Water. Generally, we don’t give it much of a thought. Unless there’s too little . . . or too much. Then it fills our consciousness, saturating our brains with phrases like “atmospheric rivers” and “glacial retreat,” or such devastatingly commonplace words as “drowning” and “drought.”
In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, here on the head of a learned and cruel Assyrian king, there as a snowflake on the tongue of an impoverished British baby, and yet again as a lifesaving elixir in the possession of a Yazidi grandmother driven into exile by the Islamic State group.
In a fabulist twist, the Booker-shortlisted, bestselling author imbues this recurring molecule with a sense of memory. After a particularly disturbing and graphic passage near the book’s opening, Shafak states her case clearly and succinctly: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.”
The book opens with King Ashurbanipal in the 640s B.C.E.; then the narrative takes a leap of thousands of years and miles, to Victorian era London. There, a young lad born to an itinerant scavenger is crowned “King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums.” Modeled on real-life Assyriologist George Smith, Arthur rises above his station to become a scholar who, like Ashurbanipal before him, is enchanted by the Epic of Gilgamesh.
From there, the scene shifts to 2014, by the Tigris river in southeastern Turkey. There, Narin, a young Yazidi girl, is preparing for a journey to Iraq with her grandmother so that she can be baptized in a sacred temple. When the girl questions her elder about why they are being forced from their land, the grandmother recounts a brief history of the Yazidi people, concluding that “For us, memory is all we have. If you want to know who you are, you need to learn the stories of your ancestors.”
Shafak seems to be on a mission to prevent us from forgetting, whether it’s the majesty of ancient Mesopotamia, the horrific crimes against humanity perpetrated upon the Yazidis, or the fragile ecosystem of rivers such as the Tigris and the Thames. Like water itself, There Are Rivers in the Sky seeps into the cracks and crevasses of our humanity, unlocking a sense of wonder.