The Voice of Sulina (Dutch: De stem van Sulina) – a hydrofeminist river novel

One of my big interests is stories that echo ecofeminist and hydrofeminist principles. I like to write them, but to become a better writer, you need to read. My next fiction projects, Tussenzee and the hydrofeminist retelling of Egle, will translate hydrofeminist theory into story, so I went looking for stories that already do this.

I found Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, a powerful book. Another one turned up closer to home. In 2025, I shared a session on science fiction and ecology with a North-American publisher at the Integrated Design Symposium in Innsbruck. She told me she was expanding her portfolio with European fiction on ecological themes, and I told her about a Flemish book. Months later, I heard she had bought it, and that the English translation will appear in spring 2027.

That book is De stem van Sulina (English title: The Voice of Sulina), a lyrical novel by the Belgian writer Anneleen Van Offel, which has been translated by Fiona Graham. Consider this blog an advertisement, but also an explanation of why I call it hydrofeminist.

The story

While a dark shadow slides across the weather maps of Central Europe, a woman travels in a campervan along the Danube, from its source in the Black Forest to its mouth in the Black Sea. Which voices rise from the river?

A pregnant writer and her partner, Leon, follow the river all the way to Sulina in Romania. Archaeological excavations, centuries-old stories, confronting questions and dreams, bodily transformations and forgotten women shape the mental journey of a young writer who is becoming a mother.

What the Belgian and Dutch press said

Knack called it “a meditation on the wilderness within ourselves and an ode to fertile femininity.” In De Standaard der Letteren, Lodewijk Verduin wrote that the novel “reveals itself as a network of meanings that sparks and crackles with discoveries.” De Tijd praised the versatility of her storytelling as enviable. Doorbraak noted that Van Offel is at her best when she browses through philosophers, ethnologists and myth collectors, weaving an associative web around the ecofeminism she sees reflected in the Danube. Pieter van de Walle wrote that every birth is a double birth: while the child is born, a mother is born too. (Source: https://www.anneleenvanoffel.be/destemvansulina)

I could not resist this. Feminist themes, mythology, travelling… hello?

What is hydrofeminism?

Hydrofeminism explores the relational entanglements between water, bodies and feminist thought. Coined by Astrida Neimanis (2017), it starts from the premise that all bodies are bodies of water: fluid, porous, interdependent. Water becomes a medium through which we can rethink subjectivity, kinship, temporality, location and care beyond anthropocentric and patriarchal logics. Hydrofeminism dissolves the rigid boundaries between self and other, land and sea, human and more-than-human, emphasising embodied connectivity, vulnerability and mutual becoming (Bozalek et al., 2024). It connects with Stacy Alaimo’s transcorporeality (2010): bodies are entangled with their environments, from what we eat and breathe to how we move through toxic, permeable landscapes. (Wuyts et al., 2027, upcoming book chapter)

Why is this book hydrofeminist?

First, the body is the river and the river is the body. Van Offel mirrors the house and the campervan to the womb, the river to the shared bloodstream of mother and child, and to her own production of text and milk. As the pregnancy advances, the boundaries of the self fall away. The “I” expands, dissolves into a “we”, and the narrating voice has to find out who it is speaking as. This is Neimanis’ watery body in narrative form.

Second, the river itself refuses containment. The Danube has multiple sources, and the Black Forest is already a magical place to start. The source “will always fall off the map”, Van Offel writes, just as she will never know exactly where that second heart beats under her skin. Along the way, she follows the layered stories of the landscape, especially those of silenced and erased women, and of the goddess Danu, who may be the river’s namesake. Anneleen and I turn out to read the same theories on Celtic rivers, goddesses and mother powers. Flanders carries more Celtic memory in its landscape than the Netherlands does, and I recognise that pull.

Third, theory and practice become one. Anneleen reads, begins to see the landscape differently, and that way of seeing gives birth to new stories. She gives birth to a book, and to a human child. The birth passage is powerful, and it too is entangled with mythology.

