When water remembers: queer hydrofeminism, diasporic belonging, and ecological grief in Elif Shafak's there are rivers in the sky (2024)

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This essay examines how Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky (2024) reimagines grief as a praxis that binds the personal to the ecological. Reading Zaleekhah through queer hydrofeminism, postcolonial critique, and diaspora theory, I argue that her relocation to a houseboat on the Thames initiates a queer diasporic re-orientation. Neither homecoming nor capitulation to heteronormative order, she arrives at the recognition that she is a body of water, inseparable from her environment, her past, and her future. Mourning becomes a queer diasporic act of confrontation, reclamation, resistance, and care, urgently needed amid the Anthropocene’s accumulating losses.