My father insists he will never feel comfortable away from a body of water and for the entirety of my life my parents have remained at some point along the river Avon, as if they are slowly moving along with the current, never quite getting stuck in the sediment. Like surface plants they float but never stick, never quite sink to the bed.
When I was a child we had a pond, and I would try to catch Jesus bugs as they flitted here and there on the surface of the water. I was obsessed with the murky depths hiding potential finds, mostly snails, but I once saw a toad and that was a highlight. I would be taken on walks along the rivers and canals that threaded through the countryside around us, and I developed an innate fear of falling into canals, dreaming of drowning every night but still loving the free flow of river water. Perhaps it was the claustrophobia of canals that made me nervous, the sets of gates and locks and controlled movement.
I feel differently about rivers though. I am a little bit in love with them and because it is unrequited it has become an obsession. I think the writers whose work features in By the River must all be a little bit obsessed with rivers. Where else does writing come from if not that small bubble of obsession in the bottom of your stomach?
By The River: Essays from the Water’s Edge, published in April, is a beautiful collection of writing, flowing flawlessly between researched essays to personal stories of writers' encounters with rivers, tracking their landscape alongside humanity's historical relationship with them. History remains intact along the banks and waters of rivers. They are one of the oldest forms of communication between civilisations. Mesopotamia, in the historical region of West Asia, was the site of the earliest development of neolithic revolution and housed the first organised civilisation, situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, offering the first peek into globalisation.
I am part of a mudlarking group (the practice of scavenging along river banks and foreshores for objects of value or history) on Facebook and I check it daily to see what people have found, and how old these precious finds might be. I googled what the oldest find in the Thames was, assuming (and hoping) it would have been discovered by a mud-larker, but disappointingly it was found by a graphic designer on a morning row in 2022. This oldest object found in the River Thames was a 5000-year-old human femur, perfectly preserved in the mud since the neolithic period. Even though the river flows and is free, the mud beneath its surface is a vault for much of humanity's history and evolution. Virginia Woolf writes in her unfinished memoir, “the past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths.” I remember specifically obsessing over this similarity when a loved one was deteriorating with dementia. I thought that if her memory was a river, then it must have just gotten confused between what was supposed to be in the mud and what was supposed to flow. I imagined memories of her past in the riverbed, not lost but unreachable, and her grasp of the present like the flowing river above, forever moving and changing and never quite sticking.
In 2011, Olivia Laing published To the River, an account of her walking the river Ouse from its source near Lower Beeding in West Sussex, to its end in the sea at Newhaven. The book does not feel unlike the passage of memory. Along the river she marks her journey with facts and figures, the different flora that springs up from the banks, and a luxuriously detailed account of the river's innate personal history.
The Ouse is perhaps most famously Woolf's river. One of the biggest features in her diaries from beginning to end, and the river in which she drowned herself in 1941. Jo Hamya's essay I felt Sure She had gone Down to the River in By The River searches through Woolf's interest in the Ouse and it is an appropriate opener to a collection such as this.
When I last walked along part of the Ouse, in Barcombe, we came upon signs about endangered eels. My girlfriend tells me that their reproduction has for a long time been a mystery, something that feels a bit like a magic trick to me. She tells me they migrate to a cave in the Sargasso Sea, breed once, and die. Only in 2022 did scientists find out how exactly these eels breed. Michael Malay, in his essay Nightfishing, writes of eels:
“A recent survey by a group called AMBER has counted more than one million human-made obstructions in rivers and streams across Britain and continental Europe. Upon reaching these shores, then, thousands of miles after beginning their journeys, eels face endless barriers obstructing their progress upstream: tidal flaps, weirs, dams, sluice gates, hydropower stations. In the past fifty years, elver populations in Europe have collapsed by 95 percent”.
By far my favourite piece in the collection is River Mumma by Niellah Arboine, named after the Nile, which is fitting. The essay remembers a river of Arboine's childhood and the folkloric tale of both protective and vengeful River Mumma. Rivers are perhaps a little like folklore; are shifting and moving and hard to grasp, but they have human history within them. She writes:
“Water is complicated to the diaspora I belong to – it carries pain, freedom, fear, death, rebirth and salvation. To me it feels cleansing, soothing, even hypnotising, like meeting a forgotten part of myself, like reconnecting to who I am, where I come from, and where I’ll eventually return.”
Water is more complicated than we like to admit. Elena Savage’s essay discusses the violent history of Britain’s canals, and the part they played in industrialisation and colonisation. She writes in Hydraulics, that “canals had been totally domesticated… they were a mark on the wall that the whole family could no longer see. And if something right in front of you seems at the same time to be invisible, it may be that the invisibility is concealing something horrid.”
Niellah Arboine ends her essay with a love note to River Mumma, the lore of water, and her own history:
“Stories of River Mumma have survived voyages, colonisation and even death itself. To know her is to know the resistance of a people.”
Rivers are life blood, cleansing waters, roads for travelling, ecosystems (both within and along the banks), memorials and memories. They are universal but mysterious in their underbelly. There are plenty of reasons to be obsessed with them.
There is an undeniable politics to rivers, whether that be of industrialisation and empire, fishing populations, ethics of land and water ownership, or personal and cultural history. This collection has touched the surface of these watery histories, but it is too deep and wide a subject to be contained. In 2024 we are all familiar with the Palestinian resistance and with the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. It is impossible to write about the politics and ethics of water and land without including the river Jordan and the occupied Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Although the essay collection predominantly covers the historical life and course of these bodies of water, it is vital to remember that land and bodies of water continue to be political sources of violence and occupation. To honour the river course and the riverbeds is to honour the indigenous populations of the land and water.
Image Daunt Books - By The River: Essays from the Water’s Edge
Edited by Atlanta T
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