A quest for selfhood in a world ravaged by climate chaos in Itӓranta’s Memory of Water

A quest for selfhood in a world ravaged by climate chaos in Itӓranta’s Memory of Water

Hailey Dansby, University of Florida

Abstract

In Memory of Water, Emmi Itaranta weaves a nuanced speculative backdrop of climate chaos to reframe the familiar coming-of-age tale. The protagonist, seventeen-year-old Noria, must find her way in a world wracked with uncertainty and desperation. In a time where drastic water shortage shapes every aspect of society, Noria trains to become a tea master, learning to honor and protect water. Caught in the ebb of her duty to her parents and society and the flow of adventurously imagining a better outcome for her community, Noria must find her voice and act according to her own agency.

The elements of the story world which evidence a shift in human-environment interactions and intimate non-human agential forces are what ultimately allow Noria to take definitive action. Perhaps the key force of the story, water, is intertwined with both human memory and non-human memory. Noria’s uncanny connection to water elicit in her an understanding of her place in the progression of time. Similarly, the omnipresent insects in Memory of Water intimate and inspire transformation and potentiality. These forces teach Noria that making a mark on the future can take any form, even self-sacrifice. Itaranta fixates on the individual’s responses to a drastically changed world and complicates the idea of selfhood within this context.

The Push and Pull of Water

As early as the opening page of the novel, Itaranta creates an uncanny bond between Noria’s consciousness and the consciousness of water. Tea master training teaches that the flow of water is synonymous to the flow of life. The tea master fosters a spiritual connection between participants in the ceremony and the water used to make tea. Water functions in the novel as “the most versatile of all elements” which “walks with the moon and embraces the air and isn’t afraid to die in fire or live in air” (5). The lyrical quality of water’s ability to change states of matter is captured in this moment, bringing this abiotic factor to life. The fluidity of water, its omnipresence, and its lack of binary and sequence is what carries the events of the novel. Itaranta gives this water agency in the same way she gives human characters agency in this story world, intimating that if water has agency tandem to humans, perhaps humans can change states of matter as well.

Itaranta’s exploration of water as an agent is potent; immediately she challenges the perceived ease and simplicity of water’s flow, its passive materiality and its lent to anthropocentric control. By giving water a consciousness and thus a memory, Itaranta manipulates the narrative framework of the novel. Noria’s tale is not told in the chronologic as she states in the opening of the novel “I can pick my own beginning. Perhaps I will pick my own end” (6). She proceeds to give an achronological introduction to her story: her father takes her to a hidden well which feeds the family’s water consumption in times of dire need—a “place that didn’t exist”. While this beginning is the one Noria chooses, Noria intimates an alternate beginning that begins with a “choice [she] had felt obliged to make, not really a choice” to be the Tea Master’s apprentice, a choice that “seemed to make [her] parents happy, and didn’t make [her] miserable, and those were the things that mattered at the time” (6). Noria’s life is framed in this timeline by her obliged loyalty to her father’s craft. With hindsight, she identifies a force greater than mere obligation in her.

Although Noria’s role as a tea apprentice and later tea master was not her own chosen path, the consequences of her obligation provide her with the tools she later needs to forge her own path. Noria’s tea master training pivots on an intuitive bond between human and water. From the beginning of the novel onwards, Itaranta signals the agency of water as entirely separate from human agency yet irrevocably intertwined. In her chosen beginning, the visit to the hidden spring, Noria feels and hears the spring’s water “flowing free, entirely pushed by its own weight and will”, sensing it “wasn’t tame or narrow, not chained in manmade confines. It wrapped [her] and pulled [her] in, until it was as close as the walls, close as the dark” (11). This is a pivotal moment because although sympathetic to the narrative ability of water due to her unique training, this is the first moment that Noria sees water as not a vessel for human thought or history, but simply as a vessel. As Fatma Aykanat notes, this language “releases a nonhuman entity from its human-made constraints” (8). Here in fact there is a reversal, the water in the spring enacts its agency and force on Noria, giving her a glimpse of a world beyond her own senses and understanding. This moment is confusedly sensory as Noria both sees, hears, and feels the agency of the water. She first reads it as an unfamiliar type of silence but comes to understand it as an omnipotent force. Noria’s self-awareness is heightened by her awareness of water’s pull.

