There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

All you need is a memorable tale, one that frames you as the hero.

Not every written word is meant for the eyes of every reader. Just as not every spoken word needs to be heard by every eavesdropper.

Water remembers. It is humans who forget.

Dilê min—“my heart.” That is how Grandma expresses her affection, by turning her own body into an anatomy of love.

It is as if love, by its fluid nature, its riverine force, is all about the melding of markers, to the extent that you can no longer tell where your being ends and another’s begins.

By the time the Ilisu Dam is completed, over eighty thousand people will have been displaced, more than two hundred villages and forty hamlets evacuated. When the work began, the peasants, most of them Kurdish, were forced out of their homes, their fields and orchards expropriated, leaving them in despair.

“God bless your feet, neighbors. May your toes never stumble over a pebble.”

“Well, this world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others, I’m afraid, abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.”

“Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire—because they want to have them in their possession. It’s all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It’s all out of fear! Then there is the third kind—when people hate those they have hurt.”

“Because the tree remembers what the axe forgets.” “What does that mean?” “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.

Since time immemorial, the Yazidis have been misunderstood, maligned, mistreated. Ours is a history of pain and persecution. Seventy-two times we have been massacred. The Tigris turned red with our blood, the soil dried u...

An unwavering pendulum swings between day and night. Light and shadow. Good and bad. Perhaps it is the same with past and present—they are not completely distinct. They bleed into each other.

Water hardens in adverse circumstances, not unlike the human heart.

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.

Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.

Dr. Zaleekhah Clarke does not wish to live. She wants to excuse herself from a world where she often feels like an outsider, a confused and clumsy latecomer, an accidental guest who walked in through the wrong door at the wrong time. Unlike her namesake, the Qur’anic Zuleikha, she is not, and has never been, assertive. She is not a fighter. She does not even like to argue—not with her husband, not with herself, not with colleagues or friends or strangers, and certainly not with a God that as a child she has been repeatedly instructed both to fear and to love, even though He never cared to explain to her why He took her parents away; a God that punishes women with old age and ugliness, and rewards them with pretty looks and attractive spouses when they prove themselves to be sufficiently submissive; a God she could easily be furious with, yet whose existence she does not even believe in. All

she wants, right now, is to retreat, a silent admission of defeat for someone tired of trying to survive—less a departure than a homecoming, a return to water. ——

which language did the angels speak?” “The language of silence.” “What does that mean?” “It means they did not need words to understand one another. They communicated through glowing light.”

“Well, Adam and Eve quarreled one day. Each believed they were more important than the other. To find the answer they put their seeds in a jar and waited for a month. When Eve opened her jar, there wasn’t anything in it. But when Adam opened his, inside he found a boy and a girl. These are our ancestors. We are the only people who descended from Adam alone.”

Every time we utter His holy name, He hears us. Every day we must pray to God, who is merciful, full of love and compassion. He is the judge of kings and beggars; the sovereign of the moon, the sun, the fire and the water. Prayer is not about asking for things. It is a conversation. When God is less lonely, we are less lonely.”

The water inside us communes with the water outside us.

Grandma is a water-dowser. Grandma is a spring-finder.

“When the ship crashed into the mountaintop, a hole opened up in the hull. Floodwaters poured in. They were all going to die—humans, animals and plants. But then, out of nowhere, a black snake appeared! It coiled and coiled like a thick rope, plugging the breach. Thanks to the serpent, everyone was saved. For this reason, we Yazidis respect serpents and depict them at the entrance of sacred buildings. In our village, we also remember the great Shahmaran—‘the Snake Queen.’ She has a woman’s head and a snake’s body.”

The world would have been a much more interesting place if everyone was given a chance to meet their ancestors at least for an hour in their lifetime.

every Yazidi will come back to earth at least seven times. While it is true that the body is mortal, the soul is a perennial traveler—not unlike a drop of water.

“Words are like birds,” says Mr. Bradbury. “When you publish books, you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in the mansions of the gentry, in farmsteads and laborers’ cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs.”

If poverty were a place, a hostile landscape into which you were deliberately pushed or accidentally stumbled, it would be an accursed forest—a damp and gloomy wildwood suspended in time. The branches clutch at you, the boles block your way, the brambles draw you in, determined not to let you out. Even when you manage to cut down one obstacle, instantly it is replaced by another. You tear the skin off your hands as you work doggedly to clear a path elsewhere, but the moment you turn your back the trees close in on you again. Poverty saps your will, little by little.

As he reads he can taste the words, the tip of his tongue tingling with flavors—buttery, oaky, zingy, spicy, herbaceous…

I’ll let you in on a secret: when times are confusing, everybody is a little lost. No one is as inwardly confident as they present themselves to be. Hence the reason we must read, my boy. Books, like paper lanterns, provide us with a light amidst the fog. That is why this is the perfect time to be in the business of publishing!”

She knows that if she does not run fast enough, she will drown in her past.

