The Island of the Missing Trees
When a Ficus carica, commonly known as the edible fig, takes up a narrative voice in a novel, readers should know they are in for something unique. In the case of The Island of the Missing Trees (2021) by Elif Shafak, the tree narrator, the multiple storylines and settings (contemporary London and twentieth-century Cyprus), and the beautiful prose all work to utterly transport the reader. Shafak masterfully gives a tree voice in what proves to be a clever, insightful way. The narrator fig sits outside the ethnic differences that divided twentieth-century Cypriots: the Turkish from the Greek. She (the tree is female) shares the wisdom learned over hundreds of years of life. In ways somewhat reminiscent of Richard Powers’s genre-shaking, Pulitzer-winning novel The Overstory, Shafak divides her novel into sections that reflect the anatomy of a tree (Roots, Trunk, Branches, Ecosystem) and bookends it with “How to Bury a Tree” and “How to Unbury a Tree.” By organizing her novel thus, and by weaving the fig’s reflective narrative throughout the interwoven stories, Shafak creates a powerful and unique reading experience.
One element of Shafak’s novel is, indeed, an homage to the fig tree. At one point, the fig interrupts the action of the novel to provide a laundry list of ways in which figs of various sorts have been central in powerful stories the world over, linked to multiple religions, or generally revered. Indeed, Shafak plays with interweaving classical myth into her twenty-first-century novel. What’s more, a plant as narrator provides Shafak abundant opportunity to weigh in on humanity’s impact on the natural world in personal terms. The Island of the Missing Trees is a compelling argument for sentience beyond the human brain, challenging its reader to rethink long-established sapiens-centric ways of perceiving knowledge, suffering, communication, and more. I found the passages in the fig’s first-person point of view particularly potent and notable (as a perusal of the few great passages I highlight below makes evident).
The Island of the Missing Trees is also a melancholy ode to the island of Cyprus itself, its rich and long cultural heritage including the brutal war that divided it during the second half of the last century. Shafak nods to the British element—she mentions Lawrence Durrell a number of times, as well as the British military occupants—as well as the Turkish and Greek residents of Cyprus. Her novel includes many Turkish and Greek words (so many so she includes a glossary of Greek and Turkish words) as her characters demonstrate the interweaving of the Greek and Turkish cultures into an islander culture, a Cypriot culture, even amidst the centuries’ old tension between them. This novel includes plenty of difficult themes including war, murder, homophobia, immigration, addiction, mental illness, suicide, and more. It examines the choices Cypriots were forced to make between what they loved and their families, their homeland and their children’s future.
While The Island of the Missing Trees explores how a culture seeks to make sense of and move past brutal violence and bloodshed, it is an undeniably hopeful book. Readers should anticipate some heavy and troubling scenes to be sure, but there is also plenty of hope to be found within its pages. The novel follows multiple generations, and speculates on the ways that descendants strive to explore and expose the trauma and tragedy of their parents and grandparents in an effort to heal. Thus, while The Island of the Missing Trees certainly witnesses individual lives destroyed—both human and arboreal—it focuses on the resilience of life over years, decades, generations.
Bibliography:
Shafak, Elif. The Island of the Missing Trees. Bloomsbury Publishing: 2021.
A Few Great Passages:
“My guess is humans deliberately avoid learning more about us [plants], maybe because they sense, at some primordial level, that what they find out might be unsettling. Would they wish to know, for instance, that trees can adapt and change their behaviour with purpose, and if this is true, perhaps one does not necessarily depend on a brain for intelligence? Would they be please to discover that by sending signals through a network of latticed fungi buried in the soil, trees can warn their neighbours about dangers ahead – an approaching predator or pathogenic bugs – and such stress signals have escalated lately, due to deforestation, forest degradation and droughts, all of them caused directly by humans? Or that the climbing wood vine Boquila trifoliolata can alter its leaves to mimic the shape or colour of those of its supporting plant, prompting scientists to wonder if the vine has some kind of visual capability?” (44-45).
“Human-time is linear, a neat continuum from a past that is supposed to be over and done with to a future deemed to be untouched, untarnished. [. . .] The human species’ appetite for novelty is insatiable” (47).
“Arboreal-time is cyclical, recurrent, perennial; the past and the future breathe within this moment, and the present does not necessarily flow in one direction; instead it draws circles within circles, like the rings you find when you cut us down.
Arboreal-time is equivalent to story-time—and, like a story, a tree does not grow in perfectly straight lines, flawless curves or exact right angles, but bends and twists and bifurcates into fantastical shapes, throwing out branches of wonder and arcs of invention” (47).
“[T]hat is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again” (55).
“Under and above ground, we trees communicate all the time. We share not only water and nutrients, but also essential information. Although we have to compete for resources sometimes, we are good at protecting and supporting each other. The life of a tree, no matter how peaceful it may seem on the outside, is full of danger” (99).
“‘[T]he past is a dark, distorted mirror. You look at it, you only see your own pain. There is no room in there for someone else’s pain’” (112).
“If families resemble trees, as they say, arborescent structures with entangled roots and individual branches jutting out at awkward angles, family traumas are like thick, translucent resin dripping from a cut in the bark. They trickle down the generations” (128).
“We are scared of happiness, you see. From a tender age we have been taught that in the air, in the Etesian wind, an uncanny exchange is at work, so that for every morsel of contentment there will follow a morsel of suffering, for every peal of laughter there is a drop of tear ready to roll, because that is the way of this strange world, and hence we try not to look too happy, even on days when we might feel so inside” (129).
“What I tell you, therefore, I tell through the prism of my own understanding, undoubtedly. No storyteller is completely objective. But I have always tried to grasp every story through diverse angles, shifting perspectives, conflicting narratives. Trust is a rhizome – an underground plant stem with lateral shoots. You need to dig deep to reach it and, once unearthed, you have to treat it with respect” (189).
“A tree is a memory keeper. Tangled beneath our roots, hidden inside our trunks, are the sinews of history, the ruins of wars nobody came to win, the bones of the missing” (212).
“Humans, especially the victors who hold the pen that writes the annals of history, have a penchant for erasing as much as documenting. It remains to us plants to collect the untold, the unwanted. Like a cat that curls up on its favourite cushion, a tree wraps itself around the remnants of the past” (212).
“Throughout my long life, I have observed, again and again, this psychological pendulum that drives human nature. Every few decades they sway into a zone of unbridled optimism and insist on seeing everything through a rosy filter, only to be challenged and shaken by events and catapulted back into their habitual apathy and listless indifference” (304).
“Way too often, the first generation of survivors, the ones who had suffered the most, kept their pain close to the surface, memories like splinters lodged under their skin, some protruding, others completely invisible to the eye. Meanwhile, the second generation chose to suppress the past, both what they knew and did not know of it. In contrast, the third generation were eager to dig away and unearth silences. How strange that in families scarred by wars, forced displacements and acts of brutality, it was the youngest who seemed to have the oldest memory” (315).
“What I meant was, some people stand in front of a tree and the first thing they notice is the trunk. These are the ones who prioritize order, safety, rules, continuity. Then there are those who pick out the branches before anything else. They yearn for change, a sense of freedom. And then there are those who are drawn to the roots, though concealed under the ground. They have a deep emotional attachment to their heritage, identity, traditions” (327).
