Banner image credit: Ferhat Elik
While researching her latest novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak spent two and a half months living in a small house beside the River Thames. Every day at high tide, the river would flood the garden, bringing with it ducks and swans. Being the deep thinker that she is, this prompted Shafak to consider the nature of time.
“It’s such a shame that we don’t learn from history,” Shafak says. “We like to think that history is always linear, always progressive, but it’s not necessarily. Some people call the Thames a ‘zombie river’ because, not that long ago, it was biologically declared dead. Why? Because we human beings, 100/150 years ago, mistreated it to such an extent that no species could live in it.
“But now, when I look at it, it’s remarkable. The river renewed itself, recreated itself, and it’s home to more than 200 bio species. Instead of admiring that, in the name of money or profit or greed, again, water companies are pumping sewage into our rivers. So it makes you question this notion of linear time.”
“If we want to remember or understand how connected we are [...] maybe we should look no further than the journey of one drop of water”
There Are Rivers in the Sky, which came out in paperback earlier this month, is a sprawling saga that spans “centuries and continents and cultures”. It’s a dazzling ode to rivers and an exploration of cultural memory through the lives of three characters: Arthur, a gifted young man from the slums of Victorian London; Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris in 2014; and hydrologist Zaleekhah, who moves to a houseboat on the River Thames in 2018 following the collapse of her marriage.
Our protagonists are connected in a few unexpected ways, one being the journey of a single water drop through time. We first encounter it during the seventh century BC as it plummets to Earth and lands in the hair of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. Over the centuries, it ascends into the atmosphere and falls back down again in an endless cycle. It’s swept along rivers and across oceans, appearing intermittently throughout the narrative: as a snowflake on the day of Arthur’s birth or collected in a bottle at the Valley of Lalish, a Yazidi holy place.
“The Mississippi, the Ganges, the Seine, the Euphrates, we tend to think that these are different bodies of water,” Shafak explains. “But it’s actually the same drops that have been circulating throughout history. It’s the same drops that we might have shed as tears just yesterday, or the same water that we might be drinking in our glass right now. So, if we want to remember or understand how connected we are with each other, but also with nature, maybe we should look no further than the journey of one drop of water.”
“Literature has a very gentle, quiet, but profound power”
This idea of connectivity is at the heart of Shafak’s artistic spirit, and she hopes her fiction can build bridges between people and cultures. In today’s “deeply polarised and bitterly politicised” age, she’s concerned about how tribal mentalities can prevent people from communicating across the ideological spectrum and finding common ground. But she maintains that novels can be a force for good in this era of division, helping us foster empathy by placing us in other people’s shoes.
To illustrate, Shafak tells me about her book signings in her native country, Turkey, where she has “a very diverse readership, people from completely different backgrounds who would not necessarily come together and break bread.” Some, she says, have been raised in ultra-conservative or ultra-nationalist households, where they might hear negative sentiments about LGBTQ+ communities and other religious and ethnic groups.
“But then,” Shafak explains, “the same people come to me and say, ‘You know what? I read your book, and this is the character that I loved the most.’ And then I realise that the character they’re talking about is maybe gay, is maybe Christian, is maybe Jewish.
“That is what novels do because they speak directly to our inner garden,” Shafak says. “When we journey into a novel, suddenly, we’re not part of a collective identity, a tribe, anymore, and we’re ready to discover a person whom we might have regarded as our other. And then we realise that person is not that different from us. Their sorrows, their dreams, their joys, are so similar to ours. That’s why I think literature has a very gentle, quiet, but profound power. It dismantles dualities, and in today’s crazy world, we really need that.”
“We live in a world in which we are bombarded by information, but there is very little knowledge and even less wisdom”
It’s this transcendental quality that first drew Shafak to literature as a child. Raised by a single working mother in Ankara and Madrid, Shafak says she spent lots of time on her own. “I thought life was very, very boring. But books showed me there were other worlds, other possibilities, that I could travel beyond the little box that I found myself in.”
She credits two early sources of literary inspiration. “One is my maternal grandmother’s world, which was full of oral storytelling: [the] oral culture of the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Middle East, and the Levant or Mediterranean,” she says. The other was the European novel.
