Making a Wager for the Knowledge and Preservation of Water in Emmi Itäranta’s Memory of Water (2012)

Climate change has warranted rethinking modes of literary and cultural representations, as argued by critics Rob Nixon (2011) and Mike Hulme (2011), as well as writer Amitav Ghosh (2016), among others. The genre of young adult climate fiction, a subgenre of young adult dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction, as noted by Alice Curry, Alexa Weik von Mossner, and Phoebe Chen, demonstrates key generic, narrative, and stylistic tools for depicting the identity formation of young adults in a post-natural world. This article draws on ecocritical and ecofeminist perspectives to investigate the ways in which Emmi Itäranta’s young adult novel, Memory of Water (2012), portrays water scarcity and insecurity as seventeen-year-old protagonist, Noria Kaitio, comes of age as a tea apprentice. Memory of Water can be categorized as what Hannah Boast calls a “water wars novel” to illustrate the impacts of a changing climate on a vulnerable region and people through the novel’s depiction of a future memory. As this article argues, Itäranta’s future memory creates a palimpsest of past, present, and future time to show a dystopic environmental, political, and cultural landscape. In this setting, Noria explores her connection to her environment through memory while she grapples with her role as an apprentice to the rite of the Asian tea ceremony: a ceremony that relies on water as a source of cultural significance and tradition. Through Noria’s narrative in a climate-changed, Nordic region, Itäranta characterizes the Anthropocene as a time of water wars created and heightened by political and cultural violence.