Rivers as Transnational Archives: Trauma, Ecology, and Narrative Form in Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky

This article offers the first sustained ecocritical analysis of Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky (2024), a novel that traces a single raindrop across millennia, linking the Tigris in ancient Nineveh, the Thames in Victorian London, and contemporary Turkey. While Shafak’s earlier fiction has attracted significant scholarly attention, this novel remains underexamined despite its explicit engagement with rivers as carriers of memory across deep time. Drawing on ecocriticism, ecological memory, and transnational literary studies, the article argues that Shafak reconceptualizes rivers as living archives that transmit transhistorical trauma, thereby challenging linear and anthropocentric models of historiography. Through close analysis of the novel’s multi-temporal structure, its focus on marginalized human and nonhuman subjects, and its intertextual engagement with the Epic of Gilgamesh, the article develops the concept of “fluid historiography” to describe a narrative mode grounded in hydrological circulation rather than chronological sequence. By foregrounding the material continuity of water across space and time, the novel renders visible the entanglement of ecological crisis, cultural memory, and slow violence. In doing so, it offers a formally innovative framework for representing the spatial and temporal complexities of the Anthropocene.