Water as Memory Keeper: Exploring the Idea of Transcultural Memory in Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky (2024)

Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky revolves around three interconnected characters, two iconic rivers – the Thames and the Tigris – and a long-forgotten ancient poem, the “Epic of Gilgamesh.” Her imaginary world spans centuries, continents, and cultures and is bound by a single drop of water that links the ancient city of Nineveh, the Ottoman Empire, Victorian England, and modern-day Iraq, Turkey, and London. In this context, the current article explores the way Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky analyzes the social, cultural, ecological and mnemonic dimensions of water’s relationship with humans, with a special focus on how it employs water as a trope of “transcultural memory” (Crownshaw 1). In other words, through the image of a single drop of water traversing millennia, Shafak constructs a powerful metaphor for transcultural memory that transcends the literal and metaphorical boundaries created by humans. Moreover, the research further explores how Shafak uses a single drop of water to situate the 2014 Yazidi genocide within the broader historical continuum of violence committed against the Yazidis across space and time, revealing the entanglement of the historical and the political with the physical and the environmental.