Zaleekhah senses that, deep within, Uncle worries she will turn out to be just like her mother—a small-town teacher married to another small-town teacher on the outskirts of Manchester, indifferent to the trappings of wealth and status, intensely critical of the world and its inequalities but content with her own humble place in the universe.

For every displaced person understands that uncertainty is not tangential to human existence but the very essence of it.

Being an outsider is all about survival, and no one survives by being unambitious; no one gets ahead by holding back. Immigrants don’t die of existential fatigue or nihilistic boredom; they die from working too hard.

He is also fond of bird paintings, especially by the Dutch artist Melchior d’Hondecoeter. A keen buyer of Japanese woodblock prints and netsuke—those exquisitely fashioned ivory or wooden toggles—which he adores for their delicate and witty carving.

in every marriage there are two sides to the story—his and hers. They never match up. My recipe for matrimonial bliss? Voluntary blindness! Cover your eyes. Pull down a sleep mask. Voluntary deafness! Use ear plugs. She said that? I didn’t hear! She did that? I didn’t see! Peace of mind. Unless, of course, he’s done something serious and you’re not telling me.”

She wants to tell him that she does not necessarily view the breakdown of her marriage as a failure. She has loved, and been loved. What more could one want?

“I just don’t understand why we can’t fail like everyone else.” “Because we can’t,” Uncle says briskly. “We keep our scars to ourselves. We don’t show them to anyone—even to our nearest and dearest.”

The only son of an established Levantine family from the Middle East, Uncle Malek came to England as a boy. In no other part of the world has he grown roots as strong. He has made English friends and English business partners; he married an Englishwoman; he speaks English every day and dreams in English at night; he supports an English football team with a passion bordering on obsession; he earns English money and donates to English charities; he is a member of several English gentlemen’s clubs and has been honored by the Queen; he has even taken English seaside holidays—and yet he is, and always will be, a foreigner. It is still there, his otherness, under the varnished image, like a splinter that cannot be pried from beneath his flesh.

“Japanese kintsugi—displaying flaws and revealing failures for everyone to see. Very noble—except I’m not a fan.” This, Zaleekhah knows, has always been the way with her uncle. He once described himself as an “upholsterer of imperfections”—covering stains, padding hard surfaces, softening edges, hiding cracks and holes. Almost as if every mistake were correctable, nearly every loss replaceable, and what remained rough, raw or ruptured should never be seen by others.

In honor of the guests, breakfast is a feast today: fried green peppers with yogurt sauce, sour-cherry jam, sweet-chili marmalade, glazed halloumi and dried figs, bulgur-stuffed aubergines with tamarind, currants and pine nuts, pistachio tahini halva, hummus with flatbread, scrambled eggs with red pepper, cheese with wild garlic, and the first batch of honey from the beehive, topped with clotted cream…In

The grave of her great-great-grandmother Leila is situated diagonally across, pointing east toward the sunrise as is the custom, but in such a way as to directly overlook the Englishman’s resting place. It is as though, in her afterlife, she is keeping a watchful eye on him. By her grave, too, there is an old oak tree.

Stuffed vine leaves, fried kibbe balls, chargrilled chicken kebabs, roast lamb with spices and a large plate of rice tahdig.

But Germany is my home now—and my children’s only homeland! At least there I don’t have to worry about police knocking on my door in the middle of the night. I don’t have to fear being arrested and tortured.”

“Maybe I am naive. But I’m a musician, brother. I was a kid when I discovered the qanun in the house. They said, ‘Children can’t touch it, it’s more than a hundred years old.’ I wouldn’t stop crying unless they let me hold it. I didn’t sleep properly until I learned to play it. Now they invite me everywhere. Why? Because people need songs like they need bread and water. People need poetry, beauty, love! So long as the sun rises and rivers flow, there will always be weddings and celebrations and music. Even fanatics cannot change that.” — Silence settles in the room, curling itself around the stove like a listless cat that refuses to move.

It’s called ‘daylighting’—returning a lost river to the open air.”

Uncle likes to call himself a “self-made

made man.” While that may be true, Zaleekhah suspects that the making of a new self requires the unmaking of an old one.

story is a flute through which truth breathes.

Our people never get married in April, because that’s when the land is pregnant. You cannot dance and jump and stomp all over it. You have to treat it gently. Do not ever pollute the soil, the air or the river. That’s why I never spit on the ground.

Grandma says one should also pay homage to the sun and the moon, which are celestial siblings. Every morning at dawn she goes up to the roof to salute the first light, and when she prays she faces the sun. After dark she sends a prayer to the orb of night. One must always walk the earth with wonder, for it is full of miracles yet to be witnessed. Trees you must think of not only for what they are above ground but also for what remains invisible below. Birds, rocks, tussocks and thickets of gorse, even the tiniest insects are to be treasured. But as a water-dowser, it is the Tigris that the old woman holds in the highest esteem.