Day 12 : Rivers in the Sky

Previous book by Elif Shafak was reviewed in 2020, coincidentally during my last 100 Days to Offload. I have also very much enjoyed 'There are Rivers in the Sky'. It is a tangled tale of Arthur and Zaleekhah, by the Thames, and Narin, by the River Tigris. Arthur, born in the victorian slums, manages to pull himself from the mire, drawn by a interest in all things ancient, to a role at the British Museum translating cuneiform tablets, and a passionate desire to understand the Epic of Gilgamesh. The story delves into all sorts of historical details of ancient Mesopotamia (about which I know nothing), and a voyage for Arthur to Nineveh. Narin is a Yazidi girl who lives in Turkey, who travels with her grandmother and father to her homeland to be baptised, only to encounter violence and terror. In 2018 Zaleekhah leaves her husband and moves onto a houseboat on the Thames, with vague plan for suicide. And it is a drop of water that links them all. 

The stories are woven together across the years by the rivers and the poem: Arthur meets Leila, the great great grandmother of Narin and learns about the history of the Yazidis, and I learned that the massacre that happened in 2014 was not the first time that they had been persecuted as a group, being seen as outsiders even in their own homeland. Zaleekhah meets Nen, a woman who tattoos designs of cuneiform and is as fascinated by Mesopotamia as Arthur, and confronts the privilege afforded her by her uncle's wealth. It's way more complicated than that, Zaleekhah is a hydrologist so loads of sciency stuff about water in there too, but I was so engaged that I didn't even note any quotes down. 

Here Arthur's home is flooded, just a lovely train of thought that gives you some idea of the way she writes:

"That weeks it rains incessantly. The Thames swells up, surges forth. The frontier separating the earth and the sky blurs into a listless grey that covers everything, as a gauze would swathe a wound. the spires of the city glower like gibbets in the twilight. So forceful is the downpour that a primordial dread bestirs amongst the Londoners, a fear deep down that they may have angered God - or a river-dwelling nymph or naiad. Gushing through the gutters, pounding on the windowpanes, the water demands to be seen and heard. London shivers and shrivels, folding into itself like a rose withering under the absence of sun.

On the third morning, the family's basement floods, and they find themselves up to their knees in murky foul-smelling water. What little they have, they haul on to the street. While his father carried the mattress, his mother the stools and his younger brother the cooking utensils, Arthur rushes to save the impressions of the Mesopotamian tablets.

'Look at you, stewing over a bunch of scribbles,' says his father under his breath.

Hours later, the rains having finally relented, the ground saturated, a defeated hush falls on the neighbourhood. A full moon hangs in the sky, so bright that Arthur can make out the maria on its surface. An arrangement of light and shade. So much in life is composed of recurrent designs. The zigzags traced by bolts of lightening, the rings inside a felled tree, the threads on a cobweb, the tessellations of a honeycomb, the twists of a conch shell, the petals of a chrysanthemum ... A city also teems with fractal geometry. The catacombs beneath Campden Market, the arches of Paddington Station; the Neo-Gothic ornamentation of the Houses of Parliament ... People, no less, are formed by repeated habit and conventions. The Mesopotamian tablets, too, embody a series of patterns whose meaning Arthur is determined to discover.

Wrapped in an old blanket for warmth, he places his finger on a line of cuneiform and reads out a mysterious name he has not come across before.

Gil-ga-mesh." (p213-214)

Purely coincidentally I had also ordered from the library 'The Beekeeper of Sinjar' by Dunya Mikhail, which is a recounting of the experiences of Yazidi women captured by ISIS during 2014 and sold into slavery and a man from Sinjar who created a network of support to help many of them escape. It was very harrowing and I confess I only skim read the second half, partly because it focussed very much on the 'escape' and I found myself left with a shadow of the unspoken horror that these women, often very young girls too, who were traded as sex slaves, bought and sold repeatedly, and the casualness with which real human beings are treated as disposable. Sometimes a story reminds you too much of the horror in the world and while it is important to learn and acknowledge it, dwelling on it is neither helpful nor healthy.

Stay sane. Be kind. Remember everyone else is a human being too.