There are Rivers in the Sky
Having grown up near a coastline and then moved away, there’s one thing I particularly miss. It’s easily summed up in one word but impossible to narrow down. I miss the smells. There’s a distinct smell to coastal fog, threading its way through redwoods and cypress trees. The fragrance of wet pine needles pressed into the earth and tangles of kelp piled along rough sand beaches where colonies of sand flies make their home in the drying heaps. Even the fetid funk of low tide, salty, fermented, and intense enough to penetrate closed car windows without warning.
Now I live far away from that ocean, in the company of a river. It doesn’t speak the same way as the roaring California coastlines which are fiercely beautiful and demand your respect. Instead, the river is the gentle companion of everyone who lives here. It didn’t take long to fall in love with it too. Cycling beside this silky ribbon that threads its way beyond the city borders and is nestled into a valley whose seasonal color changes are best described as explosive, I’m reminded of the sacredness of all bodies of water and of how fortunate I am to live beside one which has an existing concept for protecting not only the river but the ecological systems connected to it.
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak begins with the omniscient “character” literally falling into the story. A water molecule which takes the form of a raindrop and lands in the hair of King Ashurbanipal, the last king of the doomed city of Nineveh. From there, the book follows three timelines which are visited in different forms by this same water molecule. First is Arthur Smyth, born in winter on the banks of the Thames, the son of a tosher, or scavenger and part of the seething masses of impoverished peoples struggling to survive in Victorian London. In 2014, there is Narin, a young Yazidi girl whose baptism on the banks of the River Tigris in Turkey is interrupted by bulldozers, the first wave of a government dam project that will expel them from their native village, Castrum Kefa. The last timeline is in 2018 where hydrologist Zaleekah Clarke has just moved to a houseboat on the Thames after the collapse of her marriage.
The storylines don’t so much collide as they do drift alongside one another and the result is a densely packed, intensely researched love letter to the preciousness of water and specifically to the sacred rivers who have nurtured (and destroyed) civilizations throughout history. But alongside reverence has always existed greed, exploitation and in an age where AI is being forced on us, killing our critical thinking skills and decimating drinking water supplies There Are Rivers in the Sky is an urgent reminder of the finite nature of this life-giving force.
Arthur, who is based on the real-life Assyriologist, George Smith, feels the most fleshed out character and his storyline could have easily functioned as a standalone book. An inspiring poverty to prosperity tale of a boy from the slums who became a respected scholar working for the British Museum. Purely by coincidence I was reading There are Rivers in the Sky around the time of last October’s infamous Louvre heist. On a normal day I enjoy memes trolling the British Museum as a kind of guerilla restitutions campaign, let alone the upswing after the Louvre heist, but it did reinforce my thoughts about Arthur’s storyline. That perhaps it is so central to the narrative because it demands that we, as readers, interrogate our own understanding and biases of history and memory.
Each protagonist has a different understanding of history with Arthur’s being arguably the most “traditional.” The kind which is extracted from native lands (or outright stolen) and contained within the pages of scholarly text, behind glass, and in dimly lit basements. It isn’t until he spends a significant amount of time living in a Yazidi village that he really begins to question the British narrative. Narin’s story-teller grandmother is the one who will fill the archives of her memory with stories and the voices of the living world before Narin loses her hearing to a degenerative condition.
Zaleekah’s life is dedicated to the study of water. Her current project is dedicated to freeing the rivers trapped beneath London, but before her marriage ended, she was secretly attempting to continue the work of her late mentor who was trying to prove that water, in a broad sense, retains memories. But history is not something which can be possessed, and no linear, western-centric understanding could support such a concept. Without knocking us over the head with it, the message is clear: how we write our history as human beings leaves its impact and its scars on the Earth.
Developing three different, yet somewhat connected worlds is a tricky task. So, in spite of the beautiful prose, this book can feel overwhelming at times. The last pages broke my heart as they reflect the kinds of tragedies which are not only allowed at this moment but are given financial and political blessings. My sense was that there was so much Elif Shafak wanted to write about but had to limit herself perhaps because of the publisher. Despite the hulking differences in our respective lists of accomplishments it felt like a wonderful little moment of solidarity, this writing problem of being so passionate about something that you risk writing a five thousand-page tome.
Just shy of 500 pages, There Are Rivers in the Sky is an urgent reminder to be the stewards and the caretakers of our history and homeland as best we can so that our path forward isn’t one in which our precious bodies of water bear the punishments of those in power who so often feel free to mistreat them.