“Because even a river can be lonely, even a river will die of thirst,” writes the poet Natalie Diaz in the epigraph to If the River is Hidden – and as Cherry Smyth and Craig Jordan-Baker’s intertwined journey along the river Bann courses forward, so the power and truth of these words become ever more magnified.
The Bann – flowing north from the Mourne uplands to discharge quietly into the ocean on the Derry coast – is not only Northern Ireland’s longest river, but also and indisputably its loneliest. Its unemphatic waters are readily overlooked, and its complex human and natural histories have long been overshadowed by the river’s harsh given identity as the carrier of the “Bann divide”, a score across the landscape that separates Northern Ireland’s economically neglected western counties from those in the relatively more prosperous east.
Smyth and Jordan-Baker remedy such disregard in this innovative, deeply imagined, and delicately wrought book. Alternating between prose and poetry, their narratives capture a wealth of moments in this river’s life, explore its past and anticipate its future, and glance at those episodes in their own histories that have intersected with the Bann. The book’s preface encapsulates perfectly this sense of personal freight, as the authors reflect upon the slow accretions of identity and of memory – their lives lived in southern England, but influenced by memories of Ireland, and by the long shadows of the Troubles.
Presently, we are brought to the river’s hesitant beginnings, “hidden and diffused in countless rills and trickles” in the landscape below Spelga Dam, to begin the expedition – but we soon see that this will be a journey of pauses and circumlocutions: “Spelga was sweetened yoghurt,” we are reminded, in a bright light shaft of childhood memory, “not speilgeach, place of pointed rocks”.
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Such halts afford the opportunity for many insights: into the enduring reticence that flows below the shrill discourses of society in Northern Ireland; the severe orthodoxies of Presbyterian culture, and their bruising psychological effects; and most urgently of all, the looming ecological death of this ostensibly serene river. Grief and loss pulse through this account of the Bann – the bitter consolation being that we can at least learn to recognise and cherish its manifold lives and identities, while they yet remain.
