Most of us—Muslims, Jews, Christians, Agnostics; Natives and immigrants; Black and White—believe in progress: our lives are easier than were those of our grandparents; our children’s will be better than ours. At least that is our hope. There is another way of looking at things.
In my day job and private life, my great current joy is working with—and just being with—Indians. Mostly Nez Perce, but other Plateau tribes as well, and sometimes reaching back to the Ojibwe I lived next to but did not really see in my first 10 Minnesota years.
If you spend any time in Northwest Indian Country—on the ground or in books and movies and conversation, you know that Coyote stories are part of the culture. An important part. They are teaching tools and entertainment; they bridge generations and sometimes tribal differences. They teach the “how to” of life as well as how we and the animals and rest of creation got here and how we interweave with each other. Coyote, like all of us, gets into trouble occasionally, and has to reach out to his friend and rival, Fox.
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Taking a break from the trials and politics of current disjointed and chaotic American life, I reached back to a golden time in my own life, a time when I was young and living and working in Turkey and traveling in other Middle Eastern countries. In the 1960s, before the Palestinian Intifadas and before our country’s tragic misadventure in Vietnam, the Middle East was a wonderful place for a young American to work and learn. What a city Beirut was! And Aleppo and Tehran—and Istanbul! The Mediterranean was blue and warm and gorgeous, and the food was terrific. (How bland our black olives are compared to kalamata olives; how beautiful it is to watch raki—ouzo in Greece—slowly turn milky with water or ice. The Turks call it “Lion’s Milk.”)
So, I picked up a novel by an expat Turkish writer living in England, Elif Shafak. The title is “There are Rivers in the Sky.” It’s a historical novel that spans centuries and cultures, weaving three stories—that of a very poor boy genius from the sewers of London in the 1850s; another from a Yazidi girl from the banks of the Tigris River in Turkey in 2014 as a giant dam is taking away her village; and a 2018 story of a fragile, seemingly broken Yazidi descendent living in London in 2018.
The writing is beautiful, and the research stupendous.. There is the first old poem, that predates Homer, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” written in cuneiform, that haunts the genius and eventually sends him to ancient Mesopotamia. And the history of London and the River Themes, historic glimpses of the London Museum and the city itself, along with those of Paris and Constantinople on the genius’s journey. And scenes of contemporary London and a small diaspora of Yazidi descendants. The author has learned and tells us much about the religion of the Yazidis—a religion older than Christianity and Islam and people I only heard about but never met in my Middle Eastern years. Enough to say that beginning in 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL) raped and slaughtered Yazidis in Iraq in an attempt to destroy the old religion.
All of this in an intricately told tale that brings all together through water, from the 1850s sewers along the Themes in London to the damming of the Tigris and the state of the Themes in London today.
It’s dizzying, and right in the heart of it, on page 236, Shafak makes a distinction between clock time and Story-time that brings me back to the Nez Perce and Coyote. The old Yazidi grandmother is instructing her granddaughter as they prepare to go to ancient Nineva in Iraq as their Turkish village is about to be inundated by the dam.
“’Remember, my heart, Story-time is different from clock time.’
“Clock-time, however punctual it may purport to be, is distorted and deceptive. It runs under the illusion that everything is moving steadily forward, and the future, therefore, will always be better than the past. Story-time understands the fragility of peace, the fickleness of circumstances, the dangers lurking in the night but also appreciates small acts of kindness. That is why minorities do not live in clock-time.
“They live in Story-time.”
And, looking at the world around us today, maybe the clock-time we all depend on is not so effective at describing our lives. Story-time and Coyote have much to teach us.
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