The Island of Missing Trees

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Alongside remembering and starting again often sit nostalgia and trauma, on the one hand, the romanticisation of the time “before” — when people lived peacefully as neighbours, celebrated, mourned, and ate together — and, on the other, the deep and disturbing presence of experiences and losses that are too painful to name, and yet are always present and live on in future generations. Compassionate and enchanting, it's a transporting tale of roots, renewal and talking trees * Mail on Sunday, Best New Fiction * The story begins in the “late 2010s” with Ada Kazantzakis, a 16-year-old north Londoner. Her mother, Defne, died 11 months earlier, leaving Ada and her father Kostas scalded by loss. Kostas grieves discreetly, consumed by misery in the garden at night, while Ada watches from an upper window. Ever since, Cyprus has been divided, with a United Nations peacekeeping force maintaining a buffer zone between the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Adding to the multicultural mix are British military bases still on the island, which used to be part of the British Empire until 1960. A rich, magical, Sunday Times bestselling novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal.

How do your multiple geographic and ethnic identities overlap, merge, stand unique? Where do you think of as your geographical place or places? How has language influenced your sense of place? What are the elements that transport you to where you have lived before? A taste of a particular food? A word you hear in another language? But remembered it is, and not just on the island itself and among the people who live there now, but also among the many Cypriots who left their homes and settled elsewhere, in the hope of starting again.

Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe. The former lovers reconnect, and Kostas persuades Defne to join him in London, to start again, to forget what has been. With them, they take a cutting of the old fig tree, which Kostas carefully tends and eventually plants in the garden of their north London home. Alongside the main narrative, the tree speaks, reflects, and offers wisdom about the realities of which humankind cannot bear too much. For Shafak, history is essentially opaque, and politics is what ruins individuals’ lives. If only nationalism and herd mentality, which create an us-versus-them mindset, were to leave individuals alone, none of the atrocities described in the novel would have taken place. But even if we buy into Shafak’s depiction of history as the story of winners, the losers of history, whose plight is taken up by the novel, never come into being as fully fleshed individuals. Nor do they understand (or help us understand) how it was possible that two communities that lived side by side for so long could one day turn around and murder each other. Elif Shafak, born in France, is the author of nineteen books (twelve novels) translated into fifty-five languages. She has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize as well as the RSL Ondaatje Prize for 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. The BBC included The Forty Rules of Love on “100 Novels that Shaped Our World.” I reviewed her novel Three Daughters of Eve for World Literature Today. In the novel, the fig tree talks about how people can erase history by not telling the stories of those who have disappeared.

In the weeks after finishing this novel, I found myself referring to the tree narrator in the book on multiple occasions. How she spoke such truth! Some of the facts she shared seemed unbelievable, then I would read others that I knew to be true. So I counted everything she said as a reliable narrator. Shafak’s own use of the novel form, in which we get the mimesis of a tree and the narrative prosthesis of a tree that produces a sense of treeness, suggests her novel is an Anthropocenic imagination, one attentive to nature’s story and temporalities. As Bruno Latour argues, storytelling is vital to how writers, and scientists alike, describe a nature that is already animated in and of itself: “Storytelling is not just a property of human language, but one of the many consequences of being thrown into a world that is, by itself, fully articulated and active” (13). Ecocriticism adds further to our understanding of how the novel treats matter, with Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann using the term “storied matter” (1) to capture how matter provides a ground for stories but, like Latour, they emphasize that it has its own story to tell: “the world’s phenomena are segments of a conversation between human and manifold human beings” (4). The Island of Missing Trees acts as a container in Le Guin’s sense, language in motion in Boxall’s, and storied matter in Iovino’s and Oppermann’s, to catalyze a movement into arboreal narrative voice and tree-as-character to face another living thing. Shafak uses narrative’s “uncanny capacity to animate voice” (Boxall, Value, 19), with the character of Ada increasingly sensing an arboreal presence despite her disbelief. As she feels empathy for the tree, “buried all alone in the garden, its remaining roots dangling by the side” (Shafak 95), a deeper, communicative connection strikes her: “she had the strangest feeling that the tree was awake too, tuned into her every movement” (95). The uncanniness of the moment, the interplay between absence and presence, is part of the novel’s arboreal aesthetic in which it stories—and legitimates—arboreal matter. With the tree’s own articulation of an arboreal world that humans imperil, we slip out of metaphor or, rather, that figure “overflows,” to borrow Stephanie Frampton’s term, into metamorphosis as “an actual metaphor, a metaphor that is no longer figurative, but descriptive” (184). Shafak comingles the figures of metaphor and metamorphosis as a “rhetorics of becoming” (Frampton 195), with the narrating tree referring to a literal fig tree—it stories that green matter and provides a resemblance to one—and becoming one through the narrative’s actualising of arboreal sentience. This is the novel’s contribution to what Latour calls our “geostory” (3), in which nature and human are no longer set apart as object and subject but instead operate on shared ground (16). Shafak’s approach provides “a less anthropocentric kind of listening” (Fargione 254) to trees that appreciates their energy. INSKEEP: Burial turns out to be a widespread practice. It's even been reported on NPR. People who take fig trees out of the Mediterranean work to preserve them in colder climates. This was so true of both the novel itself (honestly pretty much all the books I most enjoy reading) as well as Ada’s learning her parents’ story within the novel. There are bits and pieces, circles within circles (similar to tree rings! like arboreal time), threads that are started and dropped. And so often starting a story can seem insurmountable.

