Narrating Against Forgetting: rivers, dams and environmental amnesia in Elif Shafak’s novel There Are Rivers in the Sky

The aim of this article is to read Elif Shafak’s novel There Are Rivers in the Sky (2024) as a narrative that combats environmental amnesia by focusing on stories in which the colonization of water and by means of water are a central theme. The novel connects the practices of colonial control and processes of environmental degradation, particularly through its engagement with the damming and culverting rivers. Using Stef Craps’ concept of environmental mnemonic care-work (2024), which itself is informed by Ann Rigney’s (2021) and Mihaela Mihai’s (2022) theories of cultural memory and unforgetting, the article approaches Shafak’s novel as a literary intervention that generates memorability and counters forms of ecological forgetting. While environmental loss remains a key focus, the analysis demonstrates how the novel’s protagonists reveal the entanglement of environmental amnesia with cultural, historical, and intergenerational forms of erasure. In doing so, the article examines how There Are Rivers in the Sky mobilizes the environment as a medium of memory through which ecological, colonial, and cultural histories are jointly remembered and reactivated.