There Are Rivers in the Sky

Spanning different eras, locations, and circumstances, the stories of the three protagonists in There Are Rivers in the Sky nevertheless contain a number of parallels and connections. Shafak primarily forges these connections using water, with each storyline taking place in proximity to a river and each protagonist sharing a strong, personal bond with water. A single drop of water, evaporated and reconstituted many times over centuries, witnesses the lives of all the novel’s central characters. Water thus serves as a motif representing the interconnectedness of all life and the cycles of loss and renewal that constitute history. 

Some of the connections that exist between Arthur, Narin, and Zaleekhah, are created in service of the plot. The same drop of water witnesses momentous events in each character’s life. Arthur’s birth and his arrival in Constantinople for the first time are both welcomed by the same droplet of water that is later intended for Narin’s baptism, and which she eventually consumes atop Mount Sinjar when fleeing ISIS. Zaleekhah sheds this droplet as a tear aboard the houseboat when she first moves in. Shafak uses the physical qualities of water to her metaphorical advantage. This droplet of water establishes a continuity between all these lives, making clear that—despite the racial and class hierarchies of Europe and the ethnic hostility promoted by groups like ISIS—all people share in the same human story. Shafak explicitly states this as well, likening the bonds between atoms in a water molecule to those between her characters: “Three characters connect across borders of time and place, and together they make this story” (19). 

Water is literally and symbolically equated with life itself throughout the story, emphasizing that seemingly disparate lives and cultures all share the same essential building block. The earliest of human civilizations emerged along the banks of rivers across the world, as Arthur notes in his speech at the Society of Biblical Archaeology. Millennia later, water continues to be as crucial to life as it was in Ashurbanipal’s time. Arthur, in 19th-century England, witnesses the death of a loved one due to cholera-infected water; he himself dies of cholera—an illness caused by lack of clean water—years later. These deaths make clear that clean, drinkable water is a necessity for civilization so that when Narin and her community are driven out from their homes and trapped on the slopes of Mount Sinjar by ISIS, who poison and withhold water from the Yazidis, the novel has already laid the groundwork to show that an attack on the supply of water is an attack on the very foundation of communal life. Even Zaleekhah, who lives a relatively comfortable life compared to the other protagonists, recognizes the real dangers of burying rivers in urban settlements. Just as the story of humans began with water, Shafak begins her story in Mesopotamia to underline the intrinsic link between water and human life. She follows this connection throughout the different timelines, using the necessity of water to illustrate the continuity and interconnectedness of human stories across vast geographical and temporal distances. 

Shafak further explores the interconnected and cyclical nature of life through the repetition of patterns in history. The Assyrians were famed for their conquests, forcing people to migrate from their homelands when the latter were annexed into the empire. Millennia later, persecuted groups like the Yazidis are continually on the move, forced out of their homes for a variety of complex, sociopolitical reasons rooted in violence and power. Again, rivers symbolize these historical continuities. The Thames, dirty and polluted in Arthur’s time, reemerges as a sparkling picture of health in Zaleekhah’s, even as other rivers are buried and neglected in cities across the world. Even the specific circumstances surrounding the 2014 genocidal massacre that Narin survives echoes the ones that her great-great-grandmother Leila foretold in her time. By underlining and emphasizing the cyclical and interconnected nature of life throughout the narrative, Shafak primes the reader to take note of these similarities and repetitions throughout human history. The presence of water makes these patterns explicit while also serving as a medium to explore how human action and consequence are interconnected. By mirroring cycles in water and in history, Shafak attempts to bring attention to the consequences of allowing certain cycles of domination and violence to repeat themselves.