Secrets can perpetuate intergenerational trauma. Ada’s parents kept silent about their past, and by extension Ada’s past believing they are protecting their daughter. Later the Fig Tree becomes a literal êmigrê itself when Kostas takes a cutting from its remains and puts it in his suitcase as he leaves Cyprus for London, planting it in his garden there. He helps the tree set down roots on a different island as the refugees draw strength from each other—two expatriates unable to forget their shared native homeland. Parts of the narrative here become pure poetry, as the Fig explains why it is “a melancholic tree.” The Island of Missing Trees asks us important questions about losing home, about coping and secrets . . . this is a beautiful novel . . . made ferocious by its uncompromising empathy * Guardian, Book of the Day * The Cyprus setting is stunningly described in this spellbinding story about identity, love and loss * Good Housekeeping, 'this month's 10 books to read right now' (September) *

The poetic writing style that Shafak writes with may not be for all readers. At times, the descriptions can be overly detailed and not central to the story. Yet, one cannot deny the impact of the richness of her writing. Here in The Island of Missing Trees, Elif Shafak creates her own magnificent theory, dedicating the book “To immigrants and exiles everywhere, the uprooted, the re-rooted, the rootless, And to the trees we left behind, rooted in our memories…”. Have you immigrated? Have you been rooted and uprooted and rerooted in your life? How did you make your choice as Yusuf and Yiorgos made their choice or was the choice made for you as it was for the fig tree? How did you experience that uprooting and re-rooting? In this powerfully elegant novel, British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak wades into the Mediterranean Sea to tell a story of coexistence run amok, botched by those who inhabit the Earth together. The Island of Missing Trees is a masterpiece of allegory illustrating how fanatic hatred and collective beliefs worldwide maintain a hold on present-day lives through ancestral memory—and result in othering. INSKEEP: I want people to know that the narrator of this story, to the extent that there is one, is a fig tree, which speaks in the first person. Is this how you came to that, then? You wanted a neutral observer of it all?Her botanical reading, as her bibliography reveals, was extensive (Richard Mabey, Merlin Sheldrake, an academic article about the notion of “optimism” and “pessimism” in plants). In the novel, Kostas at one point buries his fig, the better to protect it from the British winter. “I’d heard that they could be buried,” says Shafak. “When I lived in Ann Arbor in Michigan, where it can be quite cold, I heard of Italian and Portuguese families doing this. I found out that it really works. You hide it safely beneath the ground for two months, and then, when the spring comes, you unbury it, and it’s a kind of miracle, because it’s alive.” Later, this unburying is mirrored by other, grimmer exhumations: those carried out by the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus, a bicommunal organisation that continues to try to find and identify the bodies of the civil war’s disappeared. The aftermath of Defne’s death, the circumstances of which are relayed in fragments as Ada grieves, becomes apparent through the space of the fig tree, as the reader experiences the affecting narrative revelation that the tree’s voice is also Defne’s spirit. She has been associated with stories throughout the novel, with Ada recalling her mother’s propensity to conjure them, including that of migrating butterflies (154), a recurring motif, with Defne herself saying, “Imagine Cyprus as a huge butterfly” (221). Here too, she spins her own story, conjoining the tree’s without appropriating it. Unlike Ovid’s Daphne, Defne is not fleeing a male aggressor but a past trauma, and her absorption into the tree is self-willed rather than through the soliciting of external intervention as in The Metamorphoses, where Daphne’s prayers to her father to save her are answered (Ovid 21). She adapts Daphne’s story and the subsequent designation of the laurel as a sacred tree, using the Ovidian intertext to licence her alteration but also departing from it, with the emphasis on her agential transmutation into a sacralized fig tree, and a new, human-arboreal becoming. This language of arboreal metamorphosis suggests that in writing a tree, a literary text does not enact a singular ecological realism but rather arborealities, whereby the variety of arboreal lives, that is as literary representations and as real, green matter, are storied and accorded agency and sentience. The ontology of trees, along with the story of them, is something Defne desires, not in an appropriative manner, but more in terms of what Hannah Copper-Smithson describes as arboromorphism: “To become arboreal is to grow not just upward but outward, to connect, to betroth, to trust, to endure” (234). In the transformative possibilities of arboreal life is an implicit challenge to anthropocentrism, a move towards “arboromorphic qualities of connection and community” (Cooper-Smithson 235) that might be found in earlier texts representing trees, thus prompting a re-evaluation of what we notice—and value—in the literary past. The disappeared included not just those killed by the opposition. The fig tree shares the story from a mouse that witnessed Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots meeting to work towards peace and reconciliation and discussing who would be counted among the missing. The tree is central to the novel’s exploration of the past’s uncanny incursion into the present in three interlinked ways. First, it is as an authorial medium, with Shafak herself commenting on how the idea of a narrating tree provided “a sense of freedom that I needed to dare tell the story” (qtd. in Nair) of a divided Cyprus. 2 The novel’s arboreal narrator focalizes this history, bearing witness to the “division of the island into a Greek South and a Turkish North” and the displacement of thirty percent of the population (Dietzel 2; 146). As one historian of the conflict observes, “all Cypriots have been haunted and branded […] by this protracted, never-ending confrontation,” characterized as it is by ethnonationalism on both sides (Anastasiou 10). Second, the tree is a memorial medium through which the novel negotiates the island’s history. The “missing” in the title connects deforestation and ecocide to the legacy of the disappeared on both sides of the island’s divide. Third, the tree is a more-than-human medium, or an imaginative leap into arboreal life that enacts an intraspecies communion with nature, which is accorded a subject status at the level of narrative and story. The revelation that we have a narrating tree comes early in the novel, in its second chapter, so that readers experience her as a companion to the opening narrative voice. As such, Kostas’ observation to his daughter—“We’re only just beginning to discover the language of trees” (Shafak 41)—has metafictional significance.

