EXAMINING CULTURAL MEMORY, COLONIAL HISTORIES, AND HERITAGE PRESERVATION IN ELIF SHAFAK’S THERE ARE RIVERS IN THE SKY: A POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky (2024) is a trans-historical novel that connects ancient Mesopotamia, Victorian London, and contemporary Iraq and Britain through the recurring motif of water and the survival of cultural memory. This article examines how the novel represents cultural memory, colonial histories, and heritage preservation from a postcolonial perspective. Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of hybridity and the “third space,” and postcolonial approaches to cultural memory and heritage, the study employs qualitative close textual analysis. Particular attention is given to Arthur Smyth’s encounter with Mesopotamian antiquities, Narin’s experience as a Yazidi girl facing displacement and cultural violence, and Zaleekhah’s relationship with water, memory, and inherited history. The analysis argues that Shafak destabilizes conventional distinctions between Western “discoverers” and Eastern “objects of discovery” by exposing the unequal histories through which cultural artifacts enter Western museums. The novel also presents memory as a form of resistance against colonial erasure, religious persecution, displacement, and environmental destruction. Water functions as an alternative archive that survives political borders and human attempts to control history. Recent scholarship has similarly identified the novel’s concerns with identity, hybridity, water agency, and postcolonial cultural negotiation (Kanwal et al.; Rehman et al.; Muzaffar). The article concludes that There Are Rivers in the Sky transforms historical fiction into a form of cultural remembrance, asking not only who preserves the past but also who possesses the authority to interpret, display, and narrate it.