a way of verbally approaching us. It is as if cats wanted to talk to us because they have seen that humans articulate sounds with their mouths and have realized that it is important to us. The only thing we do with animals is exploit them, and they, on the other hand, from this subaltern place where we leave them, want to communicate with us.

In other books of yours, you have addressed the relationships of exploitation within the capitalist system. You yourself suffer the working conditions of being an associate professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of Barcelona.

— The self-employed quota I pay is almost the same as what I earn as an associate professor at the university. In my case, I was lucky enough to win a four-year predoctoral fellowship, during which I started publishing and doing many free recitals. Later on, while I was professionalizing myself in the field of poetry, I got my master's degree to be a secondary school teacher. This gives me the security that at any moment I can change my plans and leave the faculty, but at the same time I resist it, because I do not want only a certain social class, which is always the same, to have access to positions of power or intellectual influence.

You also lead reading promotion and poetic creation workshops at the Casal dels Infants in El Raval.

— I am with adolescents from first to fourth year of ESO, and the majority do not have Catalan either as a first language or as a habitual language of use. Right now, in the Barcelona metropolitan area, the young population uses, above all, Spanish.

You grew up in Badalona in the 90s, and even though your parents spoke Spanish to each other, they spoke to you and your sister in Catalan. Why?

— My mother was born in Almeria and my father was born here, although he spoke Spanish with his parents. The mother tongue of both is not the same as the one they used with their daughters. They have never been particularly militant about linguistic or national issues, but they met at the parish of Sant Josep, in a scouts group, one of those bastions of Catalan resistance during the Franco regime, even though they were controlled by the Church. In that environment, they associated Catalan with a kind of cultural prestige. At that time, Catalan gave them neither symbolic nor economic capital, because it was still prohibited, but when I was born and, seven years later, my sister, they spoke to us in this language. My parents took the difficult path of speaking to us in a language that was not their own. In this decision there was a part of renunciation, but it was also an act of freedom.

In one of the poems in the book you explain that in your second year of secondary school you started speaking Spanish. “The catalufes didn't get any dates”, you write.

— With my two best friends at the time, Clàudia and Laura, we made a very strange forced language switch. We went to a public high school in Badalona where the majority of the student body was Spanish-speaking and we didn't want to be seen just as nerds. We were giving in to the inertia of what they wanted or expected of us. At 14, we experienced the power that language has in shaping identities. I wanted to be different and cooler. I wanted to hang out with those who smoked weed and made trouble. Apparently, Catalan didn't give me that.

What is the social prestige of Catalan among your students at the Casal d’Infants del Raval?

— Many students tell me that Catalan makes them cringe. That it continues to be useless to try to go out partying, flirt, and do other attractive activities in Catalan. The rejection towards Catalan sometimes has to do with the status it has achieved in the institutional world. It has been essentialized as something preachy, old-fashioned, and boring. It is dangerous for this to happen, because it is a process of Latinization of the language: you turn it into something that is more or less useful in formal contexts, but not in the rest of the situations.

You compare language shift with the concept of “floral syndrome”.

— It is the phenomenon by which flowers adopt and adapt to the tastes of their pollinating agents, whether they be bees or birds. Flowers produce a certain scent to attract them, make very red fruits to grab attention, or produce a seed volatile enough for the wind to carry it away. The same happens with languages. We use them to build one identity or another. In the second year of ESO, I chose Spanish. A year later, I returned to Catalan. And now, so much time later, I am publishing a book that, more than bilingual, is in many moments bifid, because from time to time the meaning of the text is found in the ghostly space of moving from one language to the other.

Can you give me an example?

— Yes. “And I put a petal / in the place of the tongue”. In Catalan, puesto is a lexical Castilianism that would be equivalent to place. In Spanish, puesto is not used in the same sense: it would be a market stall, for example. It is a word that, in my book, I use incorrectly in both Catalan and Spanish. I find it amusing.