Water’s messages are often subtle and difficult to detect, reflecting Noria’s difficulty in detecting the currents of her own desires. Noria’s practice in tea master duties allows her to trace these:

the flow merely grows and fades and changes, like water in the iron cauldron, like life. When I realized this, my movements began to shift, leaving the surface of my skin and my tense muscles for a deeper place inside (32).

Water’s agency pushes and pulls Noria, as though she is physically caught in a rip current. Its movement and power baffle her and present a challenge for her; water is impossible for her to truly master, but she learns that she can master herself.

Although Noria’s world is so drastically changed by climate change that it is always hot, she has a haunting dream about snow that connects her to a past world. Noria ponders “the suspended moment, the movement stopped in a snow crystal or a shard of ice. Stillness, silence. An end, or perhaps a beginning” (41). Noria obsesses over the changing state of water and the suspension it creates, a pause in the global memory. Perhaps this is her chance to halt the movement, yet “she felt no closer to past-world winters” (41). Recalling the moment in which she is first discovered using the hidden spring, “the memory slips and slides and shatters” (181). The metaphorical action of Noria’s memory mimics ice; her memory is distorted by an attempt to stop its flow. Noria’s awareness of water’s transformations allow her to accept the changes and the memories which she cannot control.

Ultimately, the force of water pushes and pulls Noria into a more fluid and forgiving timeline than human-constructed time. The memory of water connects Noria to a generational past and a generational future. More than that, it connects her to the timeline of the earth, including every source of agency on the planet. The changes that must take place started before her lifetime and will continue after hers. Water links this notion to Noria’s sense of self: she realizes “time is not to be trusted. A few weeks can seem like the beginning of forever, and it’s easy to be blinded when you believe nothing needs to change” (179). The events of Noria’s life are caught up in a river, flowing from choices made for her to choices made independently once she realizes that everything must change.

The Resilience of Insects

Just as the water carries Noria’s sense of self, the presence of insects trains her sensibilities. The omnipresence of insects in Emmi Itarantas’s Memory of Water evidences a shift in human-environment interactions as does the consciousness of water. The insects represent an agency of resilience and determination. They are Noria’s constant companions on her quest to listen to water as well as herself.

The implied evolution of an entirely new and culturally useful insect, the blazefly, illuminates the unimaginable. When Noria descends into the spring’s fell with her father, the blazeflies connect Noria’s senses. Noria hears the sound of the spring but does not understand what she is encountering until “the light of the blazeflies finally hit the sound” (11). The blazeflies force Noria to reconcile that which she cannot believe reality. After all, the spring in the fell “doesn’t exist”. When Noria returns home, she connects to the blazeflies as she listens to them “bouncing against their sun-baked glass walls” and later watches them spring “up into the air and vanish into the bushes” (14). In this moment, the blazeflies intimate a restlessness in Noria that she cannot yet place, a restlessness first introduced by the water in the spring.

Additionally, a cultural anxiety over insects in the novel develops as many clothing items and structures specifically protect against insects. This anxiety attests to the newfound prevalence of certain insect populations. However, these tools (insect hoods and insect-net walls) signal an innovation and a resilience to the shifting realities of human existence. The anti-insect innovations are integral enough in everyday life to serve as tokens of remembrance. As Noria mourns her father’s death, her upkeep of their house lapses:

dust gathered in thick, grey threads on the webs that spiders spun in the corners while I wasn’t looking. Long-legged, soft-winged insects that were the color of dead leaves came seeking a faint glint of light inside the house and lost themselves in the maze of walls and closed spaces. Their dried bodies would crunch under the debris slowly accumulating in places I had no time or energy to sweep often: twig-fragile legs, scale-glittery wings torn off hollow bodies, black-eyed heads with broken antennae twisted towards silence forever. The change was stronger and faster than me. The house was different, and my life was different, and I had to submit to it, even as my blood screamed against it (127).

The accumulation of dead insects also signals a lapse in Noria’s sense of self. This moment contrasts with the earlier vivacity of insects as these “soft-winged” and dead leaf colored visitors are feeble. They submit to the closed and unnavigable channels of Noria’s mind in grief. Here, her resilience cedes to forces, like the water, that change faster than she can adjust. And yet, the insect bodies remain until they decompose and turn into something else. They become silent, but their parts are left behind; in a way they continue to adapt after death alongside Noria as she slowly attunes to death. Her resilience resurfaces when she recognizes that “life [is] different” and that she must embrace it.

