At the age of 13, when some girls become passionate about ponies, Anjana Khatwa developed an infatuation with rocks. Growing up in a Hindu family in Slough, she had a moment of epiphany on holiday in south-east Kenya when she walked across an ancient lava flow and felt convinced that the rock beneath her feet was ‘an animate entity… alive with stories that needed to be heard’. From then on, rocks have been, well, her rock.
More than a geologist, Khatwa calls herself an ‘earth scientist’. So, while there is plenty of geology in this book, some of it mildly challenging (‘Along with other silica-rich microcrystalline rocks such as obsidian and agate, flint breaks with a conchoidal fracture’), there is also mythology, folklore, ecology and spirituality. Khatwa aims to show that rocks can teach us lessons – about ‘resilience and fortitude’ and ‘empathy and humility’. (She’s hot on humility –nothing wrong with that.) Rocks can form ‘emotional bonds’ with us. How? Well, by whispering.
Khatwa is frustrated that rocks are excluded from conversations which discuss the value of nature in our lives. Exposure to rocks, as to trees and animals, she believes, has the power to ‘improve cognitive function, reduce blood pressure and improve mental health’. So, if Robert Macfarlane can wonder whether a river is alive, then perhaps it is reasonable for Khatwa, who also calls herself ‘a rock whisperer’, to ask whether rocks can speak to us – whether they have in fact been doing so since before the formation of language itself.
Her answer is yes. Rocks whisper not in beautiful, indecipherable voices, like birds, but in plain words. As Khatwa walks through the Chilterns, a piece of Cornish granite in her rucksack scolds her: ‘I don’t belong here. Why have you brought me to this place?’ And as she enters the Stonehenge exhibition at the British Library, the noise that greets her is not the chatter of the milling crowds but the ‘cacophony’ emanating from the stone objects on display. ‘Across the back wall, dozens of flint and chert hand axes are hung in formation like migrating birds. They chirp at me, proudly showing off their sharp feathered edges.’ At regular intervals through the book, rocks deliver italicised disquisitions, some lasting almost a page.
Some readers may love the whispering, and Khatwa is surrounded by a rock fraternity (with an eye-rolling sense of humour: ‘Hey! Gneiss rock!’). On the summer solstice at Stonehenge, visitors ‘press their bodies up against the standing monoliths, embracing them like a long-lost love’. Walking down Piccadilly towards Fortnum & Mason, her friend Dr Ruth Siddall engages in ‘a series of multiple conversations with every paving stone’. But there will also be those who feel a queasy foreboding as the whispery passages hove into view. In the National Geological Repository near Nottingham, the rocks are housed in boxes, so their whispers are muted. I’m afraid I thought: ‘Phew!’
And then I felt guilty. ‘I have become an expert at hiding my true self,’ Khatwa says; but as she reveals in the course of the book, she is vulnerable. Her father arrived in Britain as part of the mass migration of East African Asians in 1968, just after Enoch Powell made his ‘Rivers of blood’ speech, and even now, having lived for 20 years on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, she feels that, ‘as a brown person’, she is not wholly accepted. When her daughter was tiny, Khatwa was deserted by her husband. So every time I experienced a wave of cynicism about the rock whispering, I thought of Yeats: ‘Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.’
As she travels the world – from Ethiopia to the Valley of the Kings, from Petra to the Yucatan Peninsula – Khatwa’s vulnerability makes her sensitive to the suffering of indigenous minorities whose rocks have been subject to the ‘ravages of colonialism’. Hoa Hakananai’a, a carved basalt moai – a statue filched from Easter Island in 1868 to amuse Queen Victoria – towers over visitors in the British Museum. But only the indigenous Rapa Nui people comprehend its true significance, and Khatwa believes it should be returned to them, fast. I’m with her.
With every story she tells, happy or tragic, Khatwa feels in her bones ‘the magic of deep time’, that fashionable but mind-bending concept that encourages us to think back unimaginable aeons to before man walked on Earth. There’s an undertow of melancholy here: supposing we look forwards rather than backwards, how much longer have we got? Thousands of years? Just hundreds? Khatwa believes that, if we could just pay attention to the whispers of rocks, we might have longer than we think. ‘Close this book,’ she concludes, ‘and step out into a new world… There the whispers of rocks will greet you as an old friend.’ Maybe.
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