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La Mancha and the Kalahari have a similar etymological origin: dry land and place without water.
That is, they share the thirst.
If water is the origin of life, its absence is what has conditioned movement.
It is behind our evolution, migrations, the rise and fall of civilizations and many customs.
Thirst has been one of the driving forces of humanity.
Everything that characterizes us, standing, omnivorous eating, brain development or the invention of new tools are consequences of an adaptation to a drier environment.
Love is also the result of a drought.
The lack of water made us leave Africa in search of fertile land and build systems to retain it
The journalist and anthropologist Virginia Mendoza draws on her family memories in a town in La Mancha to create a history of water through its absence.
Thirst
connects her grandfather's resources for locating and digging wells with the inhabitants of other dry places who also look at the sky with anguish.
Thirst has made us nomadic and sedentary.
It made us leave Africa in search of fertile land and build systems to retain water and distribute it, one of the first steps towards inequality.
In the years of drought beginning in 2450 BC, the cities of Umma and Lagash clashed over water in the first war in history.
As the author explains, the book is neither a memoir nor an essay, but a hybrid that covers everything from how droughts conditioned human evolution to the transition from divination to prediction.
The absence of water precedes human convulsions, whether revolutionary movements or persecutions.
A culprit must be found.
It is a book that could receive the Oscar for best editing.
The jumps in time, space or theme are woven with success and Mendoza plays without abusing the narrative resources so as not to let go of our attention.
Personal memory flees from nostalgia and dissemination doses personal names and data for the benefits of agility.
Thirst also makes us believe in gods.
The flood is a founding myth in dozens of cultures
Ishkur, Adad, Hadad, Baal or Bel.
Thirst has also made us believe in gods.
The flood is a founding myth in dozens of cultures.
Let it rain, let it rain, the Virgin of the Cave.
The Casita, the Bótoa, the Montaña, the Blanca Paloma, the Fuensanta or the Castro also share the ability to summon rain.
All religions have their own prayers to particular divinities and the belief that there are certain people with sensitivity to detect them.
In ancient cultures, drought was a symptom that rulers had lost the favor of divinity and thirst continues to precede revolutions.
Normally, started by that genealogy of anonymous women who ask for bread for their children.
I say thirst and not drought, says the author, because she does not want to leave the causes up in the air.
The absence of water is not only a natural phenomenon, but has to do with its distribution.
The book talks about the lords of water in ancient times or its current use for intensive uses, such as the agri-food sector or tourism.
Thirst is seen in our future and, for some, it is already the present.
According to a UN report, the absence of water has killed 650,000 people in the last fifty years and is estimated to have caused seven hundred million displacements in 2023. The author says that she belongs to a generation that senses that they will have to abandon certain parts of Spain due to the risk of desertification.
The problems are known: the lack of control of irrigation, the overexploitation of aquifers, the intensive use for old uses, such as livestock farming, or new ones, such as data centers.
All these factors come together to create climate change that will cause increasingly intense and prolonged droughts.
We will have to move again because the homeland is there where it rains.
Look for it in your bookstore
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