The Tiller of Waters

In The Tiller of Waters Hoda Barakat weaves together the tales of two converging lives, entwined by a passion for cloth, and the significance of different fabrics.  

The story begins as the Lebanese parents of Niqula Mitri, Jirjis Mitri and his wife, journey towards Greece from Egypt, where they had spent much of their lives.  However, thanks to his wife's desire to revisit her homeland Lebanon, they stop off in the troubled city of Beirut, and settle there with their son.   

Jirjis Mitri is a cloth merchant, whose business blossoms upon his return to Lebanon. Niqula grows up in the war-torn city, yet is veiled from the sadness and despair of this environment by the beauty and softness of the fabrics that surround him.  The devotion to cloth is something passed on from father to son, binding them together in a shared passion.  

As Niqula grows, his love for cloth merges with his growing adoration for the family's young Kurdish maid, Shamsa. Through Niqula, Shamsa learns to appreciate and recognise all the various textiles her lover shows her.  Each step in her education in textiles comes to symbolise a new stage in her love affair with Niqula.  As she is introduced to linen, silk, velvet and then the most delicate lace, so she becomes increasingly intimate with Niqula.

As well as symbolising Niqula and Shamsa's love affair, cloth also represents the modern world.  While natural textiles have to contend with their nemesis, man-made fibres, so too do other industries constantly produce artificial replicas of the natural. Niqula Mitri's father viewed this progression in a negative light; he called it 'The Age of Diolen'.  To him it represented how society, in its aspiration to modernise, loses out on detail and quality in the pursuit of speed and convenience.  

Once Shamsa and Niqula have become intimate, it is Shamsa who takes over the story telling. She tells him about her family, and through this Barakat depicts both the rural life of Shamsa’s Kurdish relatives, and the urban experiences of other family members, juxtaposing once again the traditional and the modern, the natural and the man-made.  

Hoda Barakat brings together the timeless theme of love and the contemporary anxiety concerning tradition and modernity in The Tiller of Waters, showing the reader that, just as Jirjis Mitri believed, life’s lessons can be learned through the world of fabrics.