There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

The ear never forgets what the heart has heard.”

They vilify us not because they know us well. Quite the opposite: they do not know us at all.”

“It means it’s not the harmer who bears the scars, but the one who has been harmed. For us, memory is all we have. If you want to know who you are, you need to learn the stories of your ancestors.

Children of uprooted parents are born into the memory tribe. Both their present and their future are forever shaped by their ancestral past, regardless of whether they have any knowledge of it. If they flourish and prosper, their achievements will be attributed to a whole community; and, in the same way, their failures will be chalked up to something bigger and older than themselves, be it family, religion or ethnicity. While the journey of life may be full of reversals of fortune, children from displaced families can never allow themselves to fall below the level at which their parents started out. Yet she is doing precisely that. Falling. Failing. She cannot help but feel that, in letting herself down, she is letting her ancestors down.

We never want our parents’ weaknesses to be seen by others. Their failures are our own private affair, a secret we would rather keep to ourselves; when they become public, for everyone’s consumption, we are no longer the children we once were.

Time is circles within circles. It neither dies nor declines but whirls in epicycles. Like a wheel that continues to spin even after its power is turned off, family conflicts live on long after the individual members have passed away.

“Yesterday I was a river. Tomorrow, I may return as a raindrop.”