Following or tracing the stories of a river is a verb, and it is all about relationality. While writing this blog, I even started to wonder whether the title of this blogpost should change. Perhaps De stem van Sulina is a rivering novel, a mothering novel: an ever-changing body of text and water. There is for sure a lot of movement and transformation…

Eco-mythology: a story that keeps flowing

I also read this book as eco-mythology, and I am not surprised that Van Offel has read thinkers such as Marija Gimbutas and Astrida Neimanis.

In our upcoming book chapter (Wuyts et al. 2027), we describe eco-mythology as the study and storytelling of place-based myths within their ecological contexts. It aligns with hydrofeminist principles when it invites watery ontologies and lets narratives be co-shaped by human and more-than-human voices. It is a narrative ecology: a living process and not a fixed framework, resituating myth within the ecosystems where the tales emerge. It asks for slow attention to place, and gives grief, rupture and disorientation room to be metabolised into regenerative insight (Batalha, 2024).While reading, I felt that Anneleen was searching for a new story of her Self: her ecological Self, an expanding, ever-changing Self. That search is hard to miss when your body is literally changing because of pregnancy. I have never been pregnant, but I recognised the pull to look for stories, to dig into landscapes and to create meaning and magic in engagement with them. I am not a driver, so I prefer walking with landscapes, whereas she went driving with the landscape.

She is looking for the voice of Sulina, for an eco-mythology that keeps changing, and I interpret her as looking for her new self too. That self is not easy to catch, because we all live in an ever-changing world: eco, from the Greek oikos, home.

For me, her book is one of the few examples of what I call hydrofeminist fiction. The book, as a story and as an artefact, is also one expression of an ongoing engagement with landscape, in which many eco-mythologies of the ecological self can emerge. Each river and each writer adds another tributary: another child, human or brain child, another body of water joining the force of life, that stream of energy and water.

What I take from this for my own fiction

I do like autofiction. Tussenland already contains some autofictional events, while Tussenzee will be more fiction, based only loosely on my own experiences of eco-mythologies and re-enchantment in the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. Yes, I am going north, while Anneleen travelled south and east. Still, we are both following water to see where it leads us.

In my own experiments, I already play with a shifting “I/we” voice, so I recognised what Van Offel does.

One passage in particular stayed with me: “… maar hier hangt alleen een moerasgroene, omhullende waas. Mijn huid is geen afscheiding meer. Mijn stem maakt zich los uit mijn lichaam” (p. 210, my translation: “… but here hangs only a swamp-green, enveloping haze. My skin is no longer a separation. My voice detaches itself from my body”).

The swamp is a liminal space, neither land nor water, and it has a power of its own. Here the skin stops being a boundary, and the voice no longer belongs to one body. That is hydrofeminism in a few sentences: a porous self that dissolves into its surroundings and into others. This is what I want to learn to do in Tussenzee: let the theory live in sentences as beautiful as the ones Anneleen penned. I am also very curious to read the book in English, to see how Fiona Graham carries these sentences across.

References

Batalha, S. (2024). The sanctuary: Essays on eco-mythology. Middle Creek Publishing.

Bozalek, V., Shefer, T., & Romano, N. (2024). Wild sea swimming as a slow intimacy: Towards reconfiguring scholarship. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 8(1), 12.

Gimbutas, M. (1999). The living goddesses. University of California Press.

Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic

Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Indiana University Press.

Offel, A. V. (2024). De stem van Sulina. De Arbeiderspers.

Wuyts, W., Povilaitytė-Petri, V., & Baden, H. M. (2027). Flowing with Eglė’s eco-mythology: Restor(y)ing the Baltic Sea. In E. Jarosz, K. Kolenda, & T. Sikora (Eds.), Brackish blue humanities and environmental art: Thinking with the Baltic Sea. Taylor & Francis.