What rivers do you visit, on foot or in memory? What rivers do you invent?
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote in “XV” (translated by Antoon): “You said: I used to invent love when necessary. When I walked alone on the riverbank. Or whenever the level of salt would rise in my body, I would invent the river.”
In this issue, eight writers across genre take us to real and speculative rivers, where we are confronted with questions of lineage, longing, history, and the question of crossing. “There are so many prayers/ knifing through the blue,” writes Laura Da’. What is on the other side?
In “Sambatyon,” David Naimon writes, “But even as they came together for the seder, it was as if they were on opposite sides of the river. They could not share their stories, they could not mourn their respective dead together.”
Since writing the call for this issue, the phrase “from the river to the sea,” has evoked rage from those who claim the demand for Palestinian freedom is violence, while turning away from the relentless violence of thousands dead and unburied, ongoingly, in Gaza. Still the river reaches for the sea, and these writers remind us to reach for one another.
I’ve since also moved back to the midwest, the region of my childhood, where I’m getting acquainted with rivers old and new to me. Climate change continues to wreak havoc on the Mississippi’s essential habitats, expanding the Gulf of Mexico’s hypoxic zone. “This land shaken once/ Again says the river,” writes W.T. Joshua, of Haiti and of the world.
Rivers and land speak to each other. Veins of the earth, holding memory. As Vanessa Angélica Villareal writes in “Memory, a Lacuna”: “The land is memory made material, and keeps record of every single one of us.”
What do rivers remember and where do they invite us? I invite you to take your time with the rivers, questions, and longings in this issue.
