Beneath the Paving Stones, the River

Cities love their rivers. From Shakespeare’s Tiber “chafing with her shores” to Walt Whitman’s ode to the East River’s “scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide,” rivers have always been objects of awe, vigilance, fascination. Order and caprice coexist in them. They demarcate space, in their sinuous length, but threaten always to overspill their bounds. Dreams have thrived on rivers’ mystique: Think of the aged refugee Abu Qais fantasizing, in Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, of “all the things he had been deprived of” by exile, glittering on the other side of the Shatt al-Arab. “Something real” lies in wait there.