A daughter recalls her father’s near-loss in a river — and follows the water outward into questions of borders, violence, and what the Mediterranean remembers.
Long before I was born, my father bathed in a river that leads to the Mediterranean and lost his sight.
There are many Mediterraneans in my mind. There is the gentle water of my childhood, a mother’s womb; the drying salt on my skin, the scratch of my father’s beard on my brow. I’m scared I’ll forget the things that matter when I grow up: the smell of blooming jasmine and orange, the first taste of lemon granita, the thrum of cicadas in the heady cedar air. Sometimes, when I sink beneath the waters and the world becomes soft-sun-shot-through-blue, I pretend I am drifting backwards in time, returning myself to a shallower, navigable, world.
But that is only pretending.
The Mediterranean accepts all those on her waters. Drowning doesn’t care about names, or passports, or university degrees. Storms don’t care about borders.
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Toni Morrison writes, “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” In her poem, “The First Water is the Body,” Mojave poet Natalie Diaz continues:
Back to the body of
earth, of flesh, back to the mouth, the throat, back to the womb
back to the heart, to its blood, back to our grief, back back back.
Will we remember from where we’ve come? The water.
And once remembered, will we return to that first water, and in doing so return to ourselves, to each other?
Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?
Will our middle sea forget that we made her the dividing line between those human enough to move, and those not? What have we forgotten in our game of drawing lines? What would it mean to remember, to open our eyes and see again that first, shared, water that we come from, cradled between olive and cypress?
There is no oracle: only time will tell if we did what we knew needed doing.
In his book H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness, Ivan Illich warns that the West has drunk from the Lethe, the river of the underworld from Greek myth, which erases all memories of those who touch it. Illich says that we have forgotten the waters of the deep imagination, forgotten water as anything other than a resource. Bhavani Raman writes that “before landscapes die, they must first vanish in the imagination.” I am haunted by myriad vanishing waters. In some, the sea is rich and teeming, and her people are protected/protectors, heart-home. In some, it is a barren carcass, its shores scarred with shiny white resorts, and rivers die before they reach the sea. In some…
Unsoothable thirst is one type of haunting.
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Once, when I was small, I got caught in the undertow of a wave. I spun round and round and round, trapped, dragged against the shingle, caught breathless in the churn. It was a water lesson, a matter of seconds in shallow water that taught me to respect the currents in which I played. And so I get to write about the Mediterranean as if she is a lover, to wax poetic in little notebooks about hot days and rosemary and breathless swims under a laughing moon. I get to miss her from the safety and removal of my bedroom in Scotland. Meanwhile, the soil and groundwater of Gaza is drenched in the blood of murdered Palestinians, from bomb, famine, heat, and drone. Meanwhile, people on the move are disappeared in the landscapes of North Africa into European-funded detention centers. Meanwhile, little bodies in lovingly-tied too-big life jackets arrive on the beaches of Greece to the clicking of cameras and the tightening of EU immigration policy. Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile…
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The Mediterranean is only 1% of our ocean’s surface, but it is home to around 18% of all marine species. Beneath the blue, there should be vast seagrass meadows, but the Med is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth. We are overfishing the waters that have fed us for millennia by nearly 80%. Beaches and the bellies of turtles are pockmarked with plastic, which will remain long after we are dust and gone. How can we not be more grateful to this sea that provides us with sea bass, sardine, and mullet? With oysters, kelp, and crab. The sea is the main source of food for millions of people, and it has been there for us and our ancestors time after time. I wonder what will we say to our children, and their children’s children, when they ask why we gutted the sea and poisoned the rivers? There is no oracle: only time will tell if we did what we knew needed doing.
Water remembers. In 2011, in the occupied territory of Washington state, the Elwha River was undammed. The water re-flooded its body of riverbeds. The estuary was rebirthed; the salmon ran home. Scientists were awed by the rate of revival, but the Klallam people of the Lower Elwha had not forgotten the waters. They are continuously resisting and remaining and defending. On the other side of Turtle Island, Innu artist and activist Lydia Mestokosho-Paradis said of the Mutehaku Shipa river: “She – the river – has a memory of the people…when you are connected with her, you can be connected with the ancestors… I see the river like a person in-between, who makes connections in time and space.” In Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi author Robin Wall Kimmerer describes how many Indigenous languages possess a “grammar of animacy,” where a river or bay are verbs (“to be a bay,” “to river”), rather than the nouns they are in English. In those language-worlds, a bay is not inanimate but instead a living moment where water has chosen “to be a bay.” Not river (object), but River (subject). Water is always living, moving, becoming. The Māori proverb “Ko au te Awa; ko te Awa ko au” means “I am the river; the river is me.” It is quoted in the 2017 Act that recognized the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand as a legal person, deserving of protection and rights.
