Bates, C and Moles K. (2023). Living with water: Everyday encounters and liquid connections. Manchester University Press. ISBN 9781526161727 (hardback, £90)
(URL: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526161727/living-with-water/)
Yasmin Ahmed Abdelaziz Hafez
SOAS
To cite this review: Hafez, Y. (2023). Review of “Living with water: Everyday encounters and liquid connections”, Manchester University Press 2023, by Charlotte Bates and Kate Moles, Water Alternatives, http://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/355-living
Living with water or being infatuated with water?
Reading the book's title and the chapters' headlines, I was intrigued by how the book will explain the relations between societies and various bodies of water. The book is divided into three parts inspired by different forms and experiences of water, namely “flow”, “float”, and finally “submerge”. The authors raise questions to understand “how water is part of our everyday lives, how it gives meaning and is made meaningful to practices, encounters and understandings of place and social life, how we live with – and without – water in practice, symbolic and material ways and how we navigate and negotiate social interactions in and around water” (p. 4). They also aim to discuss “the enduring legacies of colonialism and claims to belonging that displace or exclude indigenous people and ways of knowing run through this work too, with the whitewashed histories of surfing and newly imposed communities along the waterside eroding existing narratives and ties to the water and the land” (p.3).
Water is the backbone of the whole book, bringing the different themes and authors stories together. The authors either experienced the waters themselves (experiencing rains, being in ferries, living in boats, or swimming), observed other livelihoods in or around waterscapes (fishing or preserving reefs), or reflected on the dynamics between waterscapes and societies in the past. Not only are researchers writing about water, but they also meant to experience water with all its meanings and sensations and the list of authors also includes visual artists, photographers, swimmers, poets, and writers. On the basis of the authors’ personal and intimate accounts and stories, the book aims not only to present research on water but, by experiencing and living water, to grasp multiple layered perspectives and challenges. However, I argue that using primarily personal accounts as the lens to read and “feel the water” is both the strength and the limitation of the book.
The two stories that stood out for me were the story on “living with/out water: media, memory and gender” and the other on “shifting tides: Anthropocene entanglements and unravelling in the Bay of Fundy”. In the first story, the author positions the representation of women in the media during the droughts in the UK and especially in 1976, explaining how these representations often sexualized women or objectified them. In the second story, the author follows the socio-economic and historical changes colonialism and western interventions inflicted on indigenous fishers and the Bay of Fundy to explain the continuous changes of waterscapes in the Anthropocene.
Water anchors various feelings from joyfulness to grief (stories 16 and 17) to pain and relief and threat (story 3) to joyfulness and emancipation (stories 16, 17, and 18). Some stories read as individual stories and experiences with the authors reflecting and sometimes sharing parts of their diaries, explaining and asking what “experience” water is, what it entails, and what it induces “to challenge us to think about our water vulnerability and the connections, dissections and cuts – through our bodies, places and lives – that water both allows and demands” (p.12). However, by doing solely so without positioning the personal story in a context, I found that these romanticised the water experience as a mystical personal experience rather than positioning it within a realm of complicated political and social issues.
Growing up, each of us had intimate and personal memories of our childhood with and around water. For that, water becomes associated with and rooted in our memories, and from there, we start to change our dynamics and relations with water, either growing fear of it or using it as our escape. Through our life journey, we notice the water changing around us and the fading of memories we used to hold. However, using our personal relationship with water to analyse water bodies requires a tricky dissecting of our privileges to access this body of water in the first place and requires avoiding the romanticisation of water. This striking balance between using personal experience is also a dilemma I struggle with in my work: how to separate my studies of water from my relationship with the bodies of water, and how can I remember that these relations, no matter what they are, are not devoid of political dynamics.
Some of the book's stories melted this separation line between the personal experience and the analysis, requiring looking at more comprehensive political and economic relations. They used their own experiences unfiltered as an analytical tool to understand and transfer knowledge about bodies of water. I found that by doing so, they removed the essence of water, which relates to political powers, economic injustice, and social struggles. Moreover, some authors did not reflect on how their positions or activities in waters are voluntary and, as such, allow them to use swimming as an analytical and intellectual tool, for example, in contrast to other people who are obliged to face water in their journey to survival. For instance, one author asks, “Why is that we want to float? What draws us to the water? what propels us to step onto the side of a boat, to depart land, and to float? Is it an ancient memory, stirring up from within us, reminding us of who we are, of our water-borne origins, where fluids move within us as channels, arteries, capillaries, buoyant that we are.” (p.42). This is not entirely true in other contexts where, for example, one wears a life jacket on the ferries because they do not know how to swim and risk multiple accident due to the lack of safety measures. Not all want to float, sometimes, siding on a ferry is a matter of survival, as refugees do every day. Although the chapter cites Eric Syngedouw well known sentence “water no longer flows downhill, it flows towards money” (p.39), it still romanticised the ferries and the activity of floating. It did not consider people who do not have an alternative but to take this horrendous and inhumane experience to survive.
Another shortcoming of the book relates to the fact that the South is absent in the book as a relational dynamic and a geopolitical sphere. Developing countries are mentioned only twice. The first time in the “floating as an exchange” section. In describing the fees to cross the River Thames, Eva McGrath writes “Bear in describing the Hooghly River (Ganges), that borders India and Bangladesh, writes how the river and its workers are visible in local posters, on the ‘black of buses, majhis – boatmen and their boats appear bearing the Indian flag’ (2015:21) (p.40). The second time it is mentioned, the author writes: “protesting, campaigning and restoring watery places is much harder to achieve in the Global South and is largely hidden from view in the Global North. Yet, in both spaces, it has been going on in hyperlocal ways for quite some time and has mostly been researched in the sciences and social sciences” (p.103).
The lack of presence or discussions on water issues in “developing” places was not something I disliked. There is much work on the topic, however, what could have been done was to talk about “the South” as the unequal distribution of resources within “developed” countries. In most stories, water distribution seemed to be discussed as linear, without references to complexities, local conflicts and compromises. The stories were individualistic in their struggles and discussions, and they were not chained or discussed together to convey messages about the relationship between water and social justice. Saker El-Nour, in his talk at “Civil Society Organizations and Just Transition in the Middle East and North Africa: Challenges and Opportunities” conference in May 2023, mentioned that “the South is not only a place but rather a relational dynamic; there is the South in the North, and there is the North in the South”. So, here, when I say that the south is missing, I mean the relational analysis. How does one’s personal experience rest within a particular context of some accessing water while others are deprived of this right? What makes your experience as it is and different from what other people experience, and what does it tell? The researcher analysis is an interpretation of reality that comes to the surface after personal experiences, background, and other things, and thus, a personal reflection and positioning needs to be done. Yet, it must be stated, and work must be done to explain why we came to this interpterion. Some parts read as a diary and needed to be tied more with the other readings or have an analysis of social and a broader geopolitical dimension.
In conclusion, the book shows through various and different writing styles how we can write about our relations to waters as researchers and artists. In some cases, this allowed discussions on social justice and gender issues. In other cases, if the positionality goes unchecked, explaining our relations to waterscapes using metaphors and diaries bears the risk of romanticising waterbodies and separating them for the socioeconomic and political contexts. Moreover, using personal experience without discussing positionality conceals perks and privileges while not allowing us to speak about pressing matters.