“I was about 10/11 years old when I moved to Madrid with my mother,” Shafak says. “I started learning Spanish, then English became my third language, and the first time I read a children’s edition of Don Quixote, it was a turning point in my life. I found an entire world there: the imagination, the chutzpah, the ability to journey through the written word; it just struck me so deeply.
“I think the novel, in so many ways, is the antidote to the impatience and extreme polarisation of our era,” Shafak continues. “What do I mean by that? The long form has an ability to hold nuance, multiplicity, and pluralism inside. I love that. I treasure that. We live in a world in which we are bombarded by information, but there is very little knowledge and even less wisdom. I think what the novel as a form does is invite us to slow down, to journey deeper, rather than superficial snippets of information.”
In There Are Rivers in the Sky, Shafak leverages the novel’s potential for nuance and pluralism to delve into complicated questions. One of these is ‘Who owns the past?’ – an often-debated topic on social media – which is particularly prevalent in Arthur’s storyline.
Thanks to his passion and superhuman memory, Arthur rises out of poverty to become an Assyriologist for the British Museum. He later travels to the site of Nineveh – an ancient Mesopotamian city – in search of a missing chapter of The Epic of Gilgamesh, but quickly questions his right to be there.
“This is a very complicated subject, and literature is the right place to open this up. Definitely, social media is not,” Shafak says. “One of the many reasons why I love the novel is because it gives us a chance to open up these conversations and hear a diversity of opinions, and then you have to leave the answers to the reader. It’s not a writer’s job to try to teach or preach.”
But that isn’t to say she believes fiction is the only place to examine complex subjects: “I love podcasts. I love slow journalism and in-depth analysis, like the conversation we’re having right now,” Shafak says. “We need cultural spaces, we need literary festivals, where we can hear people who might be thinking differently, who might be voting differently. We need to hear that, too, and understand where each and every one of us is coming from. That is much healthier for coexistence and democracy.”
“Fiction is not an unreal escape. Just the opposite. I think it brings us closer to the truth of our lives”
There Are Rivers in the Sky frequently depicts and engages with real-life events. Arthur is loosely based on the Victorian Assyriologist George Smith, and Narin’s narrative takes inspiration from the harrowing experiences of Yazidi people persecuted by ISIS. With this in mind, we were curious to learn what Shafak thought about fiction’s power to illuminate real stories.
Shafak says, “Some readers come to me and say, ‘I don’t read fiction because there is so much happening in the world that I need to understand. I read about important things like finance and history, or neuroscience and technology.’ And that makes me sad because, I think, inside a novel, you can find anything and everything that is part of life. That is the beauty of fiction. It joins the dots.”
Shafak believes that novelists need to be interdisciplinary readers, and There Are Rivers in the Sky is proof that she leads by example. Inside, readers will find knowledge on all kinds of subjects, from Victorian physician John Snow’s founding work in epidemiology to controversial scientific theories like water memory. But she’s keen to point out that one of the most important things readers can discover in fiction is emotional intelligence.
Shafak says, “It doesn’t matter whether we are students, professors, politicians, dentists, we all need to understand our emotions, but also how emotions guide and misguide politics and the world today. So it feels crucial to me that we also read fiction as we read other things. Fiction is not an unreal escape. Just the opposite. I think it brings us closer to the truth of our lives.”
“What we remember, we remember through emotions and stories, and that is not going to change”
In a time when we hear plenty of doomsaying about the future of the arts, it’s refreshing to hear Shafak’s take on the importance of the novel in modern times. She remembers the late 1990s and early 2000s, when pundits were busy predicting its death at the hands of technological advancements and shortening attention spans.
“It didn’t happen that way, and it won’t happen,” she says. “Actually, the opposite is happening because the faster our world runs, the deeper our need to slow down. Our connection with the art of storytelling is so ancient; it’s so universal. As human beings, we are storytelling animals. Not only that, we are story-remembering animals. So what we remember, we remember through emotions and stories, and that is not going to change.”
If I took one thing away from my conversation with Elif Shafak, it’s a reminder that storytelling is powerful, enduring, and, above all, vital – just like the born-again River Thames. It may shift and change, redefining and recreating itself, but no matter how much we neglect it, or even disrespect it, it remains a touchstone for us to rediscover and reconnect with our humanity, even in troubling times like these.
Have you read There Are Rivers in the Sky? Or are you planning on it? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.