Perhaps the most fascinating and intriguing aspect of the novel is Elif Shafak’s treatment of the natural, which is infused with the magical. The story is replete with symbolic representations; needless to say, ‘tree’ is the primary symbol. Divided into six parts, each part of the novel is designated a title with reference to the tree: The first being “How to Bury a Tree,” the second is titled “Roots,” symbolizing cultural identity and traditional values; the third is “Trunk,” suggesting a connection; the fourth is “Branches,” representing wildness and freedom; the fifth part is titled“Ecosystem,” which is an amalgamation of Roots, Trunk, and Branches, also representing society. Acting as a perfect conclusion, the final part of the novel is titled “How to Unbury a Tree.” When Kostas and Defne carry with them a dead and decaying segment of the fig tree to England, the readers are made aware of the plight suffered by the immigrants and the displaced. The New York Times has archived its articles online. Reporter's Notebook: Politeness and Violence Mix in Cyprus, from the July 30, 1974 issue, shares a perspective of the destruction of the war in July of 1974. This is the time period when Kostas is sent to London, Denfe seeks an abortion and The Happy Fig is bombed. Intergenerational TraumaKnowledgeable, sociable, and connected to lively organisms, the fig tree draws the reader into a subterranean world of dirt and roots, resisting the green pastoral of literary tradition. Kimmerer and Simard’s work thus gives epistemological weight to Shafak’s arboreal imaginary. But we can also see how the novel’s branches of arboreal knowledge overlap, as the intra-diegetic account of tree existence converges with the extra-diegetic understanding of mycorrhizal networks. The novel absorbs and compresses tree discourse in the interests of nonanthropocentric ways of valuing nature. The Island of Missing Trees captivated me as I learned some history of Cyprus and some tree wisdom— not an expected combination! There are myriad ways for readers to connect their experiences and learning with this novel. Intergeneration trauma is explored in Ada’s family as well as in nature, as the story unravels through bits and pieces in three time periods— Cyprus in 1974, Cyprus in the early 2000s and London in the late 2010s. In addition the ecosystem, the flow of time, and secrets are essential elements of the novel that we have each experienced personally.