Borders have been a defining feature of Amal El-Mohtar’s life, from Canada, where she was born, to Lebanon, where she lived as a child, and the UK, where she studied for a period. It’s unsurprising therefore, that borders are a big part of her fiction. Her epistolary novel, This is How You Lose the Time War, co-written with Max Gladstone, features two agents from rival warring factions, while her new book, The River Has Roots, is a compact and beautiful look at sisterhood and folklore. In the novel, sisters Esther and Ysabel live in Thistleford, where their family’s job is to sing to willow trees. On the other side of the border is the unreachable Faerie. The book was inspired by El-Mohtar’s relationship with her younger sister and her desire to reimagine folk songs like Loreena McKennitt’s “The Bonny Swans”, which she first heard as a teenager. In the song, one sister drowns the other, who then transforms into a musical instrument to expose her murderer. “My younger sister is the dearest person in the entire world to me,” says El-Mohtar, who also plays the harp. “This song tells me nothing of my life, but I’ve always felt drawn to it. I needed to retell this ballad in a way that makes me satisfied.”
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El-Mohtar’s immersion in fantasy, folklore and mythology began early, mainly while she lived in Lebanon between the ages of seven and nine. It was there that she first read The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien – still a favourite – and discovered western myths through a neighbour’s Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Her writing also blossomed in Lebanon, where she became aware of her literary heritage. “The first time I wrote a poem, my parents had this very solemn reaction to it, saying my grandfather was a poet, and how poetry is important and speaks truth to power,” she shares. “To be a poet is to take on this mantle of responsibility, an inheritance and a path to walk through the world.”
Yet, El-Mohtar feels a gap in her connection to the stories of her heritage. “I don’t have that background in terms of folk tales and mythologies of the Middle East,” she says. “And I feel the lack of that very, very deeply.” Perhaps because of this absence, she is acutely aware of ensuring that what is happening – and has been happening – in the Middle East becomes part of her work. “It’s been hard to do the various revision stages and acknowledgements for The River Has Roots while knowing that I’m drawing on my memories of Lebanon as a child,” she says. “But if I think of children in Lebanon today, that is not the experience they’re having. They’re being displaced, they’re being terrorized, they’re being traumatized. And it’s impossible for me to separate those things from each other, so I feel the need to bring that to the foreground whenever I can, even though it’s not part of the story.”
In The River Has Roots, El-Mohtar has her characters Esther and Ysabel sing the Palestinian folkloric resistance song “Tarweedeh Shmaali” (“Lover’s Hymn”), which she discovered on El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe’s album Zajel. Resistance is core to The River Has Roots, a book shaped by the elements that have defined El-Mohtar: sisterhood, borders, languages. She always wants her work to “tell truths and surprise”, and she’s clear about the power of fiction. “What literature can do for the Arab region is exemplified in the enormous efforts expended to silence and repress it,” she says. “Literature is powerful and has the potential and the possibility to stir minds to action and hope and resistance.”
The River Has Roots was published on March 4, 2025. Buy the book here.
From the Vogue Arabia March 2025 issue