Will you fight for the Mediterranean? Will you defend the web of rivers that run to her, the neural network of blue and brown and red-silt veins that ripen the first peach of summer for my lips?
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Long before I was born, my father swam in a river that leads to the Mediterranean and lost his sight. Half his body was temporarily paralyzed after exposure to contaminated water, likely due to a dead animal upstream. Through luck, through miracle, through science, this loss was not to last. He regained his sight, and most of his movement.
Under Illich’s warning, I begin to work upriver. Something is polluting the waters. Something is making it so we cannot see each other for what we all are. In her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe describes the process of ‘wake work’ as a “mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives.” We all occupy and are occupied by the unfolding dimensions of the past.
In Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist writes “You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.” Europe’s ongoing colonial violence and white supremacy is polluting our present. Its ontology of destruction is pervading waters everywhere. It is contaminating possible imaginaries. It is trying to blind the future. We have made the sea a monster, a killer of dreams. Through technologies developed on Palestinian bodies, Europe’s surveillance stretches further into Africa and Southwest Asia, penetrating everything from desert to government, mountains to coast. These technologies of control connect all of us, from the Sonora to Minneapolis, from London to Jenin. Urgently, Diaz asks:
If we poison and use up our water, how will we clean our wounds
and our wrongs? How will we wash away what we must leave
behind us? How will we make ourselves new?
How, how, how. I do not know. We must clean our waters. We must heal. We are not condemned to the dark. We are not condemned to blindness. I can choose to open my eyes and see.
It may sting.
A stanza from Robert Desnos’ poem, “Epitaph,” written in a concentration camp before his murder in 1945 for resisting fascism and genocide, reads:
You who live, what have you made of your luck?
Do you regret the time when I struggled?
Have you cultivated for the common harvest?
Have you enriched the town I lived in?
I ask myself these questions. I return to the mother-sea and sister-rivers, and I tell them that I love them. Along all these waters I find people: people loving, people laughing, people dying. I see small boats out to sea. I watch the news and the witnessing. I try to have courage.
You who live…
When you leave the Mediterranean, don’t forget to tell her that you love her.
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The introduction to the late Barry Lopez’s anthology, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, reads: “The love of place can sustain a life, and we usually talk as though it’s an unreciprocated love, a one-way street. These essays show why that is wrong. The places love us back in how they steady and sustain us, teach us, shelter us, guide us, feed us… So, in a sense, in learning to love the Earth and particular places in it, we are learning to love back what loved us all along.” Within, Lopez writes, “we are searching for the boats we forgot to build… To survive what’s headed our way… and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations.” I am trying to start conversations with unfamiliar places and pluralities. To open myself to knowing, to loving.
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In late August of 2025, I set out to walk the River of Woe. The Acheron, a real river in northern Greece, is made famous in myth as the entrance to the Underworld across which Charon ferries the dead. Before I enter a river, I like to say hello and introduce myself. That day I was welcomed by the sun bearing down and snow-melt cold that bit into bone. The river of pain was delivering on its named promise, but like it often is in life: the only way forward was by wading through. I managed to extract my numb legs after a couple slow-going hours and began tacking up the steep gorge sides until I met the remains of an Ottoman-era road. Like any good adventure, this was spur-of-the-moment, and I was therefore fairly ill-equipped. I continued upward into the baking bay and fir forest, sweltering slowly under the midday sun on my winding snake-path. From above, the world became the bright blue of summer sky burning in my eyes, pressed against the green-and-white hips and shoulders of the mountains. Below me were the elbows and knees of the meandering pale blue string that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the mountain groves of Dodona, which in the old stories was the site of an oracle. Where the Acheron meets the sea are the ruins of the Necromanteion, the ancient Greek oratory of the dead. I may have lacked water in the heat-drenched air, but I could hazily recall lines from Etel Adnan:
In the waters of certain rivers
there is a wild happiness
in Yosemite Valley,
with the color of the Pacific still
trailing in my eyes, I buried
the essential and the inessential. That
happiness will survive my death
I have known many rivers. I have known many seas. I learnt to read water before I learnt to read poems. Now there are many of both I call friends, brothers, sisters. They move with(in) me. I have found no words that can contain a river. The river runs beyond articulation. The river is my body. My mother asks me what it is to be a woman. I do not know yet, but for now I can say: A woman is a braid. A woman is a river. I descend back into the cold current of the Acheron. Have you ever been carried by a river?
Truly this is a wild happiness.