Noria revisits the restlessness of the blazeflies as she reconnects with the relics of the Jansson expedition and forms her plan to change reality for herself and her town. As Noria prepares to venture into the Lost Lands, she encounters this scene: a smoke haze of insects hovered in the air like clusters of abandoned shadows. They would fall apart for a short while, scatter around me when I walked through them, and clench again into swarming statues dimming the landscape like ancient spirits risen under stones of buried memories made visible (203).

The insects blur her path, but then redirect it. They link her to the past that she cannot grasp or even give words to, the same past that water pushes her towards. The “swarming statues” the insects create evoke the relics of the past world found in the plastic graveyard. The insects bring the past to the forefront of Noria’s mind and blend it with the future and even the present. Walking through the realm called the Dead Forest she absorbs

its bare trunks and branches twisted towards the sky sand-dry and colorless like a cobweb woven across the landscape, or the empty husks of the insects caught in it. Life no longer circulated in them, their veins were brittled and broken, their skins frozen into letters of a forgotten language, near-incomprehensible marks of what had once been (203).

Insects evince the records of the Jansson expedition that guide Noria as well as what she will ultimately leave behind. Like the insect debris produced during her mourning, these insects remain even after life flows out of them. The exoskeletons that facilitate this are not only the “near-incomprehensible marks of what had once been”, but the blueprints for what the future will be. This exoskeleton is the same structure that must have aided the insects in their adaptation to the changed world, as its cuticle prevents water loss and increases drought tolerance.

While Noria is trapped in her house by the government officials, her awareness is again harnessed by insects. She begins to read their exoskeleton’s blueprints; she notices “a moth caught in a cobweb under the eaves” where she hadn’t seen it a day before (225). It leads her to the realization of her own bodily ephemerality as she examines her foot and its “brittle bone and think skin, which spread pale and vulnerable” (225). In this observation, Noria receives intimations of the sacrifice she ultimately makes. She realizes that her life force is fleeting, but she has the power to leave behind an exoskeleton.

Conclusion

Memory is colored and moved both by water and insects. In the end, these two forces meld together to reveal to Noria what she always knew herself: she must share her memories.

Something stirred deep in my memory: another fly, its heavy body glistening green and black, its wings whirring as it sought its way up and down a tight mesh wall, looking for an opening… The memory unfolded further. The fly gave up on the mesh wall and landed on the table covered with tools and pieces of cable… My mind was trying to grasp something, an invisible strand that ran through years and ages and lives (252).

Here, an insect’s presence connects the flow of water with the continuance of the flow of Noria’s memory. Her resilience takes a new form beyond her physical life—it transforms into her written word. The words she leaves behind will keep in motion the changes that are already in place; her role was to continue this motion all along.

It is Noria’s heightened ecological awareness that allows her to place her life, her actions, and her memory into a history greater than human history. Selfhood in the conventional sense is replaced with a deeper understanding of ecological markers of time’s passing and thus her own role within that context. At the same time Noria feels her smallness as “grass grew, people breathed, the world turned… everything changed: changed what we knew, changed what we felt, changed like a sea that rises and swallows all streets and houses, will not withdraw, will not give back what it has claimed” she also realizes she “can pick [her] own ending, the one [she] wants” (195, 260). Thus, Noria’s great action is to accept her own mortality but to leave behind the carefully constructed blueprints for life in a changed world with a newfound understanding of one’s self.

Works Cited

Aykanat, Fatma. “Mneumonic agency of water in the Anthropocene: material and dicoursive entanglements in Emmi Itaranta’s dystopian Cli-Fi novel Memory of Water”. 2018.

Itaranta, Emmi. Memory of Water. Harper Collins, 2014.

Download the paper here

Hailey Dansby is in her third year at UF. She is a food writer for Spoon University and a lab technician at the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity. She is interested in the intersections between scientific knowledge and speculative fiction. Today she is presenting a paper on non-human agency in a climate fiction work entitled: “A quest for selfhood in a world ravaged by climate chaos in Itaranta’s Memory of Water."