Until the Nile itself becomes a god.

From the archives: a lyric essay to honour my grandmother.

The White Nile and the Blue Nile meet in Khartoum, a city poor in rain. The White Nile carries light, gray sediments from the Equatorial Lakes. It takes its time. It chooses float plains. It waits to see how the hippos run on its floor, how the mothers leave their herd to birth their babies alone. It sips on the song of the fish eagles and caries them gifts: angara and Nile perch and barbel and catfish and water leopards and mudfish and spiny eels, everything scaled and sealed and wet and soft. Over half of the White Nile evaporates before it reaches Khartoum, it loves the sky so much.

The Blue Nile carries black sediment from Ethiopian highlands. It is a skinnier, more earnest river. Some days when it meets White it takes a step back, uncertain.

Maybe White loves the quiet days, spying on humans planting coffee and sorghum and praying for rain.

Maybe it loves Khartoum but not the losing of its name, the blending of sediment, the hungry 120 million humans waiting in the North and tired of praying for rain, who bleed the Nile into their gardens for a long, long way. Who bleed the Nile until the Nile itself becomes a god. •

“Reclaimed” by Maaike VanderMeer (me).

I’ve shared this lyric essay on Substack before, but today I’m pulling it out of the archives because the painting that goes with it reminds me of stories my Grandma told about her village in the Netherlands being flooded. My Grandma passed away last weekend. When she was a girl, she wrote a story about the Red Cross helping her flooded village, and her story won her a trip to the Hague. She told me that story many times, as well as how she learned English as a young woman in Canada by reading books her employer lent her.

My Grandma loved reading and writing. It’s one of the things I inherited from her and she loved to show off my published stories to her friends. Grandma’s stories of the ocean live at the back of mind of much of what I write. She grew up by the North Sea and I grew up not too far from the White Nile, a river mythologized by many and the main character in this essay.

Here’s to Grandma, and to all the stories we’ve inherited, and to how those stories take root in new